He's spot on with the depth comment. Depth is only valuable if you have an injury or have a bunch of foul prone players and it works to your disadvantage if you have too much depth where you have good players who aren't getting enough touches. This Kentucky team is deep and big but are they really that good? Seems like he had a decent class come in but everyone else are the players who were supposed to leave early but werent good enough. The great ones are gone. Is there much difference between their 3rd guy and than their 9th guy? How will the 9th guy feel that a player of equal talent is getting that much more touches? The whole thing will blow up.
I disagree. In fact, Kentucky's depth last season was one of the main reasons they were able to advance as far as they did - when Willie Cauley-Stein went down, they were able to slide Marcus Lee and Dakari Johnson right in and not lose much. Meanwhile, teams like Arizona and Syracuse - that played mainly six or seven guys - were wagons before injuries and slumps derailed their season. This board bags on Boeheim all the time for not developing enough depth, so you can't then turn around and discredit Cal for accumulating as much as it as possible.
He also mentions UConn as an example of a team that won without depth, but I'm not sure I agree. By the end of the season, Ollie was regularly playing eight guys, and without the emergence of Terrence Samuel, we might not win the championship.
Obviously depth isn't as important as having great players, and Cal's "platoon system" is taking things to the extreme. Seven guys
can be enough - and Cal really only played six during his one championship run - but it's preferable to have eight or nine.