Assessment of this year's team: what went wrong?

G

gnaiko

25+ Posts
The year started out so promising. Every one thought this is going to be Texas' best team and maybe it's best chance to win it all. That's what makes it so disappointing, excruciating to watch Texas basketball this year. As far as I'm concerned, it's over this year. I don't think they'll even make it past the opening weekend of the NCAA tourney, although as a die hard fan I'm still hopefully optimistic they'll suddenly figure it out.

The team started out like gangbuster but abruptly collapse just as it gets into conference play. What went wrong? I think it's quite simply one of 2 things or a combination of both, 1) we overestimated the players potential, 2) bad coaching. And 1 other speculative thing 3) chemistry.

I will not rehash 2). I've already talked about that in the thread that will never die: "Barnes is an atrocious coah". So I will talk mostly about 1) & 3).

I was so optimistic starting the year because on paper we have everything, inside & outside. Pittman started out like gangbusters. In the Arkansas game, he looked every bit like a lottery pick. Fleet of foot and powerful. But since then he's been lost. To me this is one of the biggest reason Texas spiraled down hill. For whatever reason, he completely lost it. Maybe we just overestimated his ability. After all, he really only showed glimpses of greatness late last season and early this season. Maybe it was a mirage. Or maybe we completely misused him or he just lost confidence. I do wonder, from early in the season, if it's a good idea to play uptempo, be pushing the ball up & down so quickly while Pittman is in the game. I feel that works against Pittman. He gets tired running up & down and plays sloppy, more foul prone and less power/lift when tired. If we had slowed down and feed him as much as possible when he's in the game, I wonder if it would have made a difference.

The second factor is the freshmen, I think we might have overestimated their ability or they lost confidence. Early in the year, again they looked every bit the players that was hyped. Brown & Hamilton was deadly when open. Brown showed considerable skills, ball handling and crafty, albeit with lots of turnovers. Bradley looked every bit as good as advertised defensively and showed enough glimpses of capability of becoming a dominant scorer. Now they looked bad. Can't hit any shot (last night's game against Baylor was brutal). Hamilton keeps getting stripped driving to the hoop. They are supposed to be great shooters but can't hit sh*t.

The team went from beating everyone by double digits early in the year to struggling to score. The main stalwart of defense was non existant and the offense got worse.

The more I think about it, the more I think there's a chemistry issue at hand. Chemistry between Barnes and the players. I think behind the scenes there's a battle among some players and him. I think most likely Brown was disrespectful in the locker room or practice and that's why he was sat out unexplicably in games. This team was fragile in psyche, very young. When they were winning, everyone was a happy camper and went along with the program. Once they lost a few games, at first they attributed it to the inability to hit free throws, but as they lost more games; I think the young players begin to rebel. It started a cycle where, they rebel, Barnes will sit them out, they lost more confidence, and spiral on down.

This last part is just speculative on my part, but it sure looks like it. I don't see squabbles during games but why would Barne's substituting patterns be so erratic from game to game.

Whatever it is, I hope they fix it before next season. The players we have is still super talent-wise. Add in Tristan Thompson, it'll still be a good to great team if they develop. Bradley-Brown-Hamilton-Ward is potentially great on the perimeter. Wangmene-Chapman-Johnson-Thompson can be serviceable and good too. I don't know if I'm right or I'm just being blinded by the bias & delusions of being a die hard fan.

Also I forgot to mention that Jai Lucas was completely overestimated before the start of the season. I thought he could be a serviceable PG.
 
You start with a false premise. The 05-06 team was a preseason #2 in the AP with 6 first place votes.

Don't overlook the obvious, which is that Texas has no one who combines size and quickness. Texas has length (Pittman, Chapman, Hill) and quickness (James, Hamilton, Johnson), but no one who combines both.

Texas also doesn't have a guard who is above average at all three demands of playing defense, handling the ball, and shooting.

Lacking both of those players, Texas was bound to find itself having difficulties. I thnk the team should have had a better season, but let's not overlook the personnel problem.

I do think losing Ward was significant in that a team with Ward, Bradley, Balbay, and Mason could have played full court harrass the ball defense all game long. I don't know if Barnes would have done that, but when your team is low on shooters and high on athletes, you might as well try it.
 
bierce, if your point is that people didn't actually think this team would be better because the 2005-2006 was ranked one spot higher...in the preseason...by the AP, then I have to say you are certainly grasping at straws. Almost everybody said preseason this would be our best team ever. It doesn't matter who the AP thinks should be ranked higher, especially when you are comparing separate years. That year's ranking has no bearing on what people thought for this team preseason.

