REQUIRED READING (or listening): Is Coach Wade happy with the team’s progress?
There are a lot of us unhappy with the product we’ve seen on the court this season. We had much higher expectations, and the media seemed to agree with us. But there have been no signature wins to date, and the team we’ve seen so far isn’t going to get any. So what does Coach Wade think about his team? The short answer is, he is very disappointed. You wonder why the rotation looked a little different? Read on!
(NOTE: This
is my transcription of the audio from Coach Wade’s Wolfpack Radio interview prior to the Asheville game. Transcribing is a pain, I don’t recommend it. If I made mistakes, I can live with it. Don’t tell me. )
CHAZANOW: Before we get into this more and before we talk about the Auburn Tigers, tell me what it means to play with an edge. What does it mean when your team has the kind of fight that you’re looking for as we get into the back end of non conference?
We haven’t had an edge to us, even in our wins, we haven’t had an edge to us all year, so … I tried very calmly and very nicely because you can only go so far with the coach leading, I tried to let the players take the reins on everything and do things, but, it just hasn’t worked. This looks nothing like our teams have looked in the past, in terms of things like passion and how hard we play, we’ve been playing with the wrong guys. Today, it may not be pretty, but, it’s going to look gritty, it’s going to look grimey … we’ve had terrible practices leading up to Auburn, that’s the least confident I’ve ever been going into a game … you know, we were hoping something good would happen, something fortuitous would happen to us, but this game? We practiced, we had a heck of a film session on Thursday, we practiced well yesterday, we practiced this morning on gameday, we were in here at 7:15 to practice, and so I feel we’re at least going to play harder, tougher … if you look at, we do have all of this data, you can get all of this data, if you look at the data from … Auburn cut 15% harder than we did, they covered the court 16 more times than we did, they played harder than we did, and it was very glaring for our players to see it, I watched the entire game with them on Thursday, and we watched every bounce and we were in there a long, long time. And everybody got to see it, … some of these guys are sitting on the bench going “why the hell are they playing, I can do that – I can get out there and get beat defensively and can throw up bricks” … and I agree with them. I agree with them. We tried to sell them on that, so everything’s open, so, you know, we went to the offensive glass twice like you are supposed to at Auburn and got two offensive rebounds on those two offensive possessions, we have guys that don’t want to go to the glass … we don’t cut hard, we’re not very aggressive with our switches, like I said I’ve tried to give our guys some patience to work this out, but the last couple of days, but the last couple of days it’s been what you’d call a hostile takeover … I know, I know how to do it, and we’ve done it everywhere we’ve been, and we’re gonna do it here. So, this is a process, we’ve just begun, but hopefully you’ll see a team that gets down for loose balls, like everybody in the Auburn game if you go back and watch it, everybody talks about the corner three that Hall hit, ‘Aw just terrible luck, falling out of bounds – BS, it’s not terrible luck –Magwood, a freshman, beat us to a loose ball, beat our seniors to a loose ball right in front of the bench, so it’s a jump ball, and they got the ball. That’s not bad luck, that’s you not playing hard, and then rewarding the team that plays hard. And then, if you look at it, we didn’t have anyone that played as much as … fricking Hall and Overton played 36 & 38 minutes and they played with a lot more poise and a lot harder than we did. We’ve been doing all of this sports science, and all of this stuff, and that’s great, and we’ve been worried about load, they can only have this many load … to hell with all of that! We practiced on game day, we practiced for a long time, that’s helping to keep you fresh at the end of the year, the end of the year isn’t going to matter if we don’t start playing better. So that’s out the window, and, we’ll see how we look today, I would suspect we’ll look better, if not, I don’t know what to do after that. I suspect we’re going to look a little bit better. Playing with an edge would be having your seniors get all the loose balls over a freshman from Auburn, not having Auburn cut 15% harder than you, not having Auburn get up the court 5 ½ seconds faster than you, not have Auburn cover 16 more times up and down the court with how hard they’re playing … that would be playing with an edge, having everybody going to the offensive glass, not