In Reply to: Cronin needs to hire a offensively minded assistant posted by BiochemBruin on June 20, 2024 at 21:20:11
his offensive schemes designed to get good looks and good shots despite of any particulars. Whatever those schemes would be, each system's success is generally dependent on the quality of the players running them. The better the athlete, the smarter the player, the better the players are executing the schemes, the better the efficiency of the offense will be. And like what is always the case, the better the shooting the better all of it goes down making the coach look like a genius.
Last year Cronin was plagued with bad shooters. In that case it is even more important that the players work extra hard and more effectively toward making sure they get and take good shots. Experience is needed to employ that tactic. Adding to the Bruins' poor shooting was their inexperience making it doubly difficult to provide effective and efficient offense.
Even with that, Cronin had this team on the brink of exceeding almost all expectations when they went on a late season run with a 6 game winning streak and 8 wins out of 9 games and a real chance of winning that one game they lost.
The problem was that the Bruins' margin of error was so slim that they would have had to keep slowly improving, playing near their collective abilities, and continue to shoot well from 3. Well, that didn't happen and they proceeded to lose 5 of their last 6 games and even with lesser play were in, right to the end, 2 of the losses and could have easily won them.
In the PAC12 tournament Cronin's Bruins beat Oregon State and came within a whisker of beating Oregon. If a bounce here or there had gone differently or a missed basket here or there had gone in, the Bruins could have easily been 20-14, a top 3 or 4 conference finish, a semi-final finish in the conference tournament, and maybe arguably in the conversation for inclusion into the tournament.
IMO, although the results may not indicate this, I thought Cronin's coaching job for the 2023-24 season was pretty damn good and maybe one of his better coaching jobs in his career given all the deficiencies his team had to deal with.