he would probably have taken a quarter of that if the optics of us offering him that wouldnt be so bad.
Agreed. Really hope we can get him, though. Pretty sure it was primarily between us and KU at the end (with UNC involved as well). Would have a really solid backcourt depth for awhile if he can develop well in the off-year.
Eliminating the ten second backcourt rule and five second closely guarded rule is basically fatal to pressing defenses. That’s bullshit.
I do like held ball going to the defense. Never understood why a held ball could reward the offense for messing up
Also, the whole being able to foul out of the game in the first half with only three fouls is stupid as hell. What if a guy gets two cheap fouls called in the first two minutes of the game because the refs are idiots or they go to set a screen and the ball handler doesn’t wait until he gets set? The screener gets called for a foul that’s not even his fault. The guy has effectively been fouled out of the first half because what coach in their right mind is going to put him back in the game before the second half?
10 second call needs fixed. It should be 10 seconds total. Defense pressed for 7 seconds and ball goes out of bounds? Or traps you and you call a TO? You now have 3 seconds to get across half court. It shouldn't reset
90 percent of block/charge calls should be blocks Fine with eliminating the 1-and-1, but they need to go to quarters if they do that Don't eliminate the 10-second and 5-second calls Moving to the FIBA basket interference rule would be a good move
Going to OT it would be a good idea. BE tried that in the 80’s looking to keep stars on the court. Turned into a hackathon.
Decent hire. Muss is tough to work for and he and Crutchfield (now at Oregon) didn’t want to deal with the hours Muss demands. Ruta is the only one psycho enough to stick with him for a while.
He’s the guy responsible for finding huge troves of foreign talent for Gonzaga. Could have had a job at Arizona’s level for years, I think it’s as good as they possibly could have done.
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ootball-basketball-sitting-season-report-says Does this mean McClung will have to sit out next year when he transfers?
Can anyone post this article for me? https://theathletic.com/1608722/202...6ZNTV2gcRfTufBtoaY0MUqQbUlSt4wkyrfn-jNtwW4s9M
Spoiler As he builds UNCG into a contender, Wes Miller wastes no time By Brian Hamilton Feb 19, 2020 74 GREENSBORO, N.C. — Wes Miller is late. It’s really not a problem that he’s late, for a couple of reasons. One is that he is late for an interview that does not need to take place in a specific window of time. The other is that he had already apologized for the possibility he might be late. He had dropped into his athletic director’s office and politely interrupted a conversation to announce he was taking his car to a dealership on Wendover Avenue for repairs. And while he figured he could complete the drop-off and sign out a loaner and return to Coleman Hall promptly, there was a chance he’d be a few minutes tardy, because you never know, and was that going to be OK with everyone. It is, of course, OK with everyone. When he finally walks into his office a good 20 minutes later than he’d hoped, it’s still totally OK with everyone, with the notable and now extremely agitated exception of the head coach of the UNC Greensboro men’s basketball team. “I was having, like, a conniption,” Miller says, lingering in front of his desk, as sitting down is a little too much to ask at the moment. “Like, I have to go.” Being on time, or preferably early, is a big deal around here. Ask any of the players about the non-negotiable tenets in their program, and it is the first one they cite, even before going to the basketball saws about effort and defense and all the other stuff demanded by every coach everywhere. To this particular coach, being late is maybe the most disrespectful thing one person can do to another. Moments wasted waiting for someone else to be where they’re supposed to be are unrecoverable. Lateness is negligent abuse of a commodity none of us can get back. But Wes Miller is here, now: A day removed from another Southern Conference win with a team positioned to take another run at another NCAA Tournament bid, a snarling, edgy outfit surely crafted in his own likeness, and all of this work is done in his hometown, and so it seems everything is quite on schedule. The man who was once the youngest head coach in Division I is now the longest-tenured coach in his league. Walls have come down in the last nine years at UNCG, in every way, with still more set for wrecking. The lines of sight are clearer now than ever, with plans to make them clearer. That’s all Miller wants. That’s the growth he obsesses over. Anything less and everyone is just wasting their time. “I’m a pain in the ass,” Miller says. “I’m a bull in a china shop on a day-to-day basis in terms of wanting to move forward. Whether that’s to the players in practice or that’s to administrators, I’m an absolute pain in the ass. That’s just honest. Because not moving forward drives me insane.” He has indeed found his way to a chair and has settled in. The agitation is gone. