Is Lon Kruger still the worst coach ever?

[TroyMcClure]

...now that he's beaten Paul Hewitt and advanced? I've seen a lot of Kruger trashing here. Most of it unwarranted. I can imagine how bad it was a few years ago. I have always thought that he was in a no win situation. He went to a Final Four! He is now in the tourney again. Bill Self used his players to great success in Illinois. He's like a mini-Larry Brown. Everywhere he goes the team gets better. Except the Hawks. Go figure. It's the Hawks, not Lon Kruger. The guy can coach. His record proves it. Lon Kruger is like the last person I have a beef with from those days.

He is at least 3 or 4x the coach Woody is.

[WraithSentinel]

He is a good college coach. He is just not worthy of being a NBA Coach. Rick Pitino figure this out.

[TroyMcClure]

Maybe. We'll probably never know. He had no chance with that group. What I'm saying is Woody is taking sucking at the NBA level to a new extreme. I think Lon could win. People on this board say Doc Rivers can't coach. He had 4 consecutive non-losing seasons. He got fired 11 games into the year at 1-10. He immediately went to Boston and had a winning season. Woody will never, and I emphatically repeat NEVER have three straight winning seasons!

[vdunkndunk]

I think college basketball and NBA basketball are very different, from the standpoint of what it takes to be a great coach.

How you motivate a 30 year-old millionare is very different from how you motivate a 19 year-old kid. Motivating a bunch of ameteur kids for a 30 season game is different than motivating a bunch of professional men over an 82-game season. I mean, you could never have Tubby Smith or Bobby Knight screaming their heads off all the time at Lebron James or Kobe Bryant or Shaquille O'Neal...that just wouldn't work, and I'm not sure that Coach K's "I'm just a teacher who happens to coach basketball" appraoch would work either.

And NBA players won't necessarily respect you just because you're their coach. They need to know that you know what you're talking about, that you've been there before, etc. They're not necessarily sure that an unproven former college coach knows what he's talking about in an NBA context. Bascially, it sounds like Baron Davis just didn't respect the Standford coach and did whatever he wanted, and the coach didn't know how to deal with it. Shaq and co. led a mutiny against Van Gundy and Jason Kidd ran Byron Scott out of town, too.

And then there's also a difference in the kinds of defenses you can play and the general approach you take to a college game versus a pro game. From what I remember, it seems like Pitino tried to run the same stuff in the pros that he ran in college, like full-court traps and that kind of stuff, and that's just not going to work in the NBA like it does in college. At KY he had superior athletes getting all over guards who couldn't handle the pressure, whereas in the NBA there are too many ball-handlers on a team who are just to good for you to expect that kind of thing to work in the same way.

So I think that's why college coaches don't always translate. Different motivational approaches, different strategical approaches, different level of respect from the players. But in Kruger's case, the Hawks were just a terrible team. Good NBA coaches don't win with terrible teams just like college coaches don't win with terrible teams. So it's hard to judge how good someone is in a situation like that. That's why, unless I only cared about money, I would never leave college for the pros to coach a terrible team....because you're being set up to fail and you probably won't get another chance, either.

[lawman]

at this point i think woody might be the worst head coach ever. maybe he is so terrible because this is his first head coaching job so he might become a better head coach in the future but not with our franchise. woody needs to go a.s.a.p

[TroyMcClure]

Quote:

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...now that he's beaten Paul Hewitt and advanced? I've seen a lot of Kruger trashing here. Most of it unwarranted. I can imagine how bad it was a few years ago. I have always thought that he was in a no win situation. He went to a Final Four! He is now in the tourney again. Bill Self used his players to great success in Illinois. He's like a mini-Larry Brown. Everywhere he goes the team gets better. Except the Hawks. Go figure. It's the Hawks, not Lon Kruger. The guy can coach. His record proves it. Lon Kruger is like the last person I have a beef with from those days.

He is at least 3 or 4x the coach Woody is.

I thought this was worth a bump. He's in the second round again after a sextuple bypass operation last year. Oh, and he starts 4 walk ons and a 27 yr old!

This man can coach. He just couldn't coach scrubs like JT and Reef and Lo. He would have no problems with a real NBA team. It's amazing what a Reef and a JT will do to your resume. Hard to win with two of the worst defenders and turnover machines ever starting for you.

It's just funny how much rope most of you have given Woody. When I first got here, there was a lot of negativity left regarding Kruger. Totally unfair. This team is far more talented than those. Has been for two or three years.

Just wanted to remind everyone that Woody is terrible and this is what real coaches do. They win. Kruger wasn't the problem. The Hawks were.

[KB21]

I agree with you. Lon Kruger is a very good coach and is one of the best college basketball coaches out there.

I believe the problem with college coaches making the transition to the NBA has more to do with the mentality of the players in the NBA. At the college level, the majority of the players will buy into what the coach is saying because to them, it's more about the name on the front of the jersey. In the NBA, that changes, it it becomes more about the name on the back of the jersey.

This guy has put UNLV back on the map in basketball.