But I'll still play just to elucidate the point better than I have so far. If (hypothetically) there are five teams as good as KU looked preseason this year and UT starts ranked 6th, is it impossible to believe they could be better than a team ranked only behind Duke in 2005? You can't compare different years just to project individual team "greatness."
 
A lot of guys have the potential to be great, but they need an on court leader and learn some teamwork. At least that was my observation.
 
What went wrong:
-- Confidence. Pittman was probably the biggest example of shaken confidence as he looked like 2 different players before and after the New Year. The confidence/mental aspect certainly showed on the FT line.

-- Lack of a true Sr. leader and/or true PG. Yes, I understand James/Pittman/Mason are all Srs, but that doesn't make them leaders. How good could we have been with a guy like Tweety Carter running the show?

-- Hunger. Instead, we have entitlement. This team played like a team that just expected to beat the opponent. If we really wanted to win more than the other team, we certainly didn't show it.

-- Poor coaching. Without a doubt, this is Rick Barnes' worst effort. He either couldn't figure out how to use his players, or motivate them to get the most out of them. I've said it before - imagine Jay Wright or Jamie Dixon with this much talent.

-- Over-rated <clap, clap ... clap, clap, clap> We got Pitt early, and beat a vastly over-rated UNC team. We're better than our current standing, but certainly not the top team in the nation.

-- Injuries. I thought our depth would minimize Ward's injury - I was wrong. Balbay's injury just further depleted our depth and left us w/out a true PG.

-- We play in a damn tough Conference. Other than the loss in Norman, I really don't think we had a bad loss. Sure we lost to a team that won't make the tourney in UConn, but they're underachievment is almost as puzzling as ours.
 
I think a lot of us underestimated the impact not playing organized ball for a year would have on Brown and Hamilton. Barnes said a few weeks ago that he thought those guys would be starters by Jan. Not so much...
 
GoHornsGo, there were two absolutes posited. 1) Everyone thought this was Texas's best team, and 2) everyone thought this was Texas's best chance to win it all. I think 6/1 first place votes in the AP and 2/0 in the coaches' poll kind of rebuts the second prong, no matter whether you refuse to define "best" in the first statement as being "best when compared to its competition." Even so, I still doubt everyone saw this year's team as being better than the '05-'06 team. I don't know if I ever did.

I think when we review the season that it is important to not start with false premises. I don't disagree that this year's team finished in an incredibly disappointing fashion. I don't disagree that this season reflects badly on Barnes. I don't think he did a good job with the team this year. The players still on the floor from the '07 and '08 recruiting classes have shown next to no progress, with the exception of Johnson. Pittman still doesn't seem to be in year long 25+ minute a game shape, after being here four years. some of the freshmen still don't seem to understand how to move their feet to play defense or how to work with 4 others on the floor on offense. Those things do fairly raise important questions about the coaching job concerning player development. (Here I will say I do think I've seen vast improvement by Hamilton this year, if not Brown, who seems a complete enigma to me.)

Still, when you put false assumptions into your analysis, your answers tend to get skewed. We had similar, if not greater, enthusiasm in October 2005 only to learn the team greatly lacked a point guard and at times couldn't even inbound the damn ball. (Or was that the previous year we couldn't inbound to save our asses?)

This year, we had a similar question at point guard, along with questions about whether the new guys were that good (the 05-06 team had little reliance on freshmen), whether Hamilton and Brown would suffer from rust, and whether we would suffer for needing someone who combined size and quickness inside. A lot of us overlooked those questions. A lot of us pointed some of them out and told others to slow down with the Final Four tickets.

When analyzing the team, let's not overlook there were caution signs and people holding them up. I'm not going to claim that I was some kind of genius in saying the team wasn't going to be good, because I said no such thing. In fact, I started a thread after ten games in which I compared the players' production against last season's non-conference games and concluded, essentially, the team was a monster if it shot well and showed enough strong tendencies to win even on nights it didn't. At the same time, go back and look at the early game threads (USC, Pitt, Iowa, WCU), where lots of people (me included) were bemoaning various deficiencies the team was demonstrating.

We need to remember the warning signs were there, even if we ignored them.
 
