By LARRY VAUGHT
This comment by King Ghidora about coach John Calipari caught me eye the other day:
“I’m starting to think that maybe Cal is the best coach to ever walk the sidelines at UK. Yes I know that’s blasphemy to many but what he’s accomplished in this era rivals the best things Rupp did. It was a lot easier for Rupp to recruit the best players IMO because many teams didn’t give a hoot about basketball. Many did of course but still it’s not like today where every school in the country realizes the awesome moneymaking potential of a good basketball team. Heck they had assistant football coaches and guys from the PE department coach many of the SEC teams back in Rupp’s era. Rupp lobbied hard to get the SEC to take basketball more seriously. Cal doesn’t have to do that.
With the 4 straight #1 recruiting classes, the national title, 5 players going in the first round draft, two players drafted first and second, two #1 draft picks in 3 years, a final 4, undefeated in the SEC, and all this in a time when recruiting wars are epic battles is just amazing. I can only wonder what he could have done with a 40 year run in Lexington. And I have barely scratched the surface on what Cal has brought to the table. His accomplishments just keep stacking up and there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight. Several polls have the Cats ranked #1 for next season.”
What Calipari has done in three year is amazing. But rather than rate where he belongs on the all-time UK coaching list after just three seasons, it brought another question to mind: Where would you rank Calipari among UK coaches when it comes to in-game adjustments?
How does Calipari stack up against Joe Hall, Eddie Sutton, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith and Billy Gillispie (yes, we have to acknowledge he really did coach at UK for two years)?
Hall, Pitino and Smith also won national titles. Sutton might have if his run at Kentucky had not been so disjointed by personal issues. But which of those coaches, including Calipari, made the best in-game adjustments?
24 Responses to Which Kentucky basketball coach has been best at in-game adjustments?
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in my opinion , i liked pitino.
I don’t remember the games Rupp coached, but since he had so many years at UK I would say Rupp. After all, when they lost it was the boys’ fault and when they won it was because of him. As Rupp also said, if winning is not important why bother keeping score? I love that quote!
Although I wouldn’t trade Cal for two Tubbys I think that Tubby made the best halftime adjustments. Whatever you beat Tubby with in the first half would not work in the second half.
I completely agree with you donv.
I have ALWAYS said, even when it wasn’t the “popular” thing to do, that whatever Tubby did at halftime should be bottled and given to every UK coach, forever. The team could be playing a terrible game and would completely turn around, after coming out of the locker room at half. All the things that the other team was doing against them would be shut down and UK would absolutely dominate in the second stanza. Also, I don’t think there was a better coach at finding the right players to thrive in his system, until the last few years of his tenure, when he recruited some really good talent, but talent that was meant for an “up-tempo” system (Rondo, Crawford, etc.). But WE forced him to do that because our pride was hurt that we weren’t getting Top 10 talent every year. I will also appease the Tubby haters by saying that the game was passing him by a little bit, by his last few years.
I do agree with King that there hasn’t been (and probably never will be) as amazing a recruiter as Cal. He is also one of the best motivators and judge of character, when it comes to molding young players.
I guess I should also add that Cal is, hands down, my favorite coach EVER.
So glad to see you back in the fold! LOL
Kind of tend to agree about Tubby with in-game adjustments even though I think it is hard to really say about Calipari because he’s had to make so few in-game adjustments. Pitino was a lot the same way. Recruit talent, prepare and not as many in-game adjustments needed
You promise one quesoitn and then ask a bunch of them. I’ve written about Pearl a lot. I’ve avoided Calhoun and UConn because I have no opinion about the guy or the program. They are a program that has played good basketball for a long time, but I never found anything about them to be remotely interesting. If it’s boring to me, I don’t write about it. UConn might be a great story, but I don’t care about it.Fact $33,033 to Kanter from a pro team in Turkey. Fact Calipari gets a lot of one-and-done kids four in his first year at UK. Fact I was told by a UK tennis player whom I trust that she watched a tutor (many times) do the homework of a prominent basketball player while he texted. That she doesn’t want her name attached to a story stating that is understandable.Again the equivocation of a Kentucky fan saying that Calipari has never been caught cheating. No one is willing to say that he doesn’t cheat. And sadly no one at Kentucky cares.
