Regarding Pike's coaching, he's in a learning phase. He's got lots of new players and it's his first time coaching players of Dylan and Ace's ranking with the sort of stratospheric expectations that come from having them on your team. I'm guessing it's also his first time faced with a team with a couple players who can almost score at will. And I'm guessing it's also the first time his two best players, by far, were freshmen and likely to be gone the following year.
I'm okay with him having some missteps 'cause I know his energy and focus and ability to learn from mistakes is all working just fine. He's been a great coach for RUMBB and has earned a huge amount of slack and support.
I'm not concerned with Pike's lineups, he's been using these games against easily-beatable teams to learn more about our players. He's not just coaching to win, he's coaching to win but also learn more than he can afford to do in conference play or in Vegas. The lineups we've seen the past 4 games are experimental. This has been obvious just from watching, but Pike's also mentioned that he's doing that experimenting in his press conferences.
As long as we're winning the games, and we have, the experimenting is a very smart and necessary thing to do. It's pretty much an entirely new team and practices are not nearly as useful for learning about your players as games are.
So yeah, I'm not worried about coaching. The only two concerns I have right now are:
- How well can this team perform without a dominant athlete at center. Not so much on offense, but on defense and with rebounding. Not having a dominant physical presence requires the team to play better help defense and be very high energy on rebounding. Which brings me to...
- Energy and focus (aka intensity). Maybe the team has played down to it's level of competition, that's certainly common. But there are degrees of effort and what we've seen are way below what I'd be happy with so far, if I were Pike, even accounting for the bad competition.
People point to defensive problems. But, IMO, those problems are largely energy and focus. It's not like Pike has forgotten how to coach defense all of a sudden. But playing great defense requires super high levels of energy and focus. If those are missing, then all the switches and rotations and help can't work and the entire team will look lost (as we have in these early games against weak competition).
Maybe the team will magically turn it on in Vegas. But that's not typically how it works, in my experience. Teams that can play low-energy much of the season and turn it on when necessary are invariably older experienced teams who've been together for years and tend to peak come playoff or tournament time. Whereas youthful teams typically play the way they practice (and these first four games were basically practice scrimmages or tune-up games).
Unless we see a dominant first 30-35 minute high energy high focus next game, only letting up (a little bit) when the game is nearly over and totally out reach for the opponent, then I think it's much more likely than not that we don't win any games in Vegas. And we might experience some embarrassing game results.
I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong about that. And more overjoyed to see the team put in that intense 30-35 minutes showing that they get it and understand what it will take to beat really good basketball teams, especially while lacking a dominant center.
