Good post about Bo Ryan and player development. The media always seems to group coaches into a Venn diagram -- great Xs and Os guys, and great recruiters (saw Gary Parrish wrote a big story about Leonard Hamilton, full of praise about how he's one of the best recruiters in the game. That's great. What has Leonard Hamilton ever won other than recruiting battles?) . The best coaches are the piece in the diagram that overlap, according to the media.
Such an oversimplification. Bo Ryan doesn't really fit into either one of those categories. He's only a good recruiter in the sense that he recruits the right guys for the mentality and skillset he wants. But when it comes to recruiting battles for the top guys, like Stone, he usually loses. And he's not a tremendous Xs and Os guy, even though the media always pigeonholes him that way. His keeps thing pretty simple on the court and always stresses "do the ordinary well, and extraordinary things will happen." He doesn't even belong on that Venn diagram.
But what he excels at, and frankly, what I think he does as well or better than any coach in the country, is develop his players. He doesn't have a lot of guys in the NBA because he rarely gets NBA talent into his program. If you watched the Final Four game against UK last year, you saw a guy named Duje Dukan get 15 minutes off the bench, score 8 points and help get Wisconsin back into the game in the second half. Duje Dukan is a guy that Wisconsin fans had totally written off. Not a D-1 talent. Not a guy who will ever contribute. Slow feet, clueless on defense, can't rebound, can't get a shot off. And suddenly he's contributing as a junior and should play a key role his senior year. We see guys like that at Wisconsin all the time. Hell, Frank Kaminsky is a guy like that. He got a few minutes his frosh and soph years, you could see he had some skills, but his footwork was terrible, he got abused on defense, and he looked overwhelmed. The improvement is absolutely remarkable.
I don't know if Bo Ryan has ever had a recruiting class in the top four of the Big Ten. And yet he's never finished outside the top four. That says something for player development. It wouldn't be any different with NBA lottery-caliber players.
My opinion, as I mentioned on this thread before, is that Stone will wind up at UConn. I don't think he can go wrong with either program, though. The Maryland and Ok State noise just irritates me. I think there's plenty wrong with both those programs (what did they have, a combined 9 transfers out after last season?), and I'm sure the Stones will see it.
