The potential of Alabama basketball

KrAzY3 said:

I'll give my own anecdote. On one team (and this was around the time of the Fab 5 at Michigan, so no reason you can't play even true freshman) he had Caffey, Horry, Rogers, Sprewell, and Robinson. Not saying that should have been the starting five either, but they could have been used differently. Robinson ends up leading that team in scoring and Horry lead the team in blocks. I just can't buy that was the best possible use of the talent (and years ago I recall hearing a pundit pondering how Alabama didn't win more with those guys).

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I've seen the "5 1st round draft picks on the same team" quote mentioned several times recently and wanted to throw in my comments on that. Yes, they were all eventually first round draft picks but they were not all that level at the same time, not even close. Had they been, then yes that could have been a special team.

Caffey was very talented but also very raw coming out of high school. He really didn't blossom until his last year. Rogers was a project that panned out due to hard work and perseverence on his part. He was barely a D1 prospect that became a 1st round NBA draftee his senior year. He is one of my top 3 all-time favorite players (Rogers, Keith Askins, & Antoine Pettway) because of the improvement he made. Horry was probably under-utilized and that was partly on Wimp, but partly on Horry. As talented as he was I don't know that he was the hardest worker on the team and didn't always seem to relish a leadership role. A buddy of mine pointed out to me that Horry would almost always get hurt in every game, come out for a few minutes and then go back in as if nothing was wrong. I had never really noticed that but after he pointed it out I noticed it happened quite frequently. Sprewell was definitely under-utilized by Wimp but I'm not sure any of us understood how good he actually was in college. Perhaps he was just one of those guys that flourished in the pros and was more suited to that style of play.

I had to look this up to confirm but Rogers never played for Wimp. He redshirted the 1991-92 season which was Wimp's last year. Caffey was a freshmen that played a little bit that year but was very, very raw. BTW, I google'd Jason Caffey and wish now that I hadn't. Ouch! I'm not disagreeing with you about Horry and Sprewell, Wimp could have used them differently.

Here are some rambling thoughts that both agree and disagree with you on Wimp. We had a run starting around 1985 through 1990-91 where I felt like we were as good as anyone in the country (minus the 1987-88 team after losing McKey a year earlier than expected). Usually we were about 1 player away from breaking through to the next level and perhaps better tourney placement would have made a big difference. The one thing that Wimp did very well was have us playing well by the time the SEC tourney started. That usually carried over into the first weekend of the NCAA tourney and got us to the sweet 16 several times. As I mentioned in an earlier post the 1988-89 team could have knocked off the Michigan team that went on to win the NC had we not been robbed by the officials. We would have faced them in the 2nd round in Atlanta and I was convinced that with our talent and the way we were playing we would have won that game and who knows what would have happened after that point. We were the dominant team in the SEC for much of that time but it was a somewhat weaker league.

However I also felt like we had started to drop off a bit after the 1989-90 team lost to Loyola Marymount and I was starting to think that Wimp had peaked as a coach. Perhaps his off-the-court issues affected him on the court? We were not as well balanced of a team as we had been the previous years. We missed out on some recruits and some of the ones we did get never had the impact we thought they would. I remember Gary Waites was supposed to be all-world PG but he blew out a knee which affected his development. After Ansley, Cheatum, Benoit all left we struggled with our inside play and that is probably why Horry had to play inside. We had signed Cedric Moore and he was also supposed to be all-world but had issues and I think he eventually either was kicked off the team or left on his own. We lost a 7' guy out of our backyard to UT. I remembered being heartbroken because we needed a center badly. That guy never really did much in college but it still stung that they came into our backyard and signed him. It was also around this time that Pitino had become the coach at UK and he turned it around VERY quickly there and got them back on top in the SEC. Also, Arky came into the league at a high point in their history. LSU had a string of incredible talent (Shaq, Chris Jackson, Stanley Roberts, etc) in the early 90's. By the end of the 1991-92 season we had slipped from 1st to at least 4th in the conference.

I always wondered if he had not been fired (he did deserve what he got) how would he have done over the next 5-10 years. Lots of good coaches go through ups and down cycles in their careers and perhaps he would have tweaked some things, restocked the talent, and would have gotten us back to near the top of the SEC.

Wimp's undoing ON the court was his stubborness. He was very defensive minded and demanded that the players execute defense OVER offense. Stallings was the same way with Shaun Alexander regarding pass blocking. Certainly the arguments can go both ways on whether the coach or the player shoulder thee major part of the "blame" for the player being "underutilized" when they do not meet the coach's expectations and demands and when the coach has another player that can get the job done the way he wants it done consistently. In Sprewell's case, he was a defensive monster at Alabama and was not known at all for his scoring, or even for shooting well when he had the opportunity. Some guys just develop later than others.

We've hijacked the thread. I love discussing the good'ol days of Bama basketball but perhaps we should move that to a different thread and only discuss the future here.

PlanoBamaDad said:

Avery Johnson going hard after SMU Asst Coach and former Laker George Lynch - he's big time. He was a major part of Larry Brown's major turn around at SMU. Avery is rolling!

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I'm anxious to get our assistant coaches hired and on the job. I don't know anything about Lynch but if Larry Brown hired him that tells me he must be a good coach. Given his (Brown's) age I doubt he is hitting the recruiting trail too much so my guess is Lynch is doing a lot of the recruiting for SMU.

Getting back on topic, Alabama has a lot of potential and I hope Coach Johnson is the man to bring it past potential and into reality.