Rick Barnes thread

[Js1 85744]

3 minutes ago, Lonestar88 said:

In these settings, the team that isn’t coached by Rick Barnes has the advantage.

[shadow_operative 15932]

barnes recreating his 2003 conference tourney performance. 

now that’s 4D chess.

[StrippersAndNobelPrizes 855]

Tournament Houdini pulls the disappearing act again! 🤣

[KingBobo81 541]

[LTtxfan 49404]

Fire Rick Barnes...    no...   wait  😋

 

 

[Helobious 9503]

1 hour ago, KingBobo81 said:

That’s insanely bad

Edited March 15 by Helobious

[Brothahorn 10088]

On 2/10/2024 at 9:31 PM, ClubWhatever said:

I started counting people who wear suit vests besides buzz.  I lost count at "nobody".

Suit Vests are an underappreciated fashion statement.

[shadow_operative 15932]

54 minutes ago, Helobious said:

That’s insanely bad

what is your prediction for tennessee in the ncaa tourney?

[Knoxtnhorn 6164]

56 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

what is your prediction for tennessee in the ncaa tourney?

Loss to a lower seed.  What do I win?

[shadow_operative 15932]

1 hour ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

Loss to a lower seed.  What do I win?

no offense but i am exclusively interested in @Helobious prediction for the vols in the tourney. 

Edited March 16 by shadow_operative

[Fastbreak 3996]

Shocked face that Rick lost to a decent but lesser team in the conference tourney. Has that ever happened before?

It’s like I’m from the future

[Knoxtnhorn 6164]

31 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

no offense but i am exclusively interested in @Helobious prediction for the vols in the tourney. 

All good. And you know I'm just giving you and my Vol grad wife a bit of trash talk.

[shadow_operative 15932]

10 minutes ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

All good. And you know I'm just giving you and my Vol grad wife a bit of trash talk.

yeah but you’re also going to be 100% right at the end of the day lol.

[Helobious 9503]

1 hour ago, shadow_operative said:

no offense but i am exclusively interested in @Helobious prediction for the vols in the tourney. 

Barnes losing to a lower seed in the tourney is Helo-proof, even you should know that. 
 

You guys forget I was one of the only posters to pick UCONN to win it all last year, and I have them repeating this year. I don’t think that they’ve not made at least the sweet 16 every time they’ve been in the tourney over the past 20 years. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

what do i have to do to get you to say that tennessee will lose in the first weekend? juan soto autograph signing at the valle vista mall in harlingen? cuz i’ll make it happen. i need this. help me help you.

Edited March 16 by shadow_operative

[Clintonaldo 2577]

As I sat and pounded 9 beers at the bar watching the game all I could do was laugh. Just an absolute fuck beating. 

[Hookem2147 21422]

 

[Deej 77160]

Not sure who is the bigger choker...Barnes or Beard

[HookEm 2468]

On 3/15/2024 at 4:25 PM, KingBobo81 said:

What's even more insane about this record is that EVERYONE knows about it and bets against him in March, which moves the spread in Tennessee's favor.  And he still fails to beat it.

[JGrayDBU 345]

how can a coach with over 800 victories be so bad in March?  I am getting older, so I don't remember exactly, but it always seemed like his strategies never adjusted to the other team adjusting to his defense. . 

I think his first round game goes down to the wire.  Wouldn't be surprised to see Tenn. lose.

 

[Js1 85744]

7 hours ago, JGrayDBU said:

how can a coach with over 800 victories be so bad in March?  I am getting older, so I don't remember exactly, but it always seemed like his strategies never adjusted to the other team adjusting to his defense. . 

I think his first round game goes down to the wire.  Wouldn't be surprised to see Tenn. lose.

 

His teams are usually ground down into dust by March. We watched it for years - strong starts to the season, then a lull in conference play, followed by crashing and burning in March. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

8 hours ago, JGrayDBU said:

how can a coach with over 800 victories be so bad in March?

barnes (and kelvin sampson, and some other coaches) build teams that are set up to win a lot in the regular season and then lose early in the gauntlet that is the ncaa tourney. 

their entire philosophy is defense-first (causing havoc, blocking shots, creating TO’s, being able to switch everything, etc), rebounding second (especially on the offensive end), and then offense/shooting third. when you watch a kelvin sampson team you usually see five guys on the court between 6’4” and 6’9”, they’re all wildly athletic, and they’re all trained to be tenacious defenders and rebounders. barnes will go for a more traditional lineup size-wise (zeigler and aidoo for example), but the basic principles and tenets of their philosophy remains the same.

