ironman02;1342397 wrote:2010 was definitely a black eye for Roy Williams and Carolina basketball. The team was talanted, but I do think it's pretty easy to see why things turned out as they did. That Carolina team had just lost Hansbrough, Lawson, Ellington, and Green to the NBA. They did return talented players like Ed Davis and Deon Thompson, but Davis wasn't around for the last 15 games or so due to injury, and obviously Thompson was a little more than an average college player. Ginyard was coming off an injury and was never the same, but had a limited skill set to begin with. Will Graves was simply a three-point shooter, and that's it. Zeller was basically still a freshman due to his injury the previous season, and a talented recruiting class that included Henson, McDonald, and Strickland had not yet developed. Finally, Drew II and the Wears were there, which needs no other explanation.
Overall, it was a combination of injuries, inexperience, and a few recruiting misses/eventual transfers that sort of created a perfect storm. Roy has always been a great recruiter, but he had a couple classes in a row that really cost him, and set the program back for a year or two. He didn't do a particularly good job of coaching that team either, which he has admitted. Sometimes even Carolina fans are pretty hard on Roy for his Xs and Os, in-game adjustments, and philosophy regarding timeouts. However, when you look at his resume, and take a closer look at what he's truly trying to accomplish, his body of work speaks for itself. Missing the NCAAT at Carolina is pretty inexcusable, especially with what appeared to be a "talented" team, but there were several factors at play. If this year's team ends up taking a turn for the worse, then Roy should take a lot of heat for it because there should be more than enough talent on the roster to win 20+ games before tournament time.
Those are all valid reasons for what happened. But, I think you left out one important, maybe the most important, factor that played into that NIT season for Carolina in 2010. And my main criticism of Roy Williams, and what I think will keep him from being in the same conversation as Dean, Knight and K. That criticism being Roy's inability -- or perhaps
unwillingness is a more apt term -- to adapt his basketball philosophy to the strengths and weaknesses of the team that he has on the floor. That Tar Heels team in 2010 just didn't have the goods to run the floor and play the way Roy's championship teams did. Yet Roy continued with that strategy, grudgingly holding on to that "secondary break" mentality, and UNC got hammered night in and night out throughout the entire season by teams that simply exploited that fact and the Heels glaring offensive woes.
In 2007, Duke entered the season after losing two first team All-Americans, the all-time leading scorer in ACC history, and over 85 percent of the previous season's offensive production. The only returning starters were Greg Paulus and Josh McRoberts, whom I consider to be worse than many strains of cancer. Maybe not brain. That could have been a disaster of a season, and by Coach K's standards -- the Blue Devils finished the year 22-11 and lost in the first round of the NCAAs -- it was. But, rather than implement the same high-powered, high-scoring style of play that propelled many of Duke's early 2000s teams, including the 2001 championship club, K understood that 2007 was a completely different kind of team. So he took air out of the ball and instituted a strictly methodical, half-court approach. I don't recall the Devils scoring a fast break bucket the entire year. Duke averaged 70 points a game that season, barely scoring 60 on many nights. But it got Duke to the NCAAs on a year that it probably shouldn't have.
While Roy is an elite coach and one of the best of the modern era, he has proven to not be a very versatile coach.
