A Defense of John Calipari and Fran McCaffery

After seeing both coaches get roasted by their fan bases, let's take a nuanced trip into the muck to figure out just what makes a basketball coach "good" or "bad".

I find very little more frustrating than when fans pop up in my mentions criticizing the person running their favorite program for being a “bad coach,” because there is so much nuance and luck involved in what constitutes good coaching and bad coaching and that never comes into the conversation.

So I decided that I’d have that conversation with myself today in the wake of Iowa fans criticizing Fran McCaffery’s decision-making down the stretch in the loss to Minnesota and Kentucky fans losing their collective shit over a 1-6 start to the season.

So here goes.

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What makes a good college basketball coach?

It starts with roster building. How well can you identify talent, and then recruit the talent that you identify? Can you balance youth and experience on your roster? Do you have bigs and guards? Can you play big and play small? Do you get the players that come to your program better?

And then there is the team development aspect. College coaches are going to have different rosters every year, particularly as transfers increase, players head to the pros and graduation hits. Can you create an effective style of play — can you “do what we do” — that maximizes the abilities of the players that are available? Can you adjust what you do year-over-year to fit your personnel? Are you willing, for example, to scrap your zone and go full man-to-man like Scott Drew did if your players can make it work?

Lastly, there is the game-by-game part of it.

How well can you create a game-plan that will allow your team to exploit mismatches while preventing an opponent from doing the same? How prepared is your team for any in-game adjustments that might come their way? More importantly, how well and how quickly can you adjust what you planned on doing if it’s not working? And in the moments that will decide the game, do you put your players in a position that they can, and will, succeed? Are you making optimal decisions in real-time?

I bring all of this up because of discussions I had following Iowa’s loss at Minnesota and Kentucky’s loss at Louisville.

I want to start with Fran McCaffery, because I’ve been hard on Fran over the years, and Iowa fans frustrated by his bi-annual fades have been harder on him.

I understand why.

But before we get into Friday’s collapse, it’s important to mention this: Simply put, he’s done an unbelievable job putting this roster together. There is one player on this roster with a last name other than McCaffery that was a consensus top 100 recruit, according to 247 Sports’ composite rankings. That was Joe Wieskamp, who ranked 60th in the Class of 2018. Luka Garza, the National Player of the Year favorite that is averaging a laughable 28.8 points and 10.0 boards this season, was ranked 118th in the Class of 2017. Jordan Bohannon was 312th in the Class of 2016. C.J. Frederick and Joe Toussaint both ranked in the 250s in their class. Jack Nunge and Connor McCaffery were in that 150-200 range.

Taking that crop of players and turning them into a team that has a very real chance to win the Big Ten, get to a Final Four and send multiple players to the NBA should never be overlooked.

Nor should Fran’s ability to make this team so ruthlessly efficient offensively.

He’s filled a roster with sharpshooters and helped turned Luka into the best low-post scorer in the country. That combination of things has made the Hawkeyes nearly impossible to keep from getting good shots. That’s coaching, and Fran has done about as well as humanly possible at building a roster and molding his style of play to that roster.

Which leads me to Christmas Day.

For those that did not see Iowa’s overtime loss at Minnesota, here’s the Cliff’s Notes: Iowa got down by as many as 11 points in the first half. They fought all the way back, they got hot at the right time and they pushed their lead to 80-73 with 44 seconds left in the game. That’s when the wheels fell off. They missed three free throws in the final 37 seconds. Minnesota went on a 10-3 run during that span. They hit five threes in overtime. They won 102-95 in a game Iowa had complete control over.

So where does the blame lie?

On the one hand are the individual mistakes. Joe Toussaint missed two free throws with 10 seconds left. Those are killers, and there’s not much that anyone can do about them. It’s going to happen.

The bigger concern, for me, are the defensive miscues. Take, for example, Toussaint’s decision to go under a ball-screen against the hottest player in the Big Ten in a three-point game with less than 10 seconds left:

That cannot happen.

(I will not be criticizing Fran for deciding not to foul there. With the amount of time that was left, that decision is borderline. I would have fouled. I think it’s justifiable not to.)

It also wasn’t the only individual defensive miscue that we saw.

C.J. Frederick got lost — not once, but twice — in overtime, which led to a pair of wide-open threes from Brandon Johnson from the top of the key:

Yes, these are individual mistakes made by players, but those mistakes aren’t made in a vacuum. We can’t just ignore the fact that, if trends continue, Iowa will finish outside the top 90 in adjusted defensive efficiency for the fifth straight season. I’ve written plenty about their defensive issues. The only people that know how much of the blame for these mistakes is due to execution (the player) vs. preparation (the coach), but I feel quite comfortable saying that both parties are guilty.

At some point, we have to start asking why these mistakes continue to happen at Iowa. Toussaint I can forgive. He made it over the first screen, got hung up on the second and Carr his a pretty tough shot. Frederick’s is different, and while I’m picking on him here, trust me when I say he is not the only player that is guilty of defensive lapses.

But there’s more to it than that.

