I would agree. 2000-2007 was pretty good. It dropped off hard after that. But he was never a great X’s and O’s Offensive coach. Our inability to inbound the ball under the basket during his tenure still causes me to wake up sweating with nightmares in the middle of the night.
As much as basketball and football are what we see, I think Batt has his hands full “professionalizing” the AA. He’s probably home taking a breather, but still thinking about what he has to do next.
We could use a Mark Teixeira for basketball. We need that moneyed booster who knows the game and wants us to be good, just like Teixeira does for baseball. We could use a couple of them.
Pastner has shown in previous seasons that he can be a really good defensive coach. One of the other posters has said that every fan thinks that the other teams look better coached than their team does, but there are mid-majors that do look smoother than us. We’ve been playing Princeton basketball for years, and there’s no reason not to have a 5 that plays it well. If you’re a great 5 in another system, that doesn’t help us. If we’re going to distribute from the high post, surely there’s a compatible center in the top 250 players who would play here. If you’re going to get old and stay old AND run this system, then keep getting centers that you can develop to be competent in that role. With all respect to Moses, I don’t think we’ve had a recruited player since Lammers that looked like he played that role well, and Gregory recruited him; we’ve been relying on transfers to fit that role. For some reason, Pastner seems to lock in on a system when he doesn’t have the right players for that system.
Hewitt showed that you can play ugly basketball with top-25 recruits. I was stunned that we couldn’t make the NCAA tournament with Bosh. Hewitt showed that it’s not just a “get three great recruits” it’s “get a couple of great recruits that fit what you do, and some decent recruits that fit what you do really well”.
Boy, I’d love if if the Milwaukee Bucks fired Mike Budenholzer and he decided he wanted to come back to Atlanta but coach college (here).