sampson likes to play a very thin roster all year long- 7 guys getting all of the minutes, with a pretty thin bench. barnes likes to go deep into his bench all year long, but come tourney time you’re really only going to play 6-7 guys a lot of minutes. so now it comes down to, “what can those 7 guys do?” and for sampson, can his team avoid injury and/or foul trouble.

well, what those 7 guys can do is defend, and rebound, and be athletic, and go hard af for 40 minutes. what they usually can’t do is create their own shot, or even consistently knock down open looks. they depend on getting those offensive rebounds for a lot of their offense, and essentially by design they are going to have poor shooting days. on those days, pretty much any team that’s made the round of 32 can beat a rick barnes or a kelvin sampson team.

another thing i’ll say is that if you look at a lot of barnes’ underachieving in the tourney he’s either lost really close games to teams that made the EE/FF, or he’s gotten screwed. the man has been star crossed, snake bit, whatever you want to call it- the guy has had some brutal luck in the tourney. with that said, when he’s had a dominant player leading the way he’s done well. when he’s had a TJ Ford, DJ Augustin, or LA + PJ he’s gone to the EE or FF. this year he has dalton knecht. maybe knecht will be the x factor this year and take barnes back to the FF. i know that’s what i’m rooting for.

Edited March 20 by shadow_operative

[shadow_operative 15932]

1 hour ago, Js1 said:

His teams are usually ground down into dust by March.

this is an oft repeated misconception. this famously happened with his 2010 team, and people have acted like this has been the case every single time his teams don’t play to their seed. in reality barnes usually has one of the most in-shape, highly tuned teams in the tourney. after all he has employed todd wright and TW’s protege garrett madenwald to be in charge of this stuff, and TW is the best to ever do it. it’s not about his teams being physically or mentally broken down, it’s about his roster composition/play style and the fact that winning in the tourney is hard.

also, rick barnes will often have a typical conference run that most any good team has, only to have it be characterized as a breakdown by Texas fans with an axe to grind. his team will lose 6-7 games between january and early march (5 road games, a home loss to the best team in the league, and one wtf loss, aka a typical conference record for a top 15-20 team) and Texas fans will go, “see, his team is breaking down!”

our fans love to come out of the woodwork to pound their chest and pat themselves on the back every year for calling rick barnes a choker, when in reality almost nobody here actually watches his teams or keeps up with what’s going on at Tennessee. plenty of people who otherwise never post or give their own takes or opinions suddenly show up to go, “oH MusT Be MArcH aGAin!!!”. they couldn’t name two tennessee players, but they’ll always have an opinion on barnes and the job he’s doing.

Edited March 20 by shadow_operative

[LTtxfan 49404]

Wow quite interesting NCAA tournament results  for "Pickle Rick" since 2008-09 season.  😋

 

 

Edited March 20 by LTtxfan

[shadow_operative 15932]

some really tough losses in there, particularly that OT loss to purdue when carsen edwards went nuts and hit a last second shot to send it to OT. 

there’s also some not-so-brutal losses in there that get characterized as bad losses because barnes builds a really good regular season team out of spare parts only to lose “early” in the tourney. for example:

that team losing to hunter dickinson’s michigan team was considered a bad loss. tennessee fans were just about done with barnes after this one. then you look back at the roster and you go, “that team won 27 games and the SEC title? how?”. he’s simply a great regular season coach whose philosophy tends to lead to tourney disappointment. no shame in that. just lots of frustration. 

Edited March 20 by shadow_operative

[HookEm 2468]

1 hour ago, shadow_operative said:

barnes back to the FF. i know that’s what i’m rooting for.

I assume you are rooting for us to beat him tho.

[shadow_operative 15932]

1 hour ago, HookEm said:

I assume you are rooting for us to beat him tho.

yeah i can’t root against Texas, but if we do lose to tennessee in the second round it will have the least amount of sting to any tourney loss we’ve ever had. at this point im just crossing my fingers that both teams actually make it to the round of 32, and otherwise trying not to think about it lol. if the matchup does happen i will have mixed emotions regardless of the ourcome.

[shadow_operative 15932]

tennessee is a terrible matchup for us, but i could totally see creighton beating them. that game would be a total toss up imo. that would be another case where barnes “underachieved” by losing to a really good team whose floor is the elite 8. of course he’ll probably just lose to csu and avoid that altogether. lol

[HookEm 2468]

26 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

if the matchup does happen i will have mixed emotions regardless of the outcome.

