With renewed focus on recruiting abroad and a more structured offense, is coach Lonergan modelling GW on Popovich's Spurs?  

Lonergan's personal site points to a recent ESPN piece (with his own blunt title for it):

Great article, cagwu.  Thanks for posting.   Very relevant and certainly explains why ML looks for a certain type of player, and why Thinker's AAU guys don't like the Flex of ML's approach to the game.

I thought this section was particularly relevant to the way ML approaches the game (and you could change Popovich's name to ML and, for hte most part, it would still work)...

"Most of the foreign players not only have more experience playing basketball but more experience playing an unselfish style, with lots of passing and motion and screens, as messy as it is pure. As Spurs director of basketball operations Sean Marks, a New Zealander who played for San Antonio for two seasons, puts it, "The ball doesn't stick." For better or worse, the ball often sticks in America..."

...Of course, Pop's coaching style, as prescient as it is curmudgeonly, isn't for everyone. He's demanding and ruthless; his playbook is pick-and-roll heavy, more structured and complicated than European ball but a blood relative. The traits he scouts for -- players with "character," who've "gotten over themselves, who understand team play, who can cheer for a teammate," who "don't make excuses" -- hold true regardless of nationality."

Agreed... Great that we also can point to the Jarvis era for our success integrating international players into the program.  This isn't just some newfangled fad we're hopping on.

Were Jarvis's international teams also primarily defensively oriented with highly structured offenses like MLs?  A bit before my time..

Stability and success breed more stability and success.

It also doesn't hurt to have 3 Hall of Fame caliber players who learned under another HOF guy - David Robinson.

As great of a guy as #50 was and is, his teams with Terry Cummings, Sean Elliot, and Rod Strickland were dominated by some Trailblazer, Rockets, and Jazz teams that won't make anybody's "best of" list.

 Great referential post!!! This explains a lot and potentially pushes both the conversation and the questions about GW basketball and where we are going in the right direction. The advantage of a "team ball" system is that it gets players an advantage against an individual approach team in an apples against apples game. Done well, apples will compete with oranges even if oranges are "better on paper"

Indeed, this past year was a bit of both for us--we just couldn't close out games and didn't have the outside shooting to take part of the advantage of the system. It also may help us understand why guys like WHite and McCoy may have more attractiveness to coach Lonergan and (to me). They are not guys who will scare you with the ball one on one like James standing 25 feet from the hole, but in an offense that will unlock an 8 footer, then you have something.  

The premium of the system is that there are 5 passers on the floor. .Will it work at GW? Well, I think that it already has started with all the first year players added onto the holdovers (at various levels of buy-in) and getting us to a high of 86 on offensive efficiency. It already has in that we have been within a couple possessions in almost every loss with little outside help. 

So what is the true value of having 14 or 15 guys on a squad who play this way. THe discussion upthread about the conflict with the classic AAU style is so true--this can rub the nerve of many a player coming out of 3 years AAU showboat basketball. In fact, you need skills to score, but more to finish the play and not to create the play. I contend that it is all about how you can open up the defense in a team format and then finally using the talents to drop the shot into the twine.

This means that there is a less obvious point as fans to see player development. Here, I would make Kopriva exhibit A. Elsewhere, someone asked if John would ever develop into a productive player (liberally rephrasing here) and I would say that GW would be very hard pressed to recruit a guy fresh out of high school with as much to add  to GW right now at the position and responsibilities needed at this time. If you follow the site and GW ball you know that he is working on his jumper and you can see it in shoot arounds, but it is under a coaching/player wrap at this point. I pointed to the final game of last season where Kopriva played 7 minutes and still would have been UMass' 2nd leading rebounder. AND around January and on, he started to gain some success in the low blocks against decent competition. He is backing good defenders down and banking in with good accuracy against shot blockers.

That's poor little John Kopriva in a 5 to 12 minute shot on the floor--tossing good passes to cutters and getting an assist or two and working the boards. That's against very decent A10/D1 players.  People can make the claim that Kopriva was playing against the backups of UMass because of the success of Larsen and Armwood (not all the time), but that begs the point that our "BACK UPS" are better in many ways than theres (say Umass--picked by some to finish at the top of the A10).

PLAYER DEVELOPMENT is where I am really more impressed with this group of coaches. I see each player becoming more effective and adding a bit hear and there to their games' in a complimentary way. Demanding coaches? Yes--it is hard to be a player with coaches constantly harping about your game (work on this and that). When your entire game is taking someone on the dribble and the coaches want all the rest, I am sure that life can be uncomfortable.