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be. On March 6, 2012, UNCG removed the interim tag affixed to Warren Weston Miller and put a 29-year-old in charge of the men’s basketball program. He’d coached all of 22 games but already had taken home SoCon Coach of the Year honors for turning a ghastly season into a division championship and a trip to the conference tournament semifinals in three months’ time. The next four seasons — a span in which UNCG lost 32 more games than it won — probably relieved many of the notion the school happened upon basketball kismet. And that is perfectly fair. This 21-win (and counting) campaign makes it a streak of four straight years with 20-plus victories, a stretch featuring two SoCo regular-season titles, one NCAA Tournament appearance and one agonizing near-miss, with at least a legitimate shot at earning another Big Dance invite in a few weeks. But none of that is the residue of predestination or overpowering genius. Miller just learned to be a better coach. Maybe that’s an oversimplification, but it’s nevertheless truer than some fantasy rewrite. The recent success required rigorous annual self-reflection, and from that sprung sea changes in everything from recruiting philosophy to how much the 37-year-old version of Wes Miller lets go of, as opposed to squeezing the life out of every decision every day. And from that sprung 102 wins, and counting, since the fall of 2016. One of the credos splashed on the wall of UNCG’s practice gym is Be Different. Much of this has happened because Miller followed his own advice. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “Did I have a feel for basketball? Sure. That’s been my life since I can remember. But did I know what it meant to be a college basketball coach? I don’t think so. The biggest difference between me then and now is now I still probably don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I at least have some self-awareness of that. I was trying to be a certain way as a coach, where now I feel really comfortable in my own skin. I’m comfortable to say that I don’t know all the answers, I don’t have all the answers, but I’m going to work like hell every day to try to get them.” That a former North Carolina Tar Heel is achieving this just 50 miles up the road from the current tire fire in Chapel Hill is an inescapable dynamic. It’s also coincidental. Miller may be a former walk-on success story who wrote the book on that program — or one of them, anyway — but Roy Williams almost certainly isn’t going anywhere against his will anytime soon. Besides, if there is another person alive who adores the North Carolina coach more than Miller, it is at the very least a photo-finish contest. (The feeling is evidently mutual; more than once, Williams has played de facto coaching agent, phoning UNCG athletics director Kim Record in the offseason to ensure she’s taking care of his protégé.) This is not about that. Pulling on that string presumes the string exists. No, it seems more relevant to think about one of the country’s ascendant coaches confronting and calculating the capriciousness of need. It’s more relevant to wonder how Miller gets where he wants to go without being too early or too late. “He was born to be a coach,” Record says in her office, and while the evidence supports the claim, the guy in charge of her men’s hoops program believes he’s a coach simply because it provides him the most access to basketball. He has friends in the profession who want to spend their downtime doing anything but watching a game. Miller can’t inhale enough of the sport. In that context, the only feasible option after one season of playing overseas was kicking around as an assistant coach, with one season apiece at Elon and High Point and then moving to UNCG before the 2011-12 season in which Mike Dement was out as the Spartans’ coach in December and Miller was in as the interim fix who, unexpectedly, morphed into a long-term play. That long-term play had a specific endgame in mind. “I want to compete for national championships,” Miller says. “I realize that’s crazy to say. Ultimately only one team out of 353 gets to stand on the stage at the end of the year. I dream about that as much as anybody, and I want our players to. I mean, if you’re not competing to try to be the last man standing, then what are you doing?” He’s not kidding. That is the reason for doing anything. That is the whole point of it, right now, at UNCG, in his office on an early February afternoon. And that is why one thing about Miller, self-professed pain in the ass, has never changed. “He’s intense,” Record says. “He wants it now. He is stubborn. All of those qualities are what make him the coach and the person that he is today. He’s constantly thinking and pushing the envelope in a good way.” More to the point: He is an idea guy. He has a lot of ideas. And there is no filter between an idea entering Miller’s mind and subsequently entering the world. Record says she has a list solely populated by Miller’s ideas somewhere in her desk. All of them, generally, revolve around that core concept of growth and what UNCG can do in order to better both the program and, most important, the experience for the players on the roster. During Miller’s first months as head coach, he was