Questions for the Coach

Often I write these posts as a way to get the ideas out of my system, so I can move onto something else.  If I don't do the writing, then I'll just keep stewing about the same thing, over and over again. So, the posts serve as therapy for me. It used to be, when I was an ed tech administrator, that the ed tech community would find some benefit from my posts as my musings would raise issues that otherwise weren't discussed.  I continue to hope there is some external benefit from the writing.  In this case I can imagine two possible benefits.  

First, fans like me care a lot about men's college basketball, in general, and Illini basketball, in particular.  That sort of passions is a great precursor to learn more about the game, if and when such learning is possible.  Brad Underwood, the Illini coach, is now in a position to teach fans more about the game, if he cares to do that.  I'm pretty sure that isn't part of his job description.  He spends a fair amount of time dealing with the press, which is part of the job.  Why put in this additional time to interact more directly with the fans?  I don't have a great answer for that other than this - most of the questions I'll consider in this post don't seem to be covered by the press.  They are of the form - here is a possible experiment in how the team might play.  What is the upside and what would be the downside of trying such an experiment? By hearing the coach's thinking on these questions, fans would learn something about the game that may otherwise elude them.  I don't want to claim that my questions are the right ones to ask, or are the questions that most fans would ask.  But maybe posing them will get others to come up with better questions still.  That would be progress.

Second, because being an Illini fan is a democratic thing, meaning there are quite a lot of us and anyone can be an Illini fan, but most fans are not former faculty nor campus administrators, this is a reasonably good way to illustrate inquiry techniques to a larger population, where otherwise inquiry approaches may be outside their personal toolset.  Yet this is really how we should learn.  The post may make that more evident. 

Before I get to my questions I'd like to make a couple of comments about Trent Frazier.  I watched the post-game press conference on YouTube after the Houston game.  When they did a close-up of Trent, he looked beaten up to me.  The actual cause may have been pink eye, as the coach reported. That's not the issue.  The issue is that he appeared to be badly injured, yet he played his regular amount of minutes, or perhaps even more because Curbelo played less.  Yet we fans didn't know he was injured till the Houston game had concluded.  I don't know how Trent did it, yet he toughed it out.  Depending on how the rest of this post turns out, I might ask later in the post about how the injury impacted Trent's performance, not just in that game but in the preceding games played after the injury happened (Indiana and Chattanooga). Then, doing this from memory, I want to discuss how Trent handled a question in a different post-game press conference for a play where he made a blind pass to Coleman Hawkins, but Coleman wasn't there. Trent took the blame for that.  We fans will never know whether it really was Trent's error or if Coleman should have been in the spot where the pass went.  It seemed as if Trent was willing to accept the blame regardless of which was the true situation. In that he showed a certain maturity that I often don't see in college students when I teach them.  (My last time teaching was fall 2019 and the class was mainly junior and seniors majoring in economics.)  I wonder how many other fans take pride in Trent's maturity, as I did.  In the grand scheme, it really is more important than winning the game.

Now onto the questions.  I will take the Houston game as source for launching my inquiry.  I thought the game bore certain similarities with the Loyola game from the year before.  

I will begin with an observation I didn't hear about in the press conference.  Omar Payne didn't play against Houston.  Benjamin Bosmans-Verdonk played just two minutes.  Kofi played 38 minutes, more than his usual. 

During the season Omar and Benjamin were used exclusively as subs for Kofi.  What if there were times when Kofi was in the game and one of the other bigs were also in the game?  So if this were to happen there would be fewer wing players in the game.  Have the Illini tried that in practice?

• With Jacob Grandison hurt, might substituting a big for a wing player make sense?  Ditto for Trent being hurt.
• On defense, a double low post might prevent the opposition wing player from going downhill.  Can that work?
• On offense, a high-low approach might be especially interesting if sometimes Kofi was at the top of the key, feeding the other big man, or perhaps shooting a mid range shot.  Could that work?  I'm intrigued by this possibility for next year if it is at all possible that Kofi would come back.  He'd learn new skills this way. 
• I don't want to consider Coleman Hawkins as the other big, even though he is quite tall.  He plays more in the mold of Jacob Grandison.  But that does make one want to ask, what makes a member of the team a low-post player?  Is it strength, weight, and height in some combination?  Or is it some particular set of skills.  Kofi went against smaller but perhaps more athletic post players much of the season.  If those players were on the Illini, would they have played in the post or on the wing?
  

This lead-in question leads to a few different related questions.