I appreciate the honesty. I however will have zero mixed emotions if we lose to Barnes. F that.  I'm hoping he gets upset in round 1 and we don't have to play them.

[shadow_operative 15932]

and that’s fair lol.

[HookEm 2468]

I've got no ill feelings towards Barnes. Someday hopefully he gets a statue at Moody.  But he has nobody to blame but himself for losing his fastball while at Texas. Everything he has done at Tennessee could have been done better here. Oh well, sometimes you need a reset.

It is going to be funny if RT ends up being the most successful coach of the last 15 years while at Texas.  Beard, Barnes, and Shaka are all better coaches, but they each had their issues here.  Beard's were off the court.  Barnes couldn't quite figure out how to get the super elite recruits to buy into his hard ass approach for a full season.  If he could have targeted a different player and adopted a Michigan State approach of taking top 20-50 guys and developing them, I think he would have been better off than with all the one and dones.  And Shaka just went away from his bread and butter.  Every so often we would press and look incredible.  Nope nope nope, his stubborn ass had to change his style and we sucked for it.

Every one of those guys had an ego and stubbornness that got them into trouble here.  

[CustersDoctor 585]

Bobby Knight thought real highly of Rick. Tech was playing UT the night RMK got his 1,000 win. Tech had Bobby sign the stat sheet to put in their archives. RMK did indeed sign it, he knew it had some intrinsic value. And he gave it to Rick out of respect.

[shadow_operative 15932]

rock is one of the more well liked coaches in all of cbb when it comes to his peers, especially those who’ve been around for awhile. i know there’s a lot of coaches and former coaches out there with titles shot rooting for rick to win one.

[Slacks 6916]

On 3/19/2024 at 10:09 AM, Deej said:

Not sure who is the bigger choker...Barnes or Beard

[Braff Zacklin 13672]

3 hours ago, HookEm said:

I've got no ill feelings towards Barnes. Someday hopefully he gets a statue at Moody.  But he has nobody to blame but himself for losing his fastball while at Texas.

To his credit, don't think Barnes ever did blame anyone but himself. Wouldn't even use his assistants as fall guys.

[Dbeasy 15224]

I have a very strong opinion on why Barnes teams underachieved in the tournament quite a bit. If you go back and look at the last five minutes of close games, he tended to slow his team down on offense, put it in the hands of a few guys, and try to carefully eek out a win. 

The problem with that approach is that you end up with close games and don’t take advantage of your player’s natural athletic abilities that are better than the opponent. 

Compare that to Terry during last year’s tournament. He let his players loose. Even Shaka  would let players loose which is why they would occasionally catch fire and upset North Carolina or Kansas. 

If Barnes wouldn’t have had his teams playing so tight down the stretch I think they would have gone deeper in most tournaments. I have no idea if his Tennessee teams are different. I don’t watch them. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

for me that’s one of his strategies where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you can understand why he believes in it as a strategy, similar to his belief in not calling a TO after a late miss by his opponent- sometimes you get kenton paulino vs wvu, sometimes you get j’covan brown from 26 feet. point is, when you’ve got a six point lead with three minutes left, and the strength of your team is its half court defense, you can understand why a coach would want to slow it down and reduce the number of possessions. in that scenario you probably need to score 4 points in the final 3:00 to secure the W if you do it correctly. did it come back to haunt us at times? it did. but it also worked plenty of times too. i just think that the decision got magnified whenever it didn’t work out.

Edited March 21 by shadow_operative

[Deej 77160]

[Tommy Shelby 188]

4 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

rock is one of the more well liked coaches in all of cbb when it comes to his peers, especially those who’ve been around for awhile. i know there’s a lot of coaches and former coaches out there with titles shot rooting for rick to win one.

Yeah, as much as I root against Texas in like every sport (rivalries are only fun when both sides care); I always rooted for Barnes when he wasn't playing Tech.  

[HookEm 2468]

48 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

for me that’s one of his strategies where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you can understand why he believes in it as a strategy

I don't HATE the strategy, but one of the critical elements of that strategy is that you MUST MUST MUST have good free throw shooters.  And far too often we would be a very poor free throw shooting team.  Now I have this data courtesy of my new KenPom subscription...