THE GONZAGA MODEL is alive and well with GW.There was an interesting article about their recruiting and how, even after a decade plus of amazing success, they still get locked up in recruiting battles with state schools with 10K seat arenas and coaches brandishing future team success and stardom. In that article, they discuss how they have to keep working the international connections to get the talent and the team-oriented quality--guys who can work within their system. They have the luxury to "stockpile" players and develop--see the development of Kelly O. Which brings me to the next paragraph. 

From another thread :::> I don't see Lonergan playing Mikic at the 3 -- more likely that we will see Creek or Savage there in the rotation than Mikic. He struggles in the man against smaller faster players on the defensive end and he can't create space on the offensive end. More likely, Lonergan will use him when we can control the match-ups against a big--which means he has to play the part of a big--which he did do in HS/Prep. With this comment I think that this is the year that St Joe's old GW scounting report will NOT survive the test of time and GW team development--AGAIN why I am more bullish (no pun intended) about this upcoming season and beyond. AND also why I am not in the sky-is-falling crowd OR the tomorrow the sky-will-fall crowds.  

 Late night time well spent, Tuna. Encouraging insights!

Certain schools can get away with having 1-2 stars who essentially carry the team to success.  Davidson reached the Elite 8 because Steph Curry was good enough to carry the team on his back (and is now a budding NBA superstar).  Kansas won one of its national championships because Danny Manning did everything for that team. The strong likelihood is that GW will never ever attract such a great player.  The closest attempt came when Val Brown and Chris Monroe were the two primary scoring threats while playing together.  While each was a proficient scorer, neither was talented enough to pull this off and those GW teams failed to reach the NCAA's. 

The point is that a system where all five players are heavily involved without an emerging star is clearly the goal for any GW team.  The early Jarvis teams showed great balance with Yinka being an important but not dominating force.  Holland, Surles, Evans and Hammonds would be replaced with Koul, Mescherikov, Shawnta and King.  Even as dynamic as Shawnta was, it was his ability to be equal parts scorer and playmaker that made him so dangerous.  The most successful Hobbs teams featured a "share the ball" philosophy.  Double team Pops and pay for it by leaving JR, Mike, Omar, Carl or Mo open.

Given what Lonergan is seeking to accomplish, it makes you wonder whether Nigel Johnson would have been a good fit here.  Of course, Lonergan was happy to run that risk given his talent.  Yet would someone who was such a proficient scorer during his high school years be committed to keeping everyone on the team involved?  We'll never really know this answer but it is an interesting proposition.

Not to be the Al Sharpton of the group but whenever I read about this nonsense that foreign ball players are "better," I read that as code for black players are selfish, stupid etc etc.....Take it as you will but rarely do I come accross similar claims about foreign players in hockey, baseball, soccer, etc. 

Not to be the Al Sharpton of the group but whenever I read about this nonsense that foreign ball players are "better," I read that as code for black players are selfish, stupid etc etc..... Take it as you will but rarely do I come across similar claims about foreign players in hockey, baseball, soccer, etc. 

 Hooper1, I only see the code "selfish" applied inferentially to African-American players who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.  Just to demonstrate why you need more precision think about if it's ever been something people regularly say of African-born players or someone playing for Duke.  That being said if there's an assumption that there's a correlation between lower socio-economic African Americans and a particular type of basketball I'd like to see that born out in the stats.  If it is my hypothesis would be that the AAU scene is the causal variable that would demonstrate race and income as spurious.

 Hooper1, I don't really believe that's the case in your interpretation.  Ultimately what it comes down to is culturally the game of basketball is completely different overseas than it is in US.  Basketball is a team sport, but in the US  before prep players get to college the culture is very much an individual approach- like it's tennis or golf, contrast with Europe where team play and national teams is a huge deal.  

In the US, 12 and 13 yr kids are getting "mixtapes" on YouTube and AAU culture is all about individual basketball.  Inthe US, kids aren't truly getting the value of team play until they get on college campuses. Essentially, kids in the US are told how good they are at such a young level, and in Europe it's just not like that over there.  I never thought I'd ever see a US team composed of NBA players not win an Olympic gold medal- but it happened- because they couldn't play together.  

 Foreign soccer players are better than US soccer players.  

There, I said it. 

 Foreign soccer players are better than US soccer players.  

There, I said it.