UT's offense is TERRIBLE--and the reason is that our coaching is terrible. You have five players: the idea is to run a play--pick, pass, move, repeat--until someone gets open for a makable shot--ANYONE. And she shoots it. You pick and pass and move until you break down the defense, and that requires quick ball movement and crisp passing. UT does not do this and hasn't done it, by and large, for 10+ years. PS could not coach team offense in the way that Geno and McGraw do; she relied on stars to score, even if the other three or four players were top recruits and talented. It's a DUMB way to play. I remember when Parker played: when she was on the court we never went long without scoring, when she sat down for a rest, our offense always went in the tank. If you can't run a good offense with five high recruited players, even if none of them are stars, then your coaching stinks.
Anybody who is not comfortable shooting the ball should be coached to keep doing it, until they get comfortable. That's the point of individual and team practice, day after day. That is how you improve individual players and hence your team. This is why it is inexcusable that Graves still has no offensive game, and why it is inexcusable that UT's offensive sets are too slow moving and that our players go into panic mode after four passes and somebody throws the ball to the other team. We have been a terrible passing team for forever--this is why our assist totals are almost always low and our turnovers are almost always high. You would think that veteran coaches would have recognized this years ago and implemented a more disciplined offense--but we never do! It's the same problem year after year.
We have five/six/seven McDonalds AAs--but the coaches don't know how to coach team offense. It was plain as day that when the NCCA tourney got going, UT's other frontline players, including Russell, would need to be prepared to give Harrison some help. I said it on this board more than a month ago, and repeatedly. Did the coaches get Russell ready? Nooooo. Russell helped on defense--but she didn't play enough and was NO help on offense in the Maryland, despite being the biggest player on the court. I didn't see her make one low-post offensive move ALL YEAR. This is not to say that better coaching should have turned Graves into a major offensive contributor after two years, or Russell into a significant offensive contributor after 1--but we should have seen more from each of them. They should have contributed more. Not having massengale hurt--that whole situation was bizarre. Three days after she got hit in the face the team was saying she was "day to day." And she didn't play again--two months. Besides the coaching issues, it seems like every year there is something weird going one with this team--somebody quits, somebody gets injured, the whole Tucker situation was crazy. It's always something. UT has actually been floundering for a LONG time. The program fell off quite a bit in the 10 years before Parker arrived--and we've struggled consistently since she and Anosike left, which has been, what, six or seven years? Our problems go back quite a long way, actually.
