Davion Mintz (SEC Photo)
When I was a kid we would go downtown to the department stores (I realize you have to be pretty old to remember department stores downtown) and some of them had a revolving door at the entrance. As a kid you could get in there and go around and around and around. Of course, the result was always the same. You would see the same scenery and eventually you would end up back out on the front sidewalk.
Watching John Calipari try to explain what is happening with his team is kind of like that. In each postgame press conference he goes around in circles, anyone listening to him ends up mentally seeing the same scenery over and over and at the end of the trip everyone ends up back where they initially started — standing on a kind of mental sidewalk at the very beginning.
Take this quote from Calipari after the second Alabama loss. “We had our chances. We, again, got out-toughed. Just makes me sick. We got out-toughed. Not throughout the game. We fought like crazy. The last three minutes, dudes backed away. Playing – you ready? – not to lose versus playing to win.”
Or maybe this one. “I mean, did we turn it over three or four times down the stretch? Come on,” Calipari said. “We had 17 turnovers again. You know what I’m saying? You keep that to 10 or 12 and get your assists up to 15, 16, 17, 18, you win. We win this game. Same deal. Why did you make that kind of pass? Why did you go and charge on a breakout? Why’d you do that? You’re trying to score instead of play.”
Does that feel like a trip in a revolving door to you? He covers the same issues over and over and over again after every loss. The same players foul at inopportune times. The same players decide not to pass the ball and instead turn it over or take a bad shot at critical junctures in the game. The same players choose not to do the things necessary for a team to win a game down the stretch.
Then, Calipari, in his mock horror, acts like he’s never seen this before. Like how could it be happening again. It’s just like taking a ride in that revolving door, if a person doesn’t change anything, the scenery remains the same.
Many years ago a guy that knew an awful lot about basketball, Hall of Famer and former Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, said this about the best way to win basketball games. “Some say you have to use your five best players, but I found out you win with the five that fit together best as a team,” Auerbach said.
Now I know that seems very simplistic but it is a true statement. If a coach continues to play the same players at critical points in the game and continues to see the same failing results maybe he is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole or — in Calipari’s case — taking a ride around in a revolving door.
Every game, every thing, including the results, look the same.
It would be great if, at the next critical point in the game — say the last three minutes — play someone else. Just for laughs. Just to see if the results might be different. Now, I don’t know what would happen if Calipari played his best offensive group at the end of the game and I realize that the team might still lose the game but sometimes you never know who is going to be the guy that can, as Calipari so aptly said after the Alabama loss, “make the play you need to make, be able to function with the stuff swirling,” until you put them in the game.
But I do know one thing, if you stay in the revolving door long enough the result is you get pretty sick to your stomach.
— Keith Peel, Contributing Writer
