How Picking The Wrong Coach Hurts Draft Stock
Before they started their college careers, Jahlil Okafor, Karl-Anthony Towns and Myles Turner were widely seen as the three best freshmen big men in the country. All three were near 7’0 and all three were blessed with a rare combination of size, skill and athletic ability. In the week of practices leading up to the McDonald’s All-American Game,
the 1-on-1 showdowns between the future NBA big men were the talk of the camp. But while Okafor (Duke) and Towns (Kentucky) went to two of the marquee programs in the country, Turner wound up staying close to home and playing for an embattled coach at Texas.
Before he signed Turner, Rick Barnes was fighting for his job in Austin. He made his name by bringing in a wave of high-profile recruits in the mid 00’s - TJ Ford, LaMarcus Aldridge, Kevin Durant - but he had never been able to get past Bill Self and win an undisputed conference championship in the Big 12. Things began to go south in 2010, when a team that started the season 17-0 and was ranked No. 1 in the country wound up collapsing down the stretch and losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The program bottomed out in 2013, when they finished below .500 and missed the Tourney for the first time under Barnes.
.
Myles Turner was in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unwitting victim of the slow-motion collapse of Rick Barnes program, one that has been years in the making. For as much success as the Longhorns have had in Barnes' 18-year tenure in Austin, he has had trouble adjusting to the modern game and the growing importance of spread offenses, which you can see in his far more talented team losing two games to Fred Hoiberg’s Iowa State program this season.
Barnes philosophy has always been to recruit as many elite athletes as possible, yell at them within an inch of their lives to get them to play high-level defense and then score going from defense to offense. Spacing the floor and running crisp offensive sets has never been a huge part of his identity as a coach. But while he has one of the biggest and most athletic teams in the country this season, their inability to generate consistent offense in the half-court has been their downfall in conference season, when opposing coaches intimately know all of your strengths and weaknesses.
Turner could not be in a worst position to succeed. He doesn’t start because he is playing behind three 6’8+ upperclassmen - Cam Ridley, Connor Lammert and Jonathan Holmes - who all have an outside shot at the NBA. When he gets in the game, he is generally sharing the floor with two big men who can’t stretch the floor and clog up the lane and two guards who can’t shoot 3’s and who have no idea how to control tempo, run half-court sets and get the ball into the paint.
