BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE.

BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE. In football, every play is planned after an interval for deliberation. Coaches now call most plays. In soccer, there is a continuous flow. A soccer coach has to prepare his players to react to events. Most basketball coaches take after football coaches. Aside from fast break situations, there are lots of set plays. At the end of the game, there are lots of time outs, and only rarely at the end of a game does a coach let his team take the ball after a basket and attack before the other team can set its defense. College coaches who don’t seem to call a lot of plays, who let their players play, (such as, I think, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse) are not rated as highly as their record deserves. Coaches by their nature hate mistakes. It seems that Tyrus Thomas has gotten crosswise with his coaches because he makes mistakes. For example, he is criticized for “poor shot selection”, although his shooting percentage is 48.6%, so he can’t be taking too many bad shots. (For comparison, Joakim Noah, who has a similar offensive game, is shooting 49.5% this year.) As for defense, you would think that you would want an agile shot blocker like Thomas to be doing some free lancing on defense (otherwise known as “playing help defense”). One report noted that Tyrus’s new coach is Larry Brown, who is know for being a stickler on how things are done. We’ll see what happens.