hrstrat57 wrote:
uMass will press all night until they drop and then they will press more......Hurley has shown thus far that he will not throw the long ball to beat the press instead preferring the point guard mindset of I can dribble thru anything. That needs to change and probably will since we only have one guy who can dribble through anything most of the time.
I hope so....but coaches who were point guards tend to be stubborn about the press.
These are the silly criticisms of Hurley that draw me out of the woodwork...
"Throw[ing] the long ball" to beat the press isn't a "strategy," it is a play that can be used in one-off situations when the pressing team completely sells out to stop the short inbounds pass. Try doing it more than once against a press and see how many times it gets picked off/thrown away. It is not exactly the biggest coaching breakthrough for opponents of URI to understand that we are susceptible to the press right now. We have one solid ball-handler, a couple of passable ones, and three other guys in our regular rotation of 7 players who should not handle the ball under any circumstances. If we tried to "use the long-ball" more often, that would also only serve to speed up the game, which given our depth situation is clearly not a good option.
"The point guard mindset of I can dribble thru anything?" You think Hurley tells Jarvis to just dribble into/through traps without trying to pass out of them because Hurley was a PG and thinks PGs are invincible?
I mean come on, let's try to assign blame to gameplanning missteps that can actually be attributed to the coach. I can even get on board with criticizing Hurley for not giving Berry 10 minutes a game before Hass went down. Unfortunately there just isn't much with this roster that Hurley can do to discourage teams from pressing us. We might get some easy baskets, but we'll also turn it over at a higher-than-desirable rate and/or speed up the pace of play which will hurt us down the stretch given our lack of warm bodies.