getting beat on the ball, having aggressive switches … those threes were bad luck? Didn’t switch inside the three point line, supposed to switch with your heels on the three-point line, we switch inside the three-point line and it’s not bad luck! It’s bad coaching and it’s bad playing … hopefully we’ll be better in that today because these guys are 76th in the country in iso scoring, and #55 for them – 76% in the mid-range, I mean if we can’t guard the ball any better, #8’s a really good 3PT shooter, like I said there’s an NBA scout here today for them, not for any of us … we had three GMs at the Auburn game and we played like that, it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing. We’ve got guys that think they’ll be in the NBA next year, it’s a joke, they’re coming to look at two of Asheville’s players and I don’t blame them, they’ve both good athletes .. #0 is one of the top iso scorers in the country, shoots the fifth amount of runners in the country, and does it at a high clip so we’ll see how it is today .. it was an all systems breakdown from Maui to Auburn … I tried to let it self-correct, but sometimes you’ve got to step in, that’s my job … you know, I don’t care about being liked, I don’t care about how everybody feels, I’m not into any of that. I don’t like the taste of the food after we lose. I want my damn pizza to taste better after the game. So, that’s all I’m worried about. And that’s how, hopefully, we’ll play today.
I’m sorry, I took up all your time.
CHAZANOW: Don’t apologize for one of the great interviews I’ve ever had. Kidding me, that’s beautiful. We’re going to talk about the taste of your food after this Bulldog ballgame. We’re going to talk about minutes load because Asheville has some eye popping numbers in that regard. And we’re going to do it next. Also, you know the Asheville head coach extremely well. You had mentioned minutes load in the previous segment. UNC Asheville is 1, 2, and 3 in minutes played in their league, the Big South. They have the #1, 2, and 3 minutes load guys playing like 33 or 35 minutes a game, three of them, it is all on their top 3 guys. You said there are some NBA scouts here, they are picked toward the top of the Big South this year, they could win their league, so how good are these guys? What are we dealing with today with Asheville?
They’re good. Everybody’s good against us. They should be happy the scouts are here, they get to play against our defense. I mean look, they’ve got a good team. It’s hard to build depth sometimes. Your best guys tired a lot of times are better than the guys you’ve got sitting on the bench fresh. We did the same thing one year, when I was in another league, we had four of the top six guys in the league in minutes – we had a guy that played 40 minutes in 8 or 9 games that that year, we never took him out. We only played 6 or 7 guys, we came in second in the league, we went to the NCAA tournament, so you can do it. Hey look, they’ve got three good ones. #5’s a great player, #0’s a great player, and #3’s a great player. They’re going to have the ball in their hands, they shoot the ball, the three guys that are out there a lot shoot a bunch too. Coach Morrell is a great coach, it’s hard to build depth sometimes in this era, so you’ve got to ride with who you’ve got.
CHAZANOW: Taylor, Soloman, and Wright are the three guys and Coach Morrell is now in his 8th year with the Bulldogs – if you go back in time to 2007 I believe, you two were young pups at Clemson – flash forward a few years you were at VCU, you know Mike Morrell quite well, don’t you?
Yea, Mike was the only one happier than my family when I got that Chattanooga job. Mike came off the road at Charleston Southern, we’d worked together at Clemson, he was our GA when I was the OPS guy. We’d hired him for the camps. He’s the pride of Elizabeth in Tennessee. His best friend is Jason Whitten. They were high school teammates. We hired him at VCU in an off the court role at the time. He was told that the next guy that got a head job, he’d be bumped up to assistant. It had leaked on Twitter, I came back from lunch and my stuff was already packed up. Mike had already packed my stuff up, he was more excited than I was. We’re extremely close, we haven’t talked in the last couple of weeks, but we follow him and he follows us – my former GA Justin works for him. He’s a great guy, I’ve followed their program for a long time and we talk all the time. It’ll be nice to pick back up talking after we play today. But he does a great job, he’s always been consistent, he’s in the top of the league, he’s done a really, really good job there. They’ll be ready to play, he’s got great energy, he’ll be popping up on that sideline and running around, he’s probably already lifted weights three times this morning, he’ll be ready to roll.