To my knowledge, the Illini don't play zone.  For opposing teams with excellent 3-point shooting this makes sense to me.  Houston, however, doesn't fit that mold.  They shot poorly from the 3-point line but rebounded a lot of their own misses.  A zone with two bigs under the basket might make sense in this case.  Why didn't we try it?

• Obviously, you should play in the game what you've practiced ahead of time.  Could the Illini practice playing zone, as an alternative approach and still have an effective man-to-man as their main defense?
• All year long the coach talked about individual players missing practice, but in that last press conference he said the team as a whole didn't practice as much.  Did that impact experimentation on alternative approaches such as playing a zone?
• This is a philosophy of basketball question.  It's known that Brad Underwood played his college ball for Jack Hartman.  I'm guessing that his philosophy about the game stems from that experience.  When I was a kid, the Knicks had Walt Frazier, who also played for Hartman (at SIU before Hartman went to K-State).  The Knicks were a great defensive team in the glory years, but the NBA wouldn't allow a zone then.  If a call could be arranged with Walt Frazier to discuss basketball philosophy, would he be anti-zone like Underwood or would he take a more pragmatic approach?

This question is a bit idiosyncratic to me as it results because my brother is at Michigan (an administrator in the medical school) and during the season we exchange some emails about our respective teams.  Further, since Michigan was in a Thursday-Saturday slot while Illinois was in a Friday-Sunday slot for the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, I ended up watching both teams play.  

Michigan also lost its point guard for the NCAA Tournament and clearly had a worse Big Ten season than Illinois.  Yet Michigan is in the Sweet Sixteen and Illinois is out.  This is a very small sample and we're taught not to draw conclusions from small samples as those conclusions are typically not robust.  Nevertheless, I can't help but wondering about the following.  Might Michigan basketball provide a different model for how to do things with Illinois basketball?

• Do match-ups matter more than seedings in determining which team is likely to prevail in a tournament game?  If so, how would one score match-ups so fans might understand this in advance of the game?
• If practice time is limited and if it is evident that the team will make the NCAA tournament, might it make sense to use the remaining Big Ten games as a form of experimentation/practice for the NCAA tournament?  This would include games in the Big Ten tournament.  If done too overtly, the league wouldn't like it.  So I'd imagine such experiments/practices would happen only for segments of games.  Is it likely that more teams will do this in the future so they can be more versatile when they need to be?
• Hunter Dickinson often played at the top of the key and shot several 3-pointers and sometimes would feed Moussa Diabaté in the post.  This provides an example of what was mentioned above.  Kofi, who only started to play basketball late in his career, doesn't have the ball skills that Hunter has.  But, given that his free throws have improved via practice, it would seem he could learn to make the alley oop pass to Omar Payne, who has the ability to really sky. Why not try something like this? Kofi might be tempted to shoot threes if deployed this way.  From the perspective being articulated here, why not let him?  It's also possible that Kofi would learn to make the pass on a back door cut by one of the wing players?  That too would be a plus.
  
• Michigan also played zone from time to time.  It would show zone and then go back to man-to-man.  Used this way, it might be that the main effect was to make the offense have to adjust to consider what type of defense is being played.  Coach Underwood often talks about the team displaying toughness and players on opposing teams have discussed how physical Illinois is on defense. Switching styles from man to zone makes it more of a chess match.  Would adding that dimension be useful to Illinois or would it take away from the toughness?  

The Illini's Achilles heel this season was turnovers.  In asking questions about this, I don't want to consider the play of Curbelo. I think discussing particular players can be counterproductive.  So I will restrict these questions to a team play focus.

One similarity between the Loyola game last year and the Houston game this year is that both teams trapped in the half-court and were successful in doing that, meaning they generated a fair number of turnovers that way. On the other hand, when teams tried to press Illinois full court, we were fairly comfortable in breaking the press.  From a coach's point of view, what is the difference between the two?

• What are the textbook ways to break the trap?  Do those methods require players with certain types of skills to implement the approach?  Does the Illinois team possess that skill set?
  
• In breaking the press, we would often use a lob pass to get the ball past mid court.  Are lob passes too dangerous against the trap because the ball is in the air too long and gives time for off-ball defenders to intercept the pass?
• What about splitting the double team?  Should a good point guard do this regularly?  Or is it a too high risk play, even for a talented point guard?  Here I'm thinking about Trent and if he didn't have the pink eye whether that would be a good play for him.
• How much motion should there be from players who are off the ball and where should they be moving to?  One has the sense that if they are moving and their defenders are behind them, then the pass from the double-teamed player should lead the player much in the same way that a quarterback leads a wide receiver in football.  But how does that get done?
• Does the height of the player relative to the height of the defender matter for this.  When the wing players are Trent, Da'Monte, Jacob, and Alfonso then none of them are particularly tall.  Might that make for a challenge when the defensive players are taller?
• Should the center be brought away from the post just to be used as a release valve against the double team?  
• If the trap is defeated a few times at the start, might the other team refrain from using it later in the game?