I am still pis*** at Pitino for not putting Roderick Rhodes to guard Jalen Rose in the NCAA when Rose was passing over our press in the NCAA.
Tubby made the best in-game adjustments….total lockdown by defense in the final 3 minutes…..but Cal is close behind…..Joe B. is third. (Not including Rupp)
Yeah, Tubby just played a little slower in the second half.
1st thought would b tubby, but lookin back tubby made alot of strange calls that would even hav the tv ppl talkin
I always considered Tubby great at adjustments, but one thing he did has always made me scratch my head. He switched to a zone against UCLA in New York in overtime when they had Jason Kapono and he absolutely torched us in that overtime. Never understood that one.
Billy never seemed like he made any adjustments. Straight man to man at all times.
Tubby hands down. That’s why they were called the “COMEBACK CATS”. They did not just slow down they ELIMINATED what ever you did best. Just check the stats of the Utah center in the title game from 1st half to 2nd.
That said what Cal has done in three years has never been done before. Not ever in HISTORY. No coach has ever recruited as well, sent as many players to the NBA or had his level of success with a different starting 5 each year. Starting no less than 3 freshman each year. Heck even Jay Bilas called it umprecedented! !
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK GO BLUE OR STAY HOME
1. Tubby
2. Joe B. Hall
3. Cal
Bad Hires Cliff Hagan brought Sutton and probation
CM Newton brought Hal Mummie and probation
Mitch Barnhart brought Billy Clyde no probation
I think hands down Tubby is the man and in all honesty leads to an nerve wrecking season for fans well me anyway
Glad to be back Larry. I had a primitive vacation right here in my house for the past few days. It’s amazing how much we have come to depend on a steady supply of electricity. Go without for about 4 days and you’ll see what I mean.
I’m going to go with Pitino on this question. Cal makes adjustments with his teams better for the whole season but RP was fantastic at making adjustments. Tubby had one good year making adjustments but IMO he couldn’t train his players as well as he should.
And Joe B. would be my second pick. Joe was a strategy guy for Rupp for years. Rupp rarely changed his style for any team but when he did he sought out Joe B.’s advice. Joe was a great X’s and O’s guy.
Cal is third on my list but he’s first on a lot of lists like adjusting to fit his talent for a whole season. He’s actually a little slow in game adjustments IMO but he does do well when he gets around to making adjustments. Mostly he’s a half time strategy changer. I don’t see him change during a game. I think he wants a simple strategy for his players and he wants them to make their own adjustments and it clearly works well. He trusts his players to know what they can do and what they can’t. That’s extremely smart coaching IMO. The players are out there and they can see things no one on the sidelines can see.
Rupp rarely made adjustments. His strategy was to make other teams adjust to his team.
King, I echo your comments about electricity. Mine was off for two stretches totalling about 36 hours. Everytime I thought of something I could do, I realized I needed power to do it. I threw out the contents of my refrigerator twice. I think I will invest in a generator.
As to the Question, Tubby could change strategy with the best of them. Example in point, in the 1998 NCAA regional final against Duke, When Coach K had run out of timeouts, Tubby never gave him a chance to change his strategy by calling a timeout. Even Billy Packer was smart enough to recognize that.
Glad to have you back King
Coach Cal is my all around favorite by far, however when it comes to adjustments, I would have to side with Rupp!
Phillip,
Rupp used to brag about never making adjustments friend. He said he had the best players and it was up to the other team to stop them from playing their style and if he changed anything it was a sign of weakness. But he would change strategy once in a great while when he needed to win a big game. And he always sought out Joe B.’s advice on how to do it because Joe knew strategy. Rupp had his strategy and it worked great so he didn’t like to change it. I guess everyone who ever played basketball can draw up Rupp’s offense. It was the second guard around every time with the wing guys getting out on the break in a hurry after one outlet pass to the side and a pass to the pg in the center to push the ball down the floor. The big men followed as trailers. Defense was strictly man to man. Rupp figured it was talent that won basketball games as long as you had a sound strategy. And it’s hard to argue with his success.
