U21 Season 17 Post Mortem
I took over as the U21 coach just over half a year ago with the same party line as everyone else before me: do something to win the USA its first ever World Championship. I started off confident and quickly realized just how daunting the task was going to be. Its not as simple as just picking the right tactics as the role of the coach includes an incredible amount of communication with the players owners and scouts.
Today we obviously completed that goal of winning the World Championship. We defeated Poland and prevented them from the double gold at the NT/U21 levels. We also got revenge for our opening game loss.
The season started bleak after we dropped our first two games. From there we just had to dig ourselves out of a huge hole. There were points were I wasn't even sure if we would make it out of the first round. There were also points where I questioned the merit of the "go for gold" strategy.
Thankfully we soon overcame our Game Shape issues and picked up some key training updates. We lost the first two games because of poor GS and bad luck with fouls and turnovers. Thankfully these shifted in some of the later games and we came away with some wins courtesy of lady luck.
Winning the Championship is a huge accomplishment but you have to credit the managers out there. I selected this team but I didn't build it and these guys were simply the best team in the World. Having three $100k bigs and guards like Jimmie Brown is a luxury no one else had. Also credit the managers for keeping the guys in good shape and dealing with my many, many BB-mails. Special thanks to Hamstar and jimhorn for training our two best players. Also, a hearty thank you to shoe lover, bossofbosses, Bloody_Snake, J Dizzle, gdonovan, OSU, brian, zapoutos and 3ball for helping train a kick ass team.
We also couldn't have done it without everyone who helped me make decisions this. Special thanks to magiker for being my assistant coach and making some very prescient suggestions. Thanks to Tangosz, wozzvt, Sleet, jfarb, Coco and everyone else that hung out in the chat so I could bounce ideas around. Thanks to mfork for putting together some awesome little applications to help ease the coaching burden. Thanks to oriolekid, smallfrie, panic, ipsonj, A1R, and everyone else who had input on the game plans (too many to list them all). Finally, thanks to Coach Miner for putting together a new banner for us.
Most Valuable Player - Awarded to the best overall performance
Have to give this one to Mike Merrill. Finished the season as our leading scorer and second leading rebounder, finishing with an average of 17.5/8.8/2.0 per game. He was the second highest paid 21 year old to start the season and played like the best player in the World. Honorary mention to Terrance Hammond who went BEAST MODE in the championship and put together an unstoppable pair in the front court.
Coach's Award - Awarded to the most underrated player
Laverne Goddard. He doesn't have the best skills on the team nor does he have the best stats but for whatever reason this guy came up huge in big spots. He had some critical assists and steals and finished with an average of 4.6 ppg and 3.4 apg in 18.4 mpg. Also he averaged 1.7 steals per game, more than twice as much as anyone else. If you project his averages over 48 minutes he came in 0.2 apg behind starter Kenny Luther and would have put up 4.5 steals per game. The next closest person (not including Selby's one game) would have put up 1.8 steals per game.
Anyways, it was a good ride, I'm happy to finally win this championship for the country and I hope everyone had fun along the way.