Now let's consider shooting, particularly the 3-point shot.   There is the notion of a good shot versus a bad shot.  I'd like to get at what determines one from the other.  Player confidence seems to have a role here.  I'd like to get at that too.

Coach Underwood seems to be a practitioner of data driven decision making and has recently quoted statistics about Illini defense, particularly on how it plays ball screens.  But he seems less likely to talk about data with regard to shooting.  Sometimes he'll say generally that he was pleased with the shot attempts (or not) but he won't discuss particular shots other than that he seems to have a preference for the extra pass being made.  So, let's list the factors that might batter for making a good shot.  How important are each of these?

• The skill of the shooter.  (Alfonso has the reputation as a great shooter.  Trent and Jacob are also very good.  Da'Monte was excellent last year, but not as good this year.)
• The position on the court.  (Presumably, closer to the basket is easier.  Also, it may matter whether the shot comes from the top of the key, one of the corners, or some angle in between.)
• How tight the defense is.  (An unguarded shot might have a certain form to it.  A tightly guarded shot might have to be adjusted so the defender doesn't block it.)
• A shot off the pass versus a shot off the dribble.  (I tend to think a shot off the pass is higher percentage, but for Trent and Alfonso that might not be the case. Better spacing with the defender might be easier off the dribble if it isn't already there off the pass.)
• When the shot is taken during the game.  (Trent seems to have an uncanny ability to make shots near the end of a half if the game is otherwise close.  Other players might tense up in that situation because they are worried about the consequences.)
• How the player did on the previous shot in the game and how the player shot during the previous game.  (This might be the best way for us to consider player confidence.  Make a shot and play may begin 'to feel it.'  Make two or three in a row, and the play definitely is feeling it.  The issue is whether the hot hand is all psychological gobbledygook or is a very real thing. )  This gets to the last point in this section.
• Do the players themselves have a good intuitive sense of when they should be the one shooting the ball versus when they should be passing it to a teammate?  (My sense of things is that the younger players tend to call their own number too much.  The seniors have a better sense of this.  Da'Monte may be the only player who doesn't call his own number enough.)

The last question here is about preparing a game plan based on certain assumptions about the opponent versus having to improvise during the game as some of those assumptions proved incorrect and there then becomes a need to have a more realistic approach.  In the Houston game our three-point shooting was woeful.  Part of that was Jake's injury, which probably was understood in advance but there might have been a hope that he could play through it.  But Alfonso and Trent also shot poorly at the start.  Luke Goode and R.J. Melendez both substituted in as a consequence.  I, for one, didn't anticipate that happening.

This gets to what the coach tells the media in advance of the game and whether there is a great reluctance then to give out information about injured players, so the opponent can't use that information in its own preparations.  In particular, did Houston know about Trent's pink eye before the game started?  Trent's poor shooting early in the game can be attributed to that. Alfonso's poor shooting then might have been a consequence of feeling even more pressure on himself than usual.  Were Luke and R.J. effective soon after they were put in because Houston didn't anticipate that happening?  But did they eventually wear down (particularly Luke) because they too didn't expect to play so many minutes?

• From a fan's point of view, not knowing about Trent's pink eye while the game was being played made it feel like the team was choking, the same feeling we had during the Loyola game.  Once we learned about Trent's eye, after the game, a different feeling took hold.  How could we have expected Illinois to win the game under the circumstances? 
• Given this, and thinking back to the Loyola game, I wonder if Ayo had some relapse from his injury that even the Batman mask couldn't protect.  Is it possible to learn about that now, after all this time? Or are fans left to their own devices to guess at the answer to this question. 

* * * * *

Another reason for writing this post is that I started to look at Twitter for fan responses after the Houston game.  Too much of it was shooting from the hip and not thoughtful enough, at least for my tastes.  Of course, each fan is entitled to his or her opinion. But there isn't much to learn for these Tweets.  It is much more about fan venting than it is about fan learning. 

So I can imagine a more thoughtful approach where the coach, or one of his representatives, takes on one of these questions and gives a well thought out response to each one, quite possibly documented with evidence either from game video or from the data analytics of the games.  And if there is video of practices as well, perhaps that too could be used as evidence to support the responses. 