And there’s more to it than simply criticizing Fran for continuing to play a “defense” that allows just a few passes to create a wide-open three for a guy that had, to that point, hit six on the night and two in the previous three possessions.

The decision to put the ball in Jordan Bohannon’s hands was incredibly perplexing. At this point, Bohannon is a shell of the player he was as a sophomore, when he averaged 13.5 points and 5.4 assists while shooting 43 percent from three. On the season, he’s averaging 6.9 points while shooting 31 percent from the floor and 28 percent from three. Take out the North Carolina game, and he’s averaging 4.8 points and shooting 22 percent from three. His hip problems have taken their toll, and Bohannon, right now, isn’t much more than a catch-and-shoot specialist that, currently, can’t perform the latter part of that action.

He can’t shoot, let alone do the things a point guard needs to do.

So why did this happen …:

… when Toussaint was available and is the best driver on the roster?

Giving him the ball against pressure and asking him to go the length of the court in 5.7 seconds to win is begging for nothing to happen, and it’s a baffling decision to make when Joe Toussaint has been so good at getting downhill this season.

Now, if you want to tell me that Toussaint was in Fran’s doghouse because, in the last 14 seconds, he had committed a foul that led to two Minnesota free throws, missed two free throws of his own, and gone under a screen that led to the game-tying three, that makes sense!

But that still doesn’t excuse the fact that the final play of the game, a chance to win in regulation on the road, was asking a guy that can no longer go 1-on-1 to try and go 1-on-1 the length of the court in 5.7 seconds.

That is the definition of sub-optimal.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about Coach Cal.

Because the decisions that Kentucky’s head coach made in the final minute of his team’s loss at Louisville were equally head-scratching, and perhaps even more sub-optimal.

Let’s start with the possession Kentucky had with the game tied and 47 seconds left on the clock. Instead of taking the chance to go 2-for-1, Kentucky took five seconds to get into a weave that was nothing more than false motion. There were 35 seconds left on the clock when they actually got into the set they were trying to run, which was a ball-screen that was supposed to set up a designed lob for Isaiah Jackson (it was open) with a secondary option of getting B.J. Boston into an iso. Boston couldn’t beat his man, so Kentucky settled for a contested pull-up jumper from Devin Askew, whose toe was on the line. That was, roughly, the worst shot they could have gotten had they opted to go 2-for-1:

After Louisville hit a free throw, Kentucky ran a set to get Davion Mintz running off of a dribble-handoff, forcing a guy who is best suited to being a catch-and-shoot floor-spacer into making a decision off the bounce. That decision? To hit Olivier Sarr for a 15-footer, which rattled out:

Honestly, I can’t really say much about the final play, where they got the ball to *checks notes* Lance Ware in the middle of the floor with 5.1 seconds left when they had to go the length of the court, but hey, they got a wide-open 25-footer from their, in theory, second-best shooter:

So it could be worse.

But the problem with criticizing Cal too much in this spot is that, in my opinion, the biggest issue at play here is preparation. With the 2-for-1, you need two things to execute that properly: A playmaker that understands what a good shot is and can create it quite quickly, and the practice time to be able to teach your team how to execute this. Cal’s three best creators are freshmen that are struggling because they are not ready for the role they’re being asked to play, and the core issue for Kentucky is that this is an entirely new roster that is trying to learn on the fly in the middle of a pandemic that has limited practice time and team-bonding.

Put another way, if Cal doesn’t trust his guys to get a good look quickly, then creating a great look, and scoring to put pressure on Louisville on their final possession, makes sense.

The same can be said for that second play.

Yes, Kentucky ended up with a contested 15-footer, which is not exactly the most efficient shot in the world. But considering the options he has available and the fact that he had to rely on Mintz to create the look, that’s not a bad outcome. We’ve seen Sarr make those repeatedly this season, and this one was all-but down.

Where Cal can be criticized is with his inability to adjust to the modern game. Why do the Wildcats always have issues with a lack of shooters in a state that has produced the likes of C.J. Frederick, Justin Powell and Adam Kunkel? Why did this program allow the likes of Jemarl Baker and Quade Green to transfer? How long is Cal going to keep trying to play with two bigs together? Kentucky’s play-book is one of the most basic in the sport. They run what they run, and once they find something that works, they’ll keep running it over, and over, and over again.

I also think it’s fair to question Cal’s insistence on rebuilding his roster every season when he’s no longer getting classes that includes the likes of Anthony Davis, or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, or Karl-Anthony Towns. Not every five-star is built the same. There are a lot of talented freshmen that make their way to Kentucky that are nowhere near ready to carry an SEC challenger, let alone play a role on one.

But that’s big picture stuff.

With this specific Kentucky team, I’m really not sure what you can truly and justifiably criticize Coach Cal for beyond publicly lashing out at Cam Fletcher.

I’ll go to my grave saying this, and that will happen sooner rather than later if Kentucky continues to lose, but these Wildcats really are not all that far off from turning this thing around.

But if you can’t understand why a team entirely made up of newcomers is having a difficult time figuring things out in the weirdest year any of us have ever lived through, than you probably shouldn’t deserve a voice loud enough to call for Cal to get fired.