Finish the sentence. If Mark Pope mass substitutes after the first 5 minutes of play this year I'm going to.....
- Thread starter BigBlueBubba
- Start date
Hope it works well even though I don't agree with the strategy.
1) wait to comment until I see the outcome;
2) express my delight if the outcome is positive;
3) refrain from bitching on the internet if the outcome is negative.
2) express my delight if the outcome is positive;
3) refrain from bitching on the internet if the outcome is negative.
If he does that, we will lose as many games as we did this year.
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Be glad because we have a deep team with 10-12 good players (People forget that CCC didn’t even fill out the scholarships and they didn’t even have enough players to go 5 on 5 in practice)
Probably get on Rupp Rafters and complain. Some will agree. Others will tell me legendary coaches couldn’t have succeeded with my expectations. Pope could literally be like hall of fame coaches Billy D, Hurley or some other legendary coach. Just compare his first few years Win/loss record to legendary coaches. Ignore any context including the fact that they didn’t have transfer portals to immediately change the entire roster they inherited and didn’t have NIL money to buy players they want while ignoring their fact they actually showed that they could win something of note at lower level schools 
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Maybe even 13 - 14 deep. Pope was a sub for most of his career & he coaches from that perspective. I disagree with subbing at 5 minutes but don’t mind playing everyone who earns it. This is a deep- talented team.
Honestly if that happened I would be thrilled, because that would indicate not only that Pope thinks UK has a very deep team, but that he’s got the talent to roll out an entire cohesive five man group as substitutes that’s fully functional.
That should be the goal when recruiting at Kentucky.
Of course some fans will knee-jerk complain about it without seeing how it works first, because they’re the ones who truly don’t “get it”.
He’s talking about the analytics Pope uses I believe and I agree. I just hope he gets away from his spreadsheets and develops a better feel for substitutions and game flow, it’ll happen eventually I imagine. At least I hope so.
Nope. Some fans don’t get it but some get it very well. If Pope screws up like he did last year and the fans jump his *** you can rest assured that they’re the fans that actually do get it.
Pope is gonna Pope.
He has no idea what he’s doing.
If analytics say sub, he’ll sub.
The process is more important than the results. It’s just beautiful.
He has no idea what he’s doing.
If analytics say sub, he’ll sub.
The process is more important than the results. It’s just beautiful.
You know I'm probably in the minority here but I don't agree that Pope "screwed up" last year, at least with respect to substitutions.
I understand that some people were not enamored with the fact that in the first half he would bring in substitutes at a general time of the game, sometimes regardless of how well the team was playing at the time. And sometimes he put in too many bench players together and it didn't always work out.
Those are legitimate criticisms which I don't have a problem with.
But what I do disagree with are the small minority of vocal fans who seemed to complain anytime a substitution was made at all. What exactly did they want?
Remember, this started out as a fairly deep team to start the season, and it made perfect sense to give players a shot to see how they performed in non-garbage time minutes. The very same people who later were the loudest complainers later in the season, early in the season were taking cues from people like Jimmy Dykes and clamoring for Pope to "shorten the rotation" as early as November. Which is completely ridiculous IMO. If anyone was stupid enough to take their advice they would have been playing Brandon Garrrison and Mouhamed Dioubate etc. exclusively and we may have never seen players like Malachi Moreno or Kam Williams given an opportunity develop. The same could be said for Collin Chandler the previous year as these "geniuses" would have chosen to nail him to the bench and never give him a chance to develop and contribute later in the season.
Then you add in the injury issue. Good thing Pope played and tried to develop his bench early on, because if they had 'shorterned the rotation' early on and then when Lowe and Dioubate and Quaintance and Williams and Aberdeen etc. got injured they would have been up the creek without a paddle.
So what started out as a potentially deep team by the end of the season wasn't really. Again, all the more reason to try to develop a bench, at least early on. A lot of that was injury but as it turned out some was the fact that neither Noah nor Jasper Johnson developed as expected.
Even late in the season I still was fine with Pope giving Johnson and Noah some run, because in the end for that UK team to be at its best, it needed these players to step up. (and at least in Jasper's case it was necessary to give him some minutes if there was any chance at all to try to retain him for the following season, because I do believe that eventually he will be a very productive college player.) But in the end they didn't perform and Pope recognized this by limiting their minutes.
As for the substitution pattern, again I didn't really have an issue with it. Having subs come in partway through the first half to give the starters a breather is a standard pattern used in the NBA for many decades. It not only gives the starters a breather but it lets the coach know who on the bench can be productive for the 2nd half. And I think that Pope generally did a very good job of adjusting in the second half and using the players and matchups he saw worked best, in large part based on what he saw transpire in the first half.
Now I know that the vocal minority of critics seemed to want to see the starters play 35+ minutes and seemed to get angry whenever anyone was substituted, but I don't know where they get this concept that playing iron-man minutes leads to winning basketball?
I tweeted about this recently where I went back and looked at past UK teams to see how many starters actually averaged 35+ minutes and it was very rare, and arguably when that was done it was more out of necessity for bad teams. When starters are playing fewer minutes it's not only easier to handle fatigue & foul problems, but it generally correlates to winning basketball.
Link to Twitter Discussion
Also when comparing the minutes Pope has given to his top players over the last two seasons compared to historic numbers, they're not out of the ordinary. So again I'm not sure where this expectation is coming from that he should be playing his top guys iron man minutes? (Maybe if he had a first-team All-American player but that definitely wasn't the case with last year's team. Otega Oweh was the closest thing to a star on the team and even he was someone who some wanted benched early in the season.)
