Sean Miller: "It's no fun when only five are playing"

[GumbySquad]

From today's press conference:

Sean Miller 2/17/2014

"The last straw for me in terms of how we're going to do things moving forward was the ASU game," Miller said. "What we try to do and how we play makes no sense to play players close to 40 minutes. It affects your defense, it affects your ability to make shots at the end of the games, your practice environment."

"it's no fun when only five are playing."

So... many of us have been harping on this since the first day Sean Miller stepped on campus, that he is a great coach, especially on the defensive end, but his use of timeouts and his inability to develop his bench are his biggest weaknesses. Months ago, when Arizona was beating Duke and Michigan and SDSU and everything was looking peachy, many of us kept talking about the lack of bench minutes coming back to bite the Cats.

Well, anybody who is paying attention knows damn well that Arizona was in a position to lose that game at asu as a direct result of Sean Miller's stubbornness. The starters were worn out by the 2nd overtime, because of overuse. Miller lost that game more than the players did.

Maybe, just maybe, this is a reality check for him as well as for the bench players themselves... I would like nothing more than to see Miller stay here in Tucson for the next 20+ years and develop his own HOF type career, just as Lute did... but if that is going to happen, then he needs to learn a valuable lesson: Playing the 8th-10th guys early in the season is going to do worlds of good for the team as a whole. The more time the bench gets early, the more comfortable they are in their roles, the more prepared they are to come into double overtime games late in the season when the starters really need a breather.

A 7 man rotation is just fine, no problems there... but if the 8th, 9th and 10th guys go five-ten games without seeing a single minute of court time? That is a huge problem. Have to find a way to mix those guys in for 3-5+ minutes a game, especially when the Cats have a 10-15+ point lead in the second half. Give them some pressure; Playing only garbage time does a player no good. Give them some time in the second half of a game where the Cats have a comfortable lead and see if they can keep that lead. Give them in-game pressure without giving them the keys to the car itself. That is how you develop a bench coach Miller, that is how you become a better team in March.

When you have starters playing huge minutes every game then you lose your edge. Far better to see 5 minutes of Korcheck, even if the team is at a point deficit when he's out there, because when Kaleb does get back into the game he will be fresh and hungry to dominate the paint. Same goes for TJ, Nick and Gordon. Clearly they are the best players on the team, but you can tell by the way they've played the last few weeks that they are burnt out.

 

[CatsTopPac]

Agreed man. I think we've been beating the drum on this for some time. It's frustrating, but I think that we need to keep it in perspective.

He's a young coach. Any coach that we would have gotten to replace Lute was not going to have decades and decades of success. I just don't think we had the pull at the time. The program was looking like it might have been a one-hit wonder (in Lute), and that maybe the most elite coaches didn't think that the program could be successful. Obviously Miller has silenced those critics (in as much as he could in his first 5 years). But we have to remember that any coach would have deficiencies. It's a process. I know I'm not telling you anything, nor am I insinuating that you think we should have gone a different route than Miller. I'm just saying that if it had been someone else instead, maybe they would have had a better developed bench and wiser in his timeout calls, but not be such a strong recruiter, not so defensively minded, or want to change too much coming in, and not honor and embrace what Lute had already established. So I think we have to live with it, and hope it doesn't take much longer for him to see what we already do. I just think that we have to take it all in stride. Some shit he does is (like the issues we've all discussed) drives us crazy, and hurts us down the stretch in our overall potential. But we have to take the bad with the good.

We could have much bigger problems, and so I'll take the ones we have, and hope that they are addressed sooner than later. But he's our guy, and at 46 with 10 years as a head coach, we have to expect that he would have some glaring problems that only decades of coaching would correct (if only because it takes time for him to look in the mirror on it). Fortunately, Lute already had 10 years of coaching experience (and a FF) when he got to AZ at age 50.

I have to believe that Miller is close to turning the corner on some of these things, and that he is seeing that it's a reoccurring problem that he is responsible for. I also think that he might just put together teams with better benches, and so it won't be as dire (possibly even as soon as next year, depending on who leaves).

I just wonder how he doesn't see it. I wonder if he just sees such a drop off between the top 50 recruits and the rest, so that he doesn't see that even though they are not all top 50 recruits, that they still can and need to contribute. I don't know. It's the only thing I can think of. I just can't see that those guys are so horrible that he would rather not play them and deal with the seemingly inevitably problem of having such a short bench when he needs more. I don't know what else he is expecting to get out of them, if he doesn't give them more of an opportunity in games. He's not going to have 8-9 future NBA players on the roster every year, so he's going to have to either give them more of an opportunity to improve, or he's going to need to recruit only top 100 players that he feels are ready to play immediately. Because even players like Pitts and Korchek are the guys that he knew he had going in. I don't know if he expected to make them into elite players immediately, or what. But those are the guys he has, and he chose, so they aren't doing anything for us plastered to the bench as guys get hurt, in foul trouble, or exhausted from being played into the ground. Doesn't seem like a good use of a scholarship if they don't get in when (or in case) we need them.

Should be interesting to see how it plays out in the years to come.