Don’t watch MBB much anymore but this was a nice read. Paywall but some excerpts.
From the article:
Pitino’s team at St. John’s, just like his teams at Louisville and Kentucky, and at Iona and in Greece, and with the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics, spent early workouts going through individual sessions overseen by the head coach. Such one-on-ones are grueling to watch, let alone to endure. Fifteen shots in 30 seconds. Or timed attempts darting around stations scattered all over the court. Over and over. Pitino, the whole time, stands, hands behind his back, shouting directions until the player in front of him stands atop a pool of sweat. All along, every shot is counted and added to a tally. Those numbers, in part, determine how Pitino later decides who can shoot from where and when in what games. Sound strategy. He’s won everywhere.
But then came this preseason at St. John’s. Every day ended with an autopsy revealing a fatal flaw.
St. John’s couldn’t shoot.
“The lowest metrics I’ve seen from my team, ever,” Pitino recently told me.
This is what basketball looked like in bygone eras. There are caves out there with pictographs depicting men and women taking mid-range shots and long 2-pointers. Such play has been replaced by our modern analytic-focused game, a world where efficiency and shot quality carry the highest value. Rightly so. The most valuable shots are close to the basket and beyond the 3-point line. Fairly simple.
Only Pitino didn’t have such options. So, before this team ever played a game, he began devoting parts of his most valuable resource — those individual workouts — to players operating in what most other programs now consider no-man’s-land. Pitino’s 42-minute one-on-one training sessions began including 20 minutes of pull-up 15-footers, and mid-range shots off curls, and all variety of floaters. Many of the same timed shooting routines he used for 3-point shots were reimagined on the fly.
This is
the same Rick Pitinowho, back when the 3-point line was first introduced, and immediately panned by many college coaches as an abomination, embraced the evolution. He put down tape on the floor and demanded his Providence players only shoot from behind those lines. The Friars eventually shot themselves into the Final Four and Pitino secured his place as a founding father in the game’s embrace of the 3.
Now he’s doing the exact opposite.
And then you go into a hallway in the bowels of Gampel Pavilion, following a snatch-and-grab 68-62 win over two-time defending national champion Connecticut, and you ask how does the same guy who modernized the game flip the switch back to peach baskets and set shots.
“It was easy to recognize,” Pitino said. “If (shooting) is not your team’s strength, but you’re great defensively, you gotta go with what you got. I’ve never had this type of team. So I had to change what I do.”
That’s about as uncomplicated as it gets. Except taking midrange shots and long 2s is one thing, but making them is another.
He’s not the only one. Opposing teams are stuck trying to figure out how to beat a team that is scoring nearly 60 percent of its points on 2-point baskets (best among all high-major teams) and holding opponents to under 44 percent shooting on 2s.
Pitino’s crude de evolution is only part in parcel to St. John’s overall success. Firstly, the defense is its own story, one with gruesome scenes of asphyxiation. Then there’s the maniacal rebounding.
But at the root, it’s the adaptability of finding different ways to win.