Confidence and ability are both issues for this team (coaching staff included) but I think the primary problem has been attitude. The seniors on this team lack that team first attitude. James is a good (not great) player but his "look at me" attitude has always bothered me. That and Barnes' "rotation" has never made any sense to me. Never. The way he subs and rotates players is nonsensical. I wonder how this team would be under Dixon or Matta.
 
I have no idea how we beat the likes of Pitt and Michigan State and even atm. Obviously, this team was decent early in the season (but not number 1) and then lost it big time. They look like they're trying hard, but they look lost on offense and defense. Better free throwing would have won a few more games.
 
What went wrong? We played more than 17 games.

We looked like world beaters then chumps. Slumps happen and when things go downhill like they did for us it is hard to turn things around. I don't think we are as bad as we look now and were not as good as we looked early. Key injuries did not help.
Even with a ton of talent the Yankees started last year like a cellar team. Could not seem to shake the slump but look what happened.

We could not have gone 17 - 0 without talent. Hey wern't we advertised as the deepest team in the nation? Lots of players got time and played lights out. I thinks once we lost confidence the coaching went south also. All the kings horses and all the kings men could not but us back to together again.
 
This is a post at BC. As I started to read this article (8 pages) I started to see our seasons unfold . I found myself saying damn that fits our team, spot on, ******* right and it goes on to look at basketball from another angle that might of helped Barnes and staff . It was a thought provoking article. Take a look it is long but worth the few minutes to read.The Link
 
Lack of leadership is the root cause. At the first of the season most teams are over rated if they have individual talent. By the end of the year, teams become what they are. No leadership equates to individual performances which generally prevents a team from becoming a high performer.
 
1. Lack of effort by anyone not named Damion James, Gary Johnson and Avery Bradley is what led to the downfall of this team. (Say what you want about Bradley talent-wise, but he always played tough defense). The last time I saw the entire team lay it all out during a game was against michigan state when we were losing in the second half and we applied a press that just suffocated the spartans. What happened to that team and effort?

2. If you go back and look at the baylor, aggy, KU games- we never got back on defense. It was revolting to watch how many fast break points this team gave up. This is why we got blow out so much this season was fast break points alone. I don't understand why. It wasn't as if Balbay, Bradley, Brown or Lucas were pulling down a bunch of rebounds- they just stood and watched guys run past them for easy lay-ups off of our missed shots. (I'll give hamilton a pass on this one becuase he actually was very helpful on the offensive boards). The most frustrating part of this season for me was during the Baylor game in the big 12 tourney when dunn was bringing the ball down on a fast break ( think it was 1 vs 4 Texas defenders in a rare moment that we did get back on defense) and Jai Lucas was in perfect position to take a charge but instead, he runs out of the way and lets dunn get the layup. We have a bunch of prima donnas on this team and not enough tough guys. Royal Ivey, James Thomas, Brandon Mouton, Brian Boddicker would've kicked the crap out of these guys.

3. We don't know how to play help defense. Knight pointed it out in our game vs baylor. If one of the baylor guards got past his defender, he had an open lane to the bucket. If the baylor big men got the ball down low, they didn't have to worry about sagging help or a double team. The could dribble around and back their man down until they had a 2 foot jumper.

4. We don't have anyone that can drive and dish and if we did, we don't have anyone that can confidently hit an open 3 pointer. It was so disheartening to watch the aggies vs jayhawks game yesterday and watch guys make open shots.

There were a lot of problems this year but I don't see it getting any better in the next couple of years. We don't have any talented big men on the horizon. Gary Johnson gives a lot of effort but he can't play against 6'10' guys. Unless this team of guards learns how to gell, play defense and hit open shots, we are going in to dark time for Texas basketball.
 
NO POINT GUARD. Don't know if Ward could have been or will be, but with Barnes lack of offensive acumen, he needs a point guard who can take charge, make a few shots and hit free throws.

Also, can someone tell me why Pittman cannot sun for five minutes at a time? I know he has a confidence issue lately, but he has had four years to get in basketball shape.
 