That second guard around offense was pretty complicated when it got right down to it. There was a lot of options available and every player had to know every part except for the center’s part because they would all end up playing at different spots. The 2g would end up in the pg position and the 3 guy would end up as the 2 guy with the pg playing the 3 guy’s spot. If you weren’t moving the right way and constantly in that offense it looked like chaos. But it was a thing of beauty when it was going right. No one runs it these days because it was so complicated. That’s a big reason Rupp didn’t like to change it. It was hard enough to keep up with the options the way it was designed and there was always a way to get a shot unless everyone on the other team was playing perfect basketball. When I was in high school I saw a lot of hs teams run that offense but it was almost always too complicated for them.
Cal has a much simpler offense. It works because it relies on the individual skills of his players. So in his own way he’s doing the same thing Rupp did which is to win with talent. It’s like they were so far around the circle from each other they could meet on the back side and shake hands.
BTW Smith could make some adjustments on offense but he rarely did. Yes that was a smart move not calling a timeout against Duke. It won the game for UK. But after that year it seemed he thought his system was foolproof and he wouldn’t make adjustments. Even when teams were raining 3′s over his ball line defense he wouldn’t make adjustments. He counted on them cooling off eventually. It didn’t work. You can turn your back on a shooter and if he misses because he’s too open you can keep doing the same thing the whole game. But if he makes that shot you can’t lay off of him again. It’s like Smith didn’t know that. He would lay off of outside shooters even when they were burning up the nets. And he got blown out by inferior teams at times because of it. So IMO he refused to make adjustments after Pitino’s players left. He really didn’t do much coaching the senior year of Padgett and company. It was like a victory lap year. After that maybe he just didn’t have enough control over his players to teach them how to play any differently than they were playing. He lost control pretty quick IMO. There was a big reason for that but I won’t go back down that road.
King, I hadn’t heard the term “guard around” in years. The former Pikeville High School coach, John Bill Trivette was a grad assistant under Rupp in the early to mid forties. The first play that Pikeville would run was the guard around just to see what kind of defense the opponent was running. You could watch a Pikeville game back then and see a mirror image of what Rupp was doing.
I agree Tubby made good adjustments. Pitino’s teams were better at executing a single game plan to the letter when he had the unforgetables. Good at masking weakness and going to the better matchups. Hard to judge Cal, with the inexperienced teams he has. Just my opinion, but, they seemed a lot better after halftime also… (If they were struggling). It seemed that he could call time outs until he was blue in the face, but, nothing ever seemed to change until after the longer timeout after half.
I give Tubby the edge down the stretch of games too. But if Cal ever has that kind of experience, watch out! There would be no stopping him.
Yeah john that Rupp offense was a thing of beauty really. It was complicated as heck and I hated having to learn all that stuff at first. But when it started clicking you knew where the options were and when they would be there. And there were a bunch of options too. And of course once you ran through the whole series you just started it all over again. That’s when I got in trouble. It wasn’t too bad running it from my position but when I had to run it from a second or even a third position I got lost pretty quick. But I learned it in a basketball class taught by Steve Hamilton at Morehead. He’s one of two players to have played in the NBA finals and the world series too. He was actually an All American at basketball at Morehead way back when. He was one smart guy I know that. He knew basketball inside and out. He was one of those guys who made it with his brain instead of speed and stuff like that. He was a pitcher and he threw a blooper pitch long before that nut from Boston did it. He also taught me the best defense sometimes was no defense at all. If you could get in someone’s head and get them to miss their shots on their own you had it made.
I hate to say it but I don’t get this stuff about Smith knowing how to handle a team down the stretch. He made a few adjustments with players that already knew how to play and people suddenly thought he was a genius. I just wonder where all his other successes have been. I don’t notice many of them. I could point to some articles in the Minn. press but I won’t. I’m just glad that era is over.
I wasn’t around to watch Coach Rupp’s teams play, so I’m going with Rick Pitino. One game and it will sum it up: LSU