Same thing happened to Rayshaun Hammonds. Hammonds would try to use his right hand to attack from the left wing off a weave or on a dribble drive and he faced the same resistance. Toumani Camara would just stand there while the baseline is wide open to cut.
In the case of Hammonds, he has made the pass before. Edwards really does not make this pass and Sahvir Wheeler always looks to make it, but nobody cooperates and thinks it is an opportunity to chuck a three point shot while Wheeler has to make a pass from the baseline. There are not enough weak side or strong side cuts and Hammonds and Edwards are not passing it when they are in an iso.
Edwards' biggest weakness is his decision making. He takes the tough mid-range jumper or three point shot over making a play that involves his teammates helping him get to the basket. The idea of using Edwards in iso situations in crunch time situations is counter-intuitive for Crean considering his offense preaches cuts and ball movement. There is none in the isos and these isos will go away next season since there is no Superhero #1 Draft Pick.
This falls on Crean, not Edwards. Crean encouraged bad offensive basketball and he lost on Senior Night. The pressure of playing a top draft pick and making the media happy grew too much. Crean did exactly what Mark Fox would have done with Edwards. Mark Fox had Kentavious Caldwell-Pope for two seasons and it was a lot of Hero Ball. When Fox had Yante Maten as SEC Player of the Year, it was a whole lot of Hero Ball. Crean fell into the trap and maybe the best thing for Crean is to not land these sorts of recruits so he does not repeat the same mistakes. Maybe Crean can learn from coaches like Tony Bennett, who has no big stars on his team and the system is what carries the team through. Crean has a sound 5 out offense with solid in-bounds plays from the sideline and baseline, he just betrays it.
The focus from the base will unfortunately be on stupid stuff like timeouts. Tom Crean calling a timeout was not going to fix this, he was openly encouraging this horrible play. If he had a problem with it, this would have been a one-time occasion, but this has happened frequently this season and it always ends badly. It's like Socialism. In theory, isos with the #1 Draft Pick against an ordinary defender would work fine, but in practice, it results in turnovers, bad shots, and easy points on the other end. However, coaches get sucked into it and so do you!
It was not as simple as just call a timeout and re-emphasize things as to how to attack the zone. How can you attack something that you cannot decipher? From a viewer's perspective, it was an obvious 1-2-2 Zone. However, Crean and his team were not clear as to what the defense was until the Second Half, which was disturbing.
How we know that Crean did not know?
Who runs a High Post feed for Anthony Edwards against a 1-2-2 Zone? The passing lane is not there and there is a defensive presence there. Against a 2-3 Zone, the defense up high can be flattened where as the 1-2-2 Zone, the flattening results in a player in the middle resembling a 2-1-2 look, a 3-2 or a player up top playing denial. How this was not clear is hard to know, but the tentativeness and bizarre approach even through media timeouts and stoppages made it clear that they did not know what they were dealing with from Florida's defense.
What it made even worse was that they tried this twice and the players were going through the motions to set up the High Post iso with absolutely no options for Anthony Edwards. All this against a 1-2-2 Zone, then they did it against man-to-man and it did not work because Edwards was not able to take more than 2 or 3 dribbles.
There were no ball screens against the man up top in the 1-2-2 Zone and there was no movement from players to force defenders one way or another for quite some time. The only real effort was from Sahvir Wheeler and Jordan Harris. Wheeler attacked off the dribble while Harris set a pin-down screen to keep a blocker off Wheeler.
Enjoy Wednesday Night in Nashville, this is the type of performance and approach to the game that gets you there.
Game Score: 1 out of 5 stars
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