vivid_dude wrote:blueblood wrote:Mac is Mr Moneyball. All about the analytics. To the grave.
100% this. He has a system. He believes in the system. The system generally is very successful. But the system is imperfect. He will not deviate in response to some aberrational performance. He was probably thinking what I was throughout the game - Butler can’t keep this up and the Jays will pull it out. Reasonable thing to believe. Butler didn’t cooperate.
We've seen it play out exactly like that multiple times this season where teams come out shooting at a high enough clip to stay with Creighton early but can't sustain it for 40 minutes.
What's more likely to have success, sticking with something you've spent the most time practicing and perfecting with the belief that eventually it will work out or switching to something you're not as good at and just hoping you get lucky? Coaches are typically going to trust in the work their team has put in over trying things just for the sake of doing something different.
For those that think Mac was just sitting on his hands and not making any adjustments, here's what he had to say about trying to scheme in a game with such high-level shot-making:
"We changed some ball screen coverages at times and we were moving our matchups all over the place to try to slow down their their roll. Thought about zone a few times, but with the level of shot-making we just didn't we just didn't feel like — we would rather have them take some tough 2s than be able to shoot those 3s. As crazy as it sounds, I thought not having posh Alexander totally changed our defensive plan because Posh doesn't shoot a bunch of 3s. While he impacts the game in a lot of ways, and obviously they'd have been better defensively with him on the floor, the guys that they put out there in his place made shots. Bizjack's made, I think, two 3s in conference play; he made three tonight. I think Kapke's made two all year, maybe three all year; he made two tonight. So they had some guys really step up and make shots."
I haven't had time to re-watch to evaluate the defense yet (which Mac and the both players both talked about needing to do as well to properly judge how much of Butler's 99 was their defensive mistakes and how much was Butler's shot-making). Here's what I wrote prior to the re-watch for now, at least.
https://hurrdatsports.com/creighton-men ... -shootout/