It’s amazing how much locker room chemistry and age matters. NW has older guards who play well together and could sustain losing their starting frontcourt. They also were able to not fall apart after that loss.
Matt Painter says hi! He wins out it’ll be close.
In fairness, that's why Dave Thorson was hired. He was on Niko Medved's successful CSU staff, on Clem's staff here, and is an accomplished head coach in his own right. This is one of the things that doesn't add up this year: how is a team with Dave as their top assistant so fundamentally unsound?
They are also playing to capacity crowds with a charged atmosphere. Tough ticket in Evanston.
There's a sizable difference between adding a guy to your staff who's been a head coach for 8 years and 260 games, taking his teams to 3 NCAA tournaments, including to the Sweet 16 and round of 32, and one who was a college assistant for 4 years (although he obviously was a highly successful high school coach. EDIT: I neglected his previous stint as a Gophers assistant). Not saying Thorson is the guy who needs to be replaced, but it's clear that Ben needs high-level counsel that he's not getting from his current staff.
In a recently renovated arena.
Interestingly, one of the reasons we were given for why we were supposed to be okay with this hire two years ago was that Ben was bringing Thorson on board with him. This was the centerpiece of builtbadgers' sales job of the Johnson hire.
I do wonder how much of that was Thorson being one of us and people’s familiarity with him and his accomplishments at DLS. If another coach had his resume with no connections to the program or state, would people have been enthusiastic about the possibilities? Probably not.
Yes. There should have been a mandate that Ben have someone with previous D-1 coaching experience on staff. I too thought Dave T was an acceptable substitute for that. Clearly he's not.
He doesn’t recruit well. Collins, that is. Northwestern is a tough spot for recruiting.
Dave has been well thought of around here for some time, going back to his tenure on Clem's staff for several years prior to leaving for the high school job. (So yes, he had previous D1 coaching experience, but maybe you're talking about head coaching experience.) I don't know if he was Medved's top assistant, but I remember some people on this board considering him a key man on the CSU staff and being giddy at the prospect of hiring him. Of course, CSU made the NCAAs the following year without skipping a beat, so...
He was Nikos head assistant.
William Avery says hello.
