Neal: Moving forward with Ben Johnson is the only option for Gophers men’s basketball

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Here's a thought. If we weren't adding the NIL issue to Ben's retention conversation, the arguments for keeping him sound a lot like those used to justify retaining Cheryl Littlejohn a couple of decades back.
 




Bad Gopher said:
That's been my thought, and all those things are interrelated.
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Agreed. A good basketball coach in the NIL era must be able to bring excitement to the program which in turn brings in more NIL money for the players. We can blame NIL all we want but at the end of the day it is part of a coaches job to help improve that front.

We also need a coach that can construct a team that fits into our identity/system or be able to change our system to fit the identity of our players. Hindsight is 20/20 but before the year we all said that this might be the worst FT shooting team of all time. We have 3 players that were expecting to play lots of minutes with under 50% FT shooting. We have been burned by that multiple times and that is on the coach.
 


Beerculees said:
Agreed. A good basketball coach in the NIL era must be able to bring excitement to the program which in turn brings in more NIL money for the players. We can blame NIL all we want but at the end of the day it is part of a coaches job to help improve that front.

We also need a coach that can construct a team that fits into our identity/system or be able to change our system to fit the identity of our players. Hindsight is 20/20 but before the year we all said that this might be the worst FT shooting team of all time. We have 3 players that were expecting to play lots of minutes with under 50% FT shooting. We have been burned by that multiple times and that is on the coach.
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I have no clue how Big Ten basketball players could be that bad at the line. Starters, rotation players, doesn't matter. Anyone who even gets to practice with the team should shoot at least 60% from the line. Sub-50% is struggling for junior high kids.
 

fmlizard said:
I have no clue how Big Ten basketball players could be that bad at the line. Starters, rotation players, doesn't matter. Anyone who even gets to practice with the team should shoot at least 60% from the line. Sub-50% is struggling for junior high kids.
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It is amazing that there are guys at the D1 level who can't even hit 60% of their free throws. I kind of get it a little with the really big guys but you would think someone with a high enough skill level to play D1 would be able to consistently hit a shot that has been the same for pretty much their entire basketball career.

Obviously fatigue plays a role but free throw shooting is so much about just doing the same thing every time. Kind of shocking that skilled basketball players can't master it.
 

MNVCGUY said:
It is amazing that there are guys at the D1 level who can't even hit 60% of their free throws. I kind of get it a little with the really big guys but you would think someone with a high enough skill level to play D1 would be able to consistently hit a shot that has been the same for pretty much their entire basketball career.

Obviously fatigue plays a role but free throw shooting is so much about just doing the same thing every time. Kind of shocking that skilled basketball players can't master it.
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Mick Cronin (UCLA coach) agrees with you.
but that may have been a one game outlier for UCLA. It has been that way for the Gophers since at least the Tubby years. I like Trevor Mbakwe and mean no dis-respect,( heck, i still have a dvd from a Howard Pulley pro-am game at the SAL when Trevor had about 15 dunks in a double overtime thriller) but one of the funnier things I have seen in college basketball was back when the Badger board kept a tally for how many free throws the Badger team would miss vs how many Trevor would miss. at the end of the year, the Badgers missed more, but it was agonizingly close for way too long.
 




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