UT's Free Throw rank under Barnes:

• 00 - 264
• 01 - 269
• 02 - 177
• 03 - 77  (Final 4)
• 04 - 190
• 05 - 142
• 06 - 57 (Elite 8 )
• 07 - 36 (Durant)
• 08 - 189
• 09 - 246
• 10 - 326 
• 11 - 282
• 12 - 47
• 13 - 270
• 14 - 272
• 15 - 70

There are some REAL stinkers in there. And it really hindered some of those teams.

Edited March 21 by HookEm

[HtownHorn 14915]

6 hours ago, HookEm said:

I appreciate the honesty. I however will have zero mixed emotions if we lose to Barnes. F that.  I'm hoping he gets upset in round 1 and we don't have to play them.

I mean that could very well happen and it would only be a shock to Rick's personal dick sucker.

[HookEm 2468]

BTW, on the subject of free throw shooting, this is the best free throw shooting team we have had since at least 1997, maybe ever.  And not by a little bit, by two whole percentage points.  Previous best was 73.6% with Durant.  This year... 75.7%.

The 2010 Barnes team shot 63.3%. Holy hell. 

Edited March 21 by HookEm

[HtownHorn 14915]

10 minutes ago, HookEm said:

BTW, on the subject of free throw shooting, this is the best free throw shooting team we have had since at least 1997, maybe ever.  And not by a little bit, by two whole percentage points.  Previous best was 73.6% with Durant.  This year... 75.7%.

The 2010 Barnes team shot 63.3%. Holy hell. 

Last year was 74.8%, it appears Terry makes it a priority.

[Js1 85744]

19 minutes ago, HookEm said:

I don't HATE the strategy, but one of the critical elements of that strategy is that you MUST MUST MUST have good free throw shooters.  And far too often we would be a very poor free throw shooting team.  Now I have this data courtesy of my new KenPom subscription...

UT's Free Throw rank under Barnes:

• 00 - 264
• 01 - 269
• 02 - 177
• 03 - 77  (Final 4)
• 04 - 190
• 05 - 142
• 06 - 57 (Elite 8 )
• 07 - 36 (Durant)
• 08 - 189
• 09 - 246
• 10 - 326 
• 11 - 282
• 12 - 47
• 13 - 270
• 14 - 272
• 15 - 70

There are some REAL stinkers in there. And it really hindered some of those teams.

Some of those are inexcusable 

[shadow_operative 15932]

7 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Some of those are inexcusable 

it goes back to the post i made earlier about the composition of rick barnes and kelvin sampson teams. when you recruit a bunch of justin mason, damion james, doj balbay, and demarcus holland type players you get what you get. only the bluest of blue bloods get to have it all. everyone else has to pick their strengths and weaknesses. when you build teams based around physicality, athleticism, defense, and rebounding, you will very rarely have a team full of great shooters. you will rely on your best 2-3 FT shooters to hit the clutch FTs and you’ll take the falloff fr the rest of the guys because they collectively prevent more points on defense than they squander points at the FT line. it’s no surprise that when these teams also happen to be really good at FTs that they make deep tourney runs.

[HookEm 2468]

It is much more tiring to play good defense than good offense. I also suspected that some of Barnes' players were simply worn out and it impacted their free throw shooting. You can especially see it at the end of the games when players leave them short.

[shadow_operative 15932]

27 minutes ago, HookEm said:

It is much more tiring to play good defense than good offense. I also suspected that some of Barnes' players were simply worn out and it impacted their free throw shooting. You can especially see it at the end of the games when players leave them short.

his best players have generally been really good at FTs at all points of he game. the whole “the team is worn down” thing simply isn’t true. barnes revolutionized basketball strength and conditioning. he has only worked with the best of the best. tj, and dj, and kd, and ziegler, and knecht, et al are all awesome in crunch time. team FT shooting is simply a casualty of the stiyle of play of coaches like barnes. if he played a different style it wouldn’t be team FT%, it would be a lack of TO’a forced, or a lack of rebounding, or being no.245 nationally/dead last in the league at three pint defense (*cough* RT *cough*). 99% of coaches have fatal flaws. this is not unique to rick barnes. he has fewer fatal flaws than most.

[Fastbreak 3996]

I think we should honor Barnes in some way after he retires.  I wouldn't object to his name being on the arena or floor.

[shadow_operative 15932]

he’s the greatest coach in school history by a mile. if we don’t honor him in some way then who the hell are we ever going to honor on the coaching front?

[LTtxfan 49404]

4 hours ago, Fastbreak said:

I think we should honor Barnes in some way after he retires.  I wouldn't object to his name being on the arena or floor.