Keep in mind one of the greatest weaknesses of last year's team was that the starters would get down to large deficits early in the game. So it seems bizarre that fans would argue that these same starters should be playing even more minutes, but that seems to be what they did.
Bottom line is last year's team underachieved, but IMO it was primarily due to 1.) the starters and returning players weren't as effective as they should be 2.) some on the bench (Noah & Jasper in particular but also including Jelavic) didn't develop as well as expected and 3.) injuries. While substitutions might have been a problem in a few games, overall I didn't view it as a major concern.
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You made a lot of valid points but the substitution patterns off set key moments of the game.
You have some good points however you also
Omit a few points that I personally take issue with. There were several times the team was rolling and then in come the subs and killed all the momentum and which led to them going down double digits. There were numerous times that a player was hot in the game a he was subbed out, once again killing momentum. Finally I would 100% take issue if he is subbing according to a statistics sheet vs what he is seeing with his eyes. Although admittedly I can’t prove that was happening but it certainly appeared to be. That alone makes me lose all patience with anything else he is struggling with. Time and time again we have seen a good momentum destroyed and then a double digit deficit. Fans can blame injuries etc but there were several games we were in it and rolling then subbed out only to fall behind. (There’s a few players that should only be giving breathers to others that were logging serious minutes.).
Stop being so calm, sane and rational. This is a message board. The only thing we do here is express our outrage.
I didn't omit it at all. I basically started out admitting that there were a few times last season where Pope indeed made substitutions during times when the starters were playing well. And I also said that's a valid criticism.
But as I later explained, its not like the starters were consistently starting every game great. If anything it was the opposite, at least in the early half of the season. In some cases the subs came in and helped the team come back from a deep first half deficit. Other times they didn't make a huge difference but didn't lose ground. Other times they came in and fell flat.
If someone wants to go back into the details of each individual game and give an analysis of how substituting helped or hurt, that would be interesting to see. But I think what that will show is exactly what I said above, sometimes it helped, sometimes it hurt and sometimes it was hard to tell. (In your post above you seem to focus only on the times when it didn't work out.)
Again part of the goal of substituting is to give the starters a rest and keep them out of foul trouble, and thus ultimately help them be more productive in the second half. Assessing that is difficult to really know since there's no control to compare it to.
As far as my mentioning of injuries, to me that is a main driver in explaining a shift in substitution pattern, not as sort some of excuse to make subsittions. Early in the season when we all thought we had a deep team, there's a better justification and IMO duty on the coach to carving out opportunities for the bench players to play real minutes. By the end of the season there were fewer healthy players period, and the substition decisions were different, more based on foul trouble, need etc.
I'm fine with all that. Ultimately to me a sign of a good coach is to adjust to the team that he has on-hand and utlilzing them in a way that maximizes the probability of long term success. If that means using and developing a bench, then so be it. If it means playing an iron-man starting 5 35+ minutes a game, then that's OK if that's the personnel you have.
The reason I am harping on this issue right now is my concern is that because of the way last season turned out, the very same fans who started critizing Pope later in the season anytime he even made any substition will once again start the (to me illogical) mantra to only play your starters (or maybe only 7 or 8 etc.) and thus completley ignore what once again currently looks like a potentially deep team. And this criticism will end up forcing Pope into making a dumb decision, which would be to fail to develop a deep bench when there are talented players available.
Frankly, the initial post of this thread exemplifies this knee-jerk, non-thinking mindset that a vocal minority of fans seem to have.
I wasnt directly attacking you, so don’t take it personally. By saying you didn’t mention those I meant perhaps you hadn’t thought about it. Also, I don’t think that team, with no Injuries last year, was a team that was going anywhere. Something was really off or weird or there was a cancer in it or something. They also had a few games as a whole and they weren’t an instant classic by any stretch of the imagination.
I didn't take it personally. I was just responding to your claim that I overlooked something when I clearly did not, as I stated it up front in my second post.
As for something being off with the team, I agree. I listed a number of other issues with the team that had a direct impact on how substitions would take place during the course of the year.
In the end, while Pope's substition decisions were problematic at times and can be rightfully criticized, I don't think it was a signficiant issue as to why the team underperformed to what was expected at the beginning of the season. Probably not even in the top 10 IMO.
It comes down to how well the team is playing in that moment.
If we're at the 15 minute mark and we have 4 points and some of the guys are showing signs of fatigue, okay, but I still don't think we have enough good depth to mass sub when we're playing top 10 teams. Play your best players as often as possible.
Pope appeared to be subbing off a spreadsheet last year. You don't pull a guy when he's hot and Pope did that often, which usually resulted in our run coming to an end.
Colin Chandler hit 4 threes in a row, Pope pulled in 1 minute before a TV timeout. I thought that was okay, but then he left him on the bench an additional 3 minutes beyond the timeout. Why would you do that?
If we're at the 15 minute mark and we have 4 points and some of the guys are showing signs of fatigue, okay, but I still don't think we have enough good depth to mass sub when we're playing top 10 teams. Play your best players as often as possible.
Pope appeared to be subbing off a spreadsheet last year. You don't pull a guy when he's hot and Pope did that often, which usually resulted in our run coming to an end.
Colin Chandler hit 4 threes in a row, Pope pulled in 1 minute before a TV timeout. I thought that was okay, but then he left him on the bench an additional 3 minutes beyond the timeout. Why would you do that?
Depends on what was happening that first five minutes.
On average not something that I fret much about early in the year though.
I'm open to some experimenting especially against the cannon fodder portions of the schedule.
On average not something that I fret much about early in the year though.
I'm open to some experimenting especially against the cannon fodder portions of the schedule.