he still might be our best hire. who else could we hire? coaches will jump faster at higher NIL support than ever.
Checkmate
- Thread starter NYShoreGuy
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You can’t say who else could we hire when the AD only looked at one guy and nobody else. The decision was made before Willard’s resignation paper landed on the desk. Willard announced it after the TCU loss. There was no process. Curious what someone like Pitino would’ve done if we came calling the year before SJU opened up. It would’ve been his first offer back into big east basketball. Would he have taken it?
i would have taken pitino 100% but he would NEVER come to shu. maybe one year until SJU opened up, but there was prob no chance he would ever think of shu
No chance he would’ve left Iona for SHU? I think that’s silly nonsense.at least tell me SHU wouldn’t take him, but come on he would’ve seriously entertained it.
i think he was waiting for a better job, which he got. not gonna risk failing at a school with such limited resources links shu to derail his comeback.
pretty sure most people here agreed that SJU was the only destination.
He’s in his 70s, how long was he going to wait? He would’ve kept making 5 times less in pay unless SJU opened up. His morals kicked in when???
Point is we never looked and there were others out there. Hoping for the best for Sha but it’s a rough road ahead.
We actually covered this exact topic in the episode after Shaheen was hired.
You tell me who we were going to hire from that group of potential top targets at that time, if Sha wasn’t available.
Here are my notes from that episode.
Realistic / Step Ups
- Todd Golden - San Fran to Florida
- 3 yrs - (2) twenty win seasons
- Assistant at Auburn - 3 years
- Matt McMahon - Murray St - LSU
- 8 years - (154-67)
- 3 NCAA tournaments
- 4 regular season titles
- Frank Martin (S. Carolina to UMass)
- Ben Howland (miss st to ??)
- Mike White (Florida to Georgia)
- Archie Miller (to Rhode Island)
- Rick Pitino
- Will Wade
- Were Both Too toxic??
I think that is fair comment as well. But we didn’t see the best out of those guys until they were seniors. 4 years of experience along with good consistent coaching goes a long way.
The jump we were hoping for and desperately needed were from 3 players who are all sophomores. Coleman, Middleton, and Dual. I think we could still be happy with their development by the end of the year. But it will be too late relative to post season aspirations.
But for those who were expecting Wusu, Toumi, Okorofor, and Aligbe to be program game changers were setting unrealistic expectations IMO.
I mean we watched as it took Isaiah Whitehead until the second half of his sophomore season until he became the all world player we watched down the stretch that season.
I’m not picking anyone from your list. Your list isn’t the Gospel when it comes to who we could’ve hired if we put real feelers out. My entire point is we didn’t. So when a poster says who else could we have hired, the simple answer is with no process we don’t know. Nobody can say with certainty this was the best or worst choice. Sorry but the podcast doesn’t have the