Written By Sam Ekstrom
Imagine if Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders was presented with this scenario:
“OK, Flip. Starting now, you only get to keep the players you draft for the duration of their rookie contract – no more than five years. Once that’s done, they’re gone forever.”
Whether Saunders was wearing his coach hat, GM hat or whatever role he happened to be in at the time, this scenario would probably freak Flip out. Giving a coach or GM a five-year window to develop talent severely restricts their approach. No longer could you give a promising young star a contract extension. Do you play a good fifth-year player who is leaving soon over a first-year player who needs playing time? How closely do you watch a player’s minutes? Knowing the clock is ticking, how long do you stick with a lineup that isn’t meshing well?
These are all questions floating through the mind of Gophers head coach Richard Pitino, who has been caught between a rock and a hard place with this year’s Gophers. They are a senior-laden team, which theoretically should have boded well for the present. But an 0-5 conference start – and a current 5-8 conference record – has made the present a non-factor. College coaches don’t coach for the NIT; they coach for the Big Dance. With that goal slowly dwindling over the past six weeks, Pitino has been faced with many personnel dilemmas:
Does he aim to win relatively meaningless games or attempt to build his program for next season?
The second-year coach has five seniors – Elliott Eliason, Mo Walker, Andre Hollins, DeAndre Mathieu and Kendal Shell. While Shell has comfortably filled his role as towel-waver and crowd-energizer over the years, the other four seniors are firmly planted in Minnesota’s 8-man rotation. With most of these seniors likely concluding their basketball careers, there’s a certain sentimental expectation for them to go out on a proverbial high note, or at least to end the season playing their hearts out on the court together.
But Pitino’s hand was forced by a lousy start to the season, which means he’s had to hurt some feelings along the way and pursue the development of next year’s core: Nate Mason, Charles Buggs and Bakary Konate.
It started with a new-look lineup against Iowa on Jan. 16 – inserting Mason, Buggs and Eliason in place of Mathieu, Walker and Carlos Morris. “I think Nate’s one of our best players; he needs to be on the court,” said Pitino. “I do know Nate needs to play more, and Charles [Buggs], I thought, was pretty decent as well, so we’ve got to continue to develop those guys.”
The change turned out to be a drastic over-compensation as the Gophers fell behind 10-2 early on and wound up losing by two against the Hawkeyes. “You can’t think too short term,” Pitino said of the lineup change after the game, but he proceeded to put Buggs and Eliason back on the bench to begin the next game against Rutgers, keeping the freshman Mason in the starting five, which only lasted another week.
“To be honest, it just seems weird to me bringing DeAndre off the bench,” said Pitino after a win against Illinois. “I don’t think it’s really a whole lot of anything more. I just like DeAndre starting the game. The minutes, like you said, I don’t think they’re going to change. I just like DeAndre starting better. I really don’t know why.”
Mathieu is admittedly an emotional yo-yo — a player who excels when confident and shrinks when insecure. “He’s very hard on himself,” Pitino said on Jan. 30. “It’s very evident in his body language. He gets down on himself. It’s very obvious.” In his third game coming off the bench against Nebraska, Mathieu shot 0 for 7 from the field, which prompted Pitino to reinsert him into the starting five.
These are the kind of decisions that have been commonplace for Pitino this season. The young head coach has faced many challenges in his “sophomore year” as the front man of the program. He’s dealt with assault charges against DaQuein McNeil, the sudden transfer of Josh Martin and a long list of late-game meltdowns. But one of his biggest obstacles has been the vague task of managing feelings. The Gophers are an emotional group, particularly within their group of veteran leaders. For example, guys were “bawling” after the Iowa loss, according to Pitino.
Eliason is one of the emotional ones, and he’s also been a victim of Pitino’s win-now-versus-develop-for-later conundrum. Eliason was visibly downtrodden when his minutes were reduced in favor of freshman Bakary Konate. “It’s not necessarily Elliott,” said Pitino in mid-January. “We’ve got to develop Bakary. We’ve got to do it.” This was another short-lived decision, however. After three games of Konate playing double-digit minutes and only scoring seven total points, Pitino returned to Eliason as the back-up center.
What Pitino appears to be realizing is that trial by fire may not be the most ideal approach to a freshman’s development. For instance, thrusting Konate into the physical Big Ten before he matured was not helpful for anybody. Playing Mason above Mathieu seemed to send the senior into a funk without increasing production from the guards.
The last thing a coach wants to do is make his players feel insecure, or to a more dramatic extent, make them think their coach has mailed in the season. Three seniors on the team have had their roles diminished at one time, but Pitino – once he’s seen that his move failed to click – hasn’t been afraid to set things back the way they were.
This could either create a sense of distrust, on one hand, or a sense of appreciation for the coach on the other hand; he was humble enough to admit: ‘Guys, I made a mistake. I’m going to fix it.’ Pitino does say that he’s handled situations involving seniors with a more delicate touch, and his team doesn’t seem to mind the moves.
“Coach made his decision; kind of mixed up the lineups during practice, and we got the hang of it pretty well,” said junior Joey King, “so it doesn’t really matter who’s in there. We’ve got pretty strong chemistry with each other. We all love playing with each other out on the court.”
Pitino is toying with another lineup experiment right now – his fourth different lineup of the conference season. This decision, though, doesn’t involve any seniors. Morris, the junior, was benched two games ago in favor of Buggs, a sophomore. One could say that Morris played himself out of the starting job with a 5-for-23 shooting stretch over a 3-game span that ended with his coach saying “he didn’t play real well” against Purdue. Buggs is less of a loose cannon – attempting fewer than three shots per game and rarely turning the ball over – but hasn’t been a trustworthy defender to this point. Nonetheless, Buggs’ 6-foot-9 frame coupled with his Rodney Williams-like athleticism makes the sophomore an intriguing project.
“Yeah, it’s easy,” said Pitino Tuesday when asked if Buggs was the team’s best athlete, “and it’s not even close. I don’t know who the second-best athlete would be.”
Again, the decision comes down to a younger player with upside versus an older player who provides immediate help. Morris, despite being a ball-stopper on offense and occasionally lackadaisical on defense, has the ability to score in double figures with ease. Buggs doesn’t. (Though get Buggs in a dunk contest and Mr. LaVine would be given a run for his money.)
Ultimately, on a team without much depth, and therefore without many options for Pitino to experiment with his personnel, it comes down to this: “It’s a good lesson for anybody,” said Pitino. “Any player, you need to have healthy competition.” In all of the cases mentioned, Pitino wanted to challenge the incumbent. He wanted to teach them not to coast, not to rest on their seniority and not to feel entitled to their role.
Next year, the team will belong to those same younger guys who’ve been stealing spots: Mason, Konate and Buggs. Hopefully they’ve learned a lesson as well: Pitino isn’t afraid to mix and match.
Sam Ekstrom is a staff writer for Cold Omaha at 105 The Ticket and a play-by-play broadcaster in Burnsville, Minn. Hear him on 105 The Ticket Sunday mornings from 8-10 a.m. on “The Wake Up Call.” Follow him on Twitter @SamEkstrom for further insights.