shouting himself hoarse in the practice gym. Upon further investigation, he learned sound does not carry well in what is essentially a big concrete box. So Miller inquired as to what adjustments could be made, which is why acoustic baffling now hangs from the ceiling and padding lines the walls. Adjacent to the practice gym was a sliver of space used as a kinesiology lab. To Miller, the location made it an ideal spot to wedge in a lounge and, more critically, a nutrition center. So now players walk in and pass the shelves with healthy snack bars on the right and the hydration station and refrigerator on the left, before crashing on a massive gray U-shaped couch hand-picked by Miller, with the Spartans logo stitched on nine cushions and the sprawling backsplash of a full house at a home game on the wall behind it. (This was also Miller’s idea. He’s big on visuals.) While UNCG might not be able to afford an on-the-payroll chef to ensure its players are fed and fueled properly, Miller was disinclined to shrug and move on from what he believes to be a critical component of performance; so he and his staff figured out a way to feed the players organic meals, basically imported from Whole Foods or other venues, delivered in such a way the players wouldn’t know the difference between that and a training table bonanza. “We might have to make sacrifices as coaches or administrators,” Miller says, “but by the time that meal gets onto a plate it’s the same thing.” He thought the wall between that lounge-nutrition room and the practice gym should be, in fact, a window, so everyone can see what’s going on in both areas, which Record deems another one of her coach’s ideas that she wishes wasn’t so good. Another project will blow out the walls facing out to the concourse of Fleming Gymnasium and likewise, replace them with windows, so the men’s and women’s basketball offices aren’t hidden, bunker-like, from passersby. The court in the practice gym — currently in the middle of the space — is scheduled to be shifted in such a way that UNCG will have more room to work on the side baskets. It’s all a bouillabaisse of practical thinking and inventiveness and sheer willfulness, mostly from the man in charge. If one idea comes to fruition, many, many more are always waiting their turn. It’s not a new story in the Southern Conference or leagues like it. Maximizing resources at a place that reported $1,756,758 of men’s basketball spending in 2017-18 — the most recent figure available from the U.S. Department of Education — is standard operating procedure. Persuading everyone to give you what you need is a skill as imperative as installing an effective press-breaker, but you need a willing audience too. When the team played at Syracuse in the NIT in 2017, it took a charter flight for the first time, for no other reason than the administration believed that’s how teams should travel in the postseason. “There’s been nothing that’s been truly important to our success at UNCG that the leadership here has said no to,” Miller says. “The people I work for, they don’t want to accept, No, we can’t do it. They want to find ways to do it.” As for the building material that has been most consequential to UNCG’s success? To get what he needed there, Wes Miller had to convince himself. Miller already has one NCAA Tournament appearance to his name, and the 2019-20 Spartans are a top contender for the SoCon’s automatic bid. (Brian Losness/USA Today Sports) The UNCG Spartans of 2013-14 were, in the head coach’s estimation, one of the most gifted groups he has had. It was a team that beat Virginia Tech. It was a team that lost by single digits to Wake Forest and North Carolina State. It was also a team that finished the season four games under .500, losing eight of its final 12 games. Had the losses ended there, the experience might’ve been exasperating enough. They didn’t end there. In a span of seven days of the offseason, three players left the program as transfers or to pursue professional careers. Redirection of blame was not an option; that was Miller’s second full season as coach and it was a roster that included his first full recruiting class. The tenor and culture of the program permitting this turbulence was on him. Following the next season, an 11-win slog, another player departed unexpectedly, but the whys of that decision were merely an echo of what Miller and his staff had concluded after the previous offseason’s exodus. They had reached a reckoning. They had to establish values and identity and be unswerving in their commitment to them — and especially in the process of finding players aligned with the traits they deemed most important. In short, talent wasn’t necessarily the end-all. Edginess and competitiveness and plus-athleticism had to be prioritized equally, because those prospects not only fit what Miller wanted UNCG to be, but they’d also most likely stick around for three or four years because that fit was so comfortable and good. He had to find players who wanted to grow. “It wasn’t just like, let’s get good players and go win games,” Miller says. “We needed to establish a set of values that every decision could be based on and try to put those values above everything else. To me, we’ve never turned back from that type of an approach. But that was the biggest inflection point because honestly, I’m sitting there wondering, am I about to lose my job? And a lot of people probably would have. That’s why I’m like the luckiest guy in the world because I had leadership that says, ‘No, we’re going to let you figure it out.’ ” It is not splashed on the walls like other UNCG catchphrases, but self-assessment is one of the most intrinsic concepts to all of this. Miller unabashedly steals that from his former coach in Chapel Hill; he still recalls sitting in Williams’ office, days removed from his first season as a player with the Tar Heels, and listening to Williams tell him he had to eliminate turnovers and develop into an elite on-ball defender in order to get on the floor. In his last two seasons, Miller recorded 103 assists against 37 turnovers and indeed could more than hold his own on the defensive end. But it was also a dialogue, in some ways: The coaches asked the players what they thought of their own performance, if they agreed with the assessments, and subsequently handed out sheets of paper representing the consensus they had reached on each player’s offseason goals. Miller appreciated the clarity the process gave him, and asking versions of those same questions — What can we do better? What can I do better? — gave him the traction to build the winner he has at UNCG. Tangibly, looking in the mirror precipitated that aforementioned shift in recruiting philosophy that brought in the winningest class in the history of the program, the group that arrived as the Class of 2016. It also made him better at his job. In November 2017, Isaiah Miller was a freshman making his collegiate debut in a game against Virginia. He had been, predictably, a quiet type during the preseason run-up to that season. The UNCG coaches, also predictably, had attempted to draw some level of communication out of him, especially on the defensive end. In that game against the Cavaliers, Miller heard a common refrain from the sideline — “Talk! Talk!” — and during a stoppage in play finally felt compelled to explain to the head coach why he wasn’t complying. “He called a timeout and he said, ‘Why aren’t you talking?’ ” Isaiah Miller says now. “I said, ‘Coach, I have no idea what to say.’ ” Revelation almost isn’t adequate enough to describe what happened to Wes Miller in that moment. “Well, damn,” he remembers thinking. “That’s my job to teach him what to say.” It wasn’t an ah-ha elicited during one of those postseason player-coach confabs, but the willingness to listen and adjust is reflective of the overriding philosophy, and it does not go unnoticed among the Spartans. Isaiah Miller duly notes how the coaches now slow down the installation of defensive concepts and calls, almost to a crawl if necessary, so players new to the system and to the demands of college basketball aren’t left to fend for themselves. “There’s a lot of things that make him a great coach — that’s one of the huge ones,” senior forward James Dickey says. “For you to be at the top of the food chain, and you’re so selfless that you’ll allow other people who don’t know as much about basketball to give you suggestions and you actually listen to them? It makes that bond tighter. It makes me want to go through even a bigger wall for him.” As a result of all of it, Miller now has players he loves to coach playing exactly the way he wants them to, which is how they’re built to do it anyway. “What we think we have the best chance to recruit,” he says, “is directly correlated to the style we play.” An unrelenting defense, spearheaded by a 1-2-2 press that doesn’t really take a break, ranked 31st in the country in adjusted efficiency as of Tuesday morning, per KenPom.com. The 508 turnovers forced by the Spartans ranked third nationally; opponents cough it up on nearly a quarter of their possessions. At the other end, UNCG sits just outside the top 25 in offensive rebound percentage, collecting 34.3 percent of its own misses. It’s actually a quite simple template: The objective is to frustrate opponents at one end or the other, or both, through effort level. Which is something entirely controllable by UNCG, every single day. Indeed, grab a seat close enough to the sideline, and you’ll hear Miller absolutely wear out the word “active,” which essentially has become embedded program code for having pop in your feet and moving your hands and playing as hard as possible every second you’re on the floor. “He coaches really hard, right?” Dickey says. “He gives you the Xs and Os, how he wants things done. But if you don’t necessarily get it done the right way, but you’re playing your balls off, he’s happy. He’d rather see his players playing with crazy effort and energy and activity rather than getting it right all the time. That right there gives you more confidence to play your balls off, and everything else will work out.” So far, so good. With that has come the growth Miller constantly seeks. UNCG’s last two recruiting classes have featured the first four three-star signees of Miller’s tenure; freshman twins Keyshaun and Kobe Langley of High Point, in fact, were once Virginia Tech-bound before they decommitted and stayed local. Assuming the coaches’ assessment of these prospects is accurate, it augurs a captivating next step: that same granular, high-moxie approach merged with enhanced talent. It’s presumably what Miller has wanted all along. It’s also worth wondering if he can get that, or something like it, somewhere else. Miller makes no secret how much he learned from his time under Williams at UNC. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images) On a Sunday afternoon in early February, a most remarkable thing happens: A college basketball game transpires with one of the coaches not saying a word to the officials. If it happens, it’s so fleeting that it’s barely a measurable event. Otherwise, yes, Miller appears to go the full 40 minutes of a Southern Conference matchup against Samford without uttering a syllable to a referee about a call. He’s not relaxed; his arms are crossed, in a way that suggests he’s worried about what they’ll do if they’re not, and his suit coat is flung behind the bench before three minutes has passed. He’s animated in timeouts when there’s a bit of let-up. But by and large, standard head coach turmoil levels are at an impressively low setting. When he spies senior Kyrin Galloway not sprinting quite as hard as he’d prefer, Miller catches Galloway’s attention and pantomimes a running motion, pumping those arms back and forth, using sign language in lieu of a verbal diatribe. When Isaiah Miller picks up his third foul early in the second half, the junior makes his way to the bench and receives a correction from the head coach — “That’s a positioning foul. That’s an alert-and-ready foul” — that isn’t audible to anyone seated more than three rows behind the scorer’s table. The final score of UNCG 95, Samford 67 most likely has a lot to do with this. Assuring an outcome fairly early preempts the need to scream at officials or his own team. It’s also, as Miller tells the Spartans, one of their most complete efforts of the year. As he weaves through the moderate postgame crowd on the floor, shaking hands and waving to his niece holding the handmade poster featuring “Team Spirit” writ large and picking up a cameraman’s microphone cover when it falls to the floor, Miller couldn’t ask for much more. So how long is that going to last? Can UNCG be a slightly different shade of blue heaven? “Sure,” Miller says. “I’ve never coached in this job looking for the next job. The thing that I’ve always said when people ask about that is, the only thing that really matters to me is that we keep growing. As long as we keep growing, I feel great about what we’re doing. I love the players, the coaching, I love the people that I’m working for, and I like the direction that the athletic department and the university are going. There’s 353 (Division I teams). We all should be competing to be at the top of that list. I just want us to continue to be working toward that steadily. I just don’t want us to plateau. What’s been neat is, I don’t think our leadership or our fan base or the people at this institution feel any differently at this point.” Setting aside the ever-present impulse to change and grow, his program looks like he wants it to look. He coaches players with the good kind of basketball insolence, just like he had. He runs a system in line with his personality. The quandary, such as it is, is whether he can recreate that somewhere else. Where the resources abound but so, too, might the entitlement. He has faced and will continue to face the question so many others in his position have faced: To chase the national championship he insists he’s chasing, how much does Miller have to change? And that really is about fulfillment. UNCG’s coach keeps keen measures of that. To the left of his office desk, on a windowsill in front of blue mini-blinds, sit four glass jars filled with pennies. Each jar represents a season, with the year written in marker on the lid. Each penny inside represents a Spartan, and the player or players who best exemplify the team standards that day get to put the pennies in the jar. The goal is to put more pennies in the jar than the team did in the previous season. Sure enough, there are more pennies in the 2016-17 jar than there are in the 2015-16 jar, and more in the 2017-18 jar than in the ’16-’17 jar, while the jar representing last season appears to contain the most pennies of all. The trick is that the standard, the bar to clear in order to drop a penny in the jar, evolves. What earned a penny four years ago might not earn a penny today. As the program grows, so do expectations on the players. But those jars keep filling up. They contain hard evidence that Wes Miller is getting what he wants. It’s like he tells a small group of reporters on the Greensboro Coliseum floor after that Samford game, repeating another refrain probably worn thin over his nine years here: They’re not trying to be normal or average at UNCG. They’re trying to be different. It’s the last thing he has to say before he leaves.
Give me quarters, timeout to advance the ball and personally I want continuation. The 6 foul thing seems extremely overdone. Taking away 10 second calls is completely unnecessary.
yea it goes either way honestly. I like it because it gives a better chance to have buzzer beaters and shit tbh.