This is almost as boring of an election as the U21 one so far.
Soooo. Mr Wozzvt:
1) What was your biggest mistake in your past tenure as NT coach.
I mentioned a couple in the season 12 post-mortem. The normal vs Uruguay was probably the one tactical decision I most regret. Our 4 guard lineup experiment vs Italy went even more poorly than we expected and hurt our PD, but we were way behind on PD even if that had been close.
2) What have you learned in your tenure.
Wow, there's a lot of things that could go here, so here's a couple.
- Among NT level players, GS may be the single most important skill (within reason).
- If you have a weakness, other NTs will find it (e.g., our low passing in Season 11 left us susceptible to the 3-2; by season 12 we were putting up flow ratings as good as anyone).
- There's a lot of things you can game-plan around (the lack of an elite, well rounded SF; bigs with one skill much weaker than the others; guards with poor jump shots or passing; etc), but defense isn't one of them.
3) With the next world championship most likely on Neutral grounds what can we do as a nation to best position ourselves to make a run at the championship.
4) We have improved greatly in the NT rankings but how can we close the gap between teams like Spain and Italy?
I'll answer these two together, since I see them as part of the same issue. I think our plan this past season was pretty good, we just came up a game short, but I'm not sure there's a magical panacea to closing that gap. We've gotten good training lately, and a good group of people who are interested in continuing to train the next group of NTers. I'm not interested in developing the sort of farming arrangements other countries have, because I'd rather help than exploit our owners.
That said, I don't think we're that far away. Enthusiasm has this funny side effect, where I think it magnifies small differences. Take us and Spain, who won the WC: at equal effort vs them, we were tied at half time when Madrid got hurt and things kind of unraveled. Now, they're a better and deeper team than we were, meaning we were probably unlikely to win that anyway, and under adverse (injury) situations, it wasn't going to happen. But, the big difference in how our seasons turned out was that they were able to win some of the same matchups we did while using less effort. So when it came down to the end of the season, they were way ahead of us in enthusiasm. So, being just enough better than us that they could TIE and Normal some games that we Normaled and CT'd, meant that they were set up much better at the end. We don't *need* to beat the likes of Spain and Italy in group play to make a run at a WC: we need to be able to beat good teams with a TIE, and very good teams with a Normal.
5) Say something awful (God Forbid) were to happen to Gipson, would Lundy be an instant call up?
Have I said Gipson is ahead of Lundy? We ended last season with 7 guards on the roster, I think it's a fair bet they both get some playing time this year. In any case, this is a good problem to have. Going into next season, we have Madrid, Medrano, Bronson and Dillard as our likely top 4 guards. At the start of season 11, our top 4 were Madrid, Qu Qihua, Kent Pritchard and Thad Whittington. For those that haven't followed the skills updates on the offsite forum, that's a monstrous improvement. Either Lundy or Gipson would've been a no brainer starting PG for that team, and the fact that they're currently 5/6 on the depth chart speaks volumes for the training that our top guys have gotten over the past few seasons.