We were overrated from the start. Beating #10 N Car made us look like a real contender at the time, but is appears NCar would only finish 7-8 in the B12. Blame it on Barnes, blame it on youth, blame it on senior leadership, or blame it on injuries it you like. For me, a little of all above but mostly just a top 20 type team with flaws that was overhyped and over scheduled. The B12 was brutal this year and we peaked in Dec against ranked competition. As opponents were building in Dec, we were stoked and sticking our chest out. Defensive lapses, turnovers, and FT's took turns killing us and maybe this group was just not mature enough to correct those flaws. FT's drive you crazy but it's the defensive breakdowns and turnovers that were our downfall. Even had Dex played at a higher level we'd still have had the same problems against the better teams.
 
1. Injuries. Ward's injury hurt much more than I anticipated.
2. Lack of true PG.
3. Pittman. I am sure other teams made adjustments to his very limited offensive game, and things got more difficult in conference play. But he also stopped fighting for position, stopped rebounding, stopped defending. Sad.
4. Lack of shooters. James can score from anywhere, but he's not a pure shooter. Only Hamilton is, and he's so erratic, and takes so many bad shots, as we all know. I have high hopes for him, however.
 
I do have real concerns about Brown's play, as he seemed far too content to just hang around the perimeter and not attempt penetration when he was playing point, far too content to drift off his man and kind of sink into the paint to no purpose on defense. The latter habit had him unable to get out on his man quickly, so an opponent under pressure always had someone wide open to take a pass, and it put him in no position to receive an outlet and push the ball on a break.
 
I think they played hard.

But they were unfocused on defense, did not help out and did not put offensive plays, cuts, screens, to good effective use.

Hate to say it, but I think coaching was not up to snuff this year. We had lots of inexperience on the court all year long, and the game plan was never adjusted to take advantage of the players abilities.

hope Barnes gets some offensive help in the coaching ranks next year.

Barnes looked worn out in the last B12 tournament game against Baylor. He looked like he had given up. I don't think he had given up, but he just seemed worn down and defeated.

i hope he can find a way to turn it around in a hurry. Like by next season. I can't see any march miracles for this team.
 
I was disappointed more in the coaching. Thats too much talent not to be successful. I also think he allow the team, not to focus on what was getting him the W at the beginning of the season. Which was D.James and D.Pittman and I dont think that he pushed D.Pittman harder enough this year.And he got away from his veteran guard J.Mason which play good for him for 3 years. If he was not able to make outside shoots. Design plays for him drive or pull up for a jumper.Sitting him like he did I believe made him lose his confidents in shooting. Now he gave you defense.Because a lot of our guards were not playing defense.I also think there were chemistry issues too.
 
Here is what went wrong.
1) Lack of a true point guard and bad defense.
2) Big XII may be the best its been since its inception...KU, KSU, Baylor, Aggy, and Mizzou are all better than us and we rightfully lost to them.
3) Bad and stubborn coaching.
 
Nothing is wrong, the team and the Coaches are fine. Teams with this much talent are frequently a work in progress. No one wants to face this team right now.

OP must have been happy in the Weltlich era when you knew what to expect and that was nothing.

The despair exhibited on this thread wouldn't be here if Coach Barnes hadn't elevated this program from the gutter dweller it was.

I predict Elite 8 for this team.

Take the bags off your heads.
 
Personnel is not the reason this team went from the No. 1 team in the country to the crap that we see now. Maybe not having a true PG kept them from being elite, but they have more than enough talent to be a top 15 team regardless.

They just did not improve as a "team" as the season went along, while all other good teams in the country did. The team offense and team defense were absolutely atrocious.

It is just a given that your can't out talent everyone else, and you must have a way of playing offense that creates good looks at the basket and a way of playing defense that limits open shots. Texas somehow had neither this year. I love Texas and will root for them no matter what (I even watched the entire Rout 66 game against UCLA), but they played so ugly that they were almost unwatchable certain times.
 
"No one wants to face this team right now."

"I predict Elite 8 for this team."

Wishbonemac, what the hell are you smoking these days? In the Big-12, only Texas Tech and Oklahoma State might believe your first statement. Baylor would be laughing. Elite 8 for us in March Madness? Maybe in the NIT (and even that is a long shot) but NOT in this year's NCAA Tournament.
 
wishbonemac,

You must have grabbed the wishbone and made your wish. I hope your wish comes true, i.e., elite eight. However, I think you must have just taken a huge toke off a giant joint of strong stuff to make such a prediction.

Did you see this team play UConn and a&m at their place? How about the ugly game at ou?

If you think we are elite 8, you must think Baylor, the team that rolled us the last two times we played them, is final four.
 
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