CHAZANOW: You guys, the head coaches at NC State, UNC-G & UNC-A, all from the Shaka Smart coaching tree for some degree or largely, do you think you all rely on data the same way and have the same vision for how it should go?
Mike Jones at UNC-G runs the most similar stuff to what we run, but we’ve all kind of evolved and done our own thing. He still does some of the stuff that’s relatively similar, but you’ve got to do your own thing. Everybody has to be yourself. None of us are Shaka. Mike was with him the longest, Mike was with him at VCU and then at Texas, and then he got the Asheville job from Texas. He was with him the longest. A lot of the stuff with Coach Smart is the internal stuff with your players and that sort of stuff, I know Mike does and incredible job with that – taking them out to eat, spending time with them, that’s more of the stuff from Coach Smart.
CHAZANOW: We’re going to try to make that pizza taste better, we hope that postgame pizza is delicious today. Chucky & I are going to work on that, David Maudlin our engineer, we’re working on that.
It didn’t taste very good at Auburn, I can tell you that, and it tasted even worse in Maui – hopefully we’ll play better, I’m pretty disappointed but I’m not down, we’ve got a lot of season to play, luckily we’ve given ourselves plenty of good opportunities, but they are running out, thank goodness our league is doing better, I don’t like having to rely on the league, I like the league having to rely on us, but they’re going to have to prop us up a little this year if we’re going to get where we want to go, thank goodness the league is doing better and we’re going to have some opportunities here ahead of us – but it’s not going to matter if we have opportunities if we keep playing like we’re playing. If we don’t get any toughness, look, you can lack some toughness and some physicality, I can only get us 8-10% more toughness and more physical, but you can’t lack that and not be alert and aware and we don’t have either. We’re not alert, not aware, we’re not physical – none of that. And so, you can make up for some of that if you have some alertness and awareness to you about what you’re doing. I can fix some of the alertness and awareness and you’re going to see that today. We quiz people before games. And I kind of let some stuff slide, but if you don’t know that answer today, I’m not messing with you. We’ve got some guys that played a little bit more, that aren’t going to play as much. And I don’t really care. Because you get what you earn. And I explained to them what meritocracy is. They’ve been living in a democracy, this is day three of our meritocracy. I had to get them to look up the definition of that on Thursday.
CHAZANOW: That’s why people love sports though, because you earn it, there’s a score?
Well, I’m not saying the guys didn’t earn it before, but we’ve stuck with some guys, and tried to help some guys get going, and they’re not doing it. I can live with not making shots, I can live with all that, but we’re not good on the … this is the worst offensive rebounding team we’ve had, we’re not good on the offensive glass, I mean, I know we caused 20 turnovers the other night but we should have cause 30 – our hand activity is terrible, we don’t get two hands into the game, we just play with one hand, our hand activity is awful. You heard me yelling about that this morning. And so, there’s a lot of little stuff like that that’s just alertness and awareness, you don’t have to be any tougher or any more physical – we are who we are – we’re not going to be able to change some of that, we don’t have a 7’2” guy sitting behind the curtain who can come in and annihilate people in the paint, but we can quit getting out of the way of shields, we shielded better at Auburn, that’s one thing we did do better there now that we’ve done some live shield drills – we can get loose balls, they beat us to 6 of 8 loose balls, that’s a difference, that’s a margin when you play good teams, and we’ve been playing good teams and we’ve got good teams coming up. Asheville’s a good team, they’ve got a chance to win the Big South. They’re going to be right there at the top. And we’ve got Liberty, Liberty is really good. Look, that’s what we want. We want to play good teams, but we’ve got to start playing better. We’ve got to start playing well. We’ve got to start playing to our capabilities. We’re going to try to get a little toughness, but if you’re not going to get tougher you’ve got to be more alert and aware. I think we can have some control over that.
CHAZANOW: Thank you coach
