Oz, the real problem with Hubert is that he has either been convinced by someone or come to his own conclusion that this myth of "position-less basketball" is valid. Hopefully that changed late this season when he FINALLY put power forward in the power forward position, well kind of at least. He at least put a power forward body out there, yet he didn't change his offensive approach, he still stationed that power forward in the deep corner and expected him to jump shoot deep corner treys. JWit hit some of those treys late but we all know JWit was very streaky, he can hit some but when he goes cold it is a artic blast.
It is one thing to allow your 4 or 5 to step outside and take the occasional trey, I am all for that, in fact if anything I would have liked to see more of that, especially with Jalen. But that does not mean go set up camp outside the 3pt arch, it means go set a screen out of movement and pop out at times, roll off the screen at other times but work out of a motion offense.
I think Hubert got baited in to some of this, that first season he was head coach. Recall, he lost Garcia and Ant during the season leaving him with basically only the often injured Puff as he bench. This forced him in to iron 5 mode. Manek, as one of his iron 5 was in particular good at hitting those deep corner treys, Manek doing so was a major cog that got us in to the title game. Hubert saw the value of that, adopted that as a feature for his offensive approach. Problem is that was a special skill that Manek had, not one every power forward can pull off. Yet Hubert tries to plug guys like Leaky, Nance, Ingram,J Wit, and Drake in to that role, heading more and more to the 4 around 1 offensive approach. It worked some games when those guys were on but far to many times they were not.
The 4 around 1 is in itself fine to go to as a change up in a game when you have a guy that can consistently splash it but it is a awful basic approach, it is a gimmick, like a change up in baseball, it better not be your primary pitch. Just because you may be able to get away with it more in the NBA does not mean you can in college, college teams can not trot the levels of talent the NBA has on every team. I heard over and over how Tyson scorched the nets in practice, yeah well you don't have game pressure in practice. Manek was blessed with exceptional shot prep, very quick trigger, and strong confidence few big men can match.