It might be that the response to just one of these questions takes 5 minutes or more, so there might be individual videos made of the responses to each question.  (In the verbiage we now have for online learning, these would be called micro-lectures.)  And it might be that even the coach doesn't feel expert enough to answer some of these questions in full, but he is sufficiently well connected in the coaching profession to get somebody else who does have good answers.  The video in this case would be a dialogue between the coach and this outside expert.  

Personally, I would love to watch stuff like this.  My guess is that many Illini fans would likewise be interested in them.  There would be learning for them to the extent that they had a strong prior opinion on something about the team, but the video contradicted that while nonetheless making a reasonable case.  Not everyone likes to have their bubble punctured in this way, as a rule.  My guess, however, is that given how the season did end more fans would be willing to hear and accept these explanations.  

Let me close by noting that I deliberately tried to avoid writing about Andre and Coleman.  In a different era (1983-84) the Illini got very mature play out of sophomores, particularly Bruce Douglas and Efrem Winters, but they were each starters the year before.  Coleman didn't get much playing time a year ago and Andre missed a lot of playing time this year.  So the comparison isn't fair this way.  It may be that then, with the 3-point shot not yet part of the game and no shot clock as well, a more deliberate style of play made sense that may not make sense now.  I'm not sure of that.  It would be another question to ask.  But asking about whether players once in the game pursue their own agenda and not the game plan the coach wants them to pursue seems an unfair question for the coach. The press, I think, often asks such unfair questions.  Then the players and the coaches may try to dodge those.  Perhaps it's an interesting game of cat and mouse, but it doesn't help fans learn about what was really going on.

About The Tournament and About The Illini

The current bracket is available here, with all the results from the round of 64.  I've tabulated this by seeding to give a sense about favorites winning vs upsets.  No doubt point spread in the game matters too, but that was more data collection than I wanted to do.  Here are the results, just based on the seeding. (Note that in this round the seeding of a team and its opponent sum to 17.

 
The seeding gives an ordinal ranking of the teams.  The higher ranked team should be more likely to win.  For how much more likely, you need a cardinal ranking.  Also, it is possible that teams are not ranked correctly.  For example, Yale, which lost pretty handily to Purdue, was a 14th seed.  The Ivy League is not known for its basketball.  Should Yale have been a 16th seed, so that Purdue would have faced sterner competition in that round?  Who knows?   My sense of things is that the ordinal rankings are pretty much correct and there is a sharp difference in quality between the number 16 seeds and the number 1 seeds.  But then there is a large plateau that rises between the number 15 seeds and the number 2 seeds. Both the 11 and 12 seeds did pretty well, which is some indicator of that plateau.  

Now let me turn to the team I root for, Illinois.  They won, but just barely.  They played pretty terribly.  Something the announcers didn't comment on is that Jacob Grandison, who had been a starter most of the year, came off the bench and got very few minutes.  This was because of injury.  It was the first game back for him since he was injured.  Having a starter out like that upsets the the team play and the the individual performance of other players.  A second point that the announcers didn't make is that when André Curbelo wasn't playing much, Trent Frazier was the point guard and was playing at a high level.  As Curbelo has gotten more minutes, he has become the point guard, and in my mind dribbles the ball more than he should, as he waits for an opportunity to open up.  So Frazier has become another wing player.  As a point guard, his three point shooting was quite good.  But his shooting has deteriorated in this new role. 

If Illinois has good three-point shooting, we are a top-level team.  If not, we are pretty mediocre.  We can grind, which we did against Chattanooga.  That will keep the game reasonably close.  But we won't win that way against better opposition.  

Now let me talk about the relatively new additions to the lineup, both Curbelo and Coleman Hawkins.  While Curbelo has been coming off the bench, Hawkins has been starting recently.  Both have big upsides, but both are high variance and make quite a few mistakes in every game they play.  Some of that is just sloppy play.  Another part is that each shoots the ball from the outside too much, in my opinion.   They should be looking to pass, sometimes to other wing players, but hardly did that in yesterday's game. 

Our three point shooters are much more accurate off the pass than they are off the dribble.  (Plummer may be an exception after he has made his first three and starts to feel it.)  Since teams will be having multiple players guard the paint, to be ready to double team and even triple team Kofi Cockburn when he gets the ball, other wing players should be in good shooting position and should be ready for the ream to pass it to them.  Feeding Kofi is off course necessary to do, but there needs to be some variety to how the team goes about things.  

Let's hope we can move the ball better against Memphis and play well in that game, rather than simply grind things out. But one wonders how much the quality of play can change from one game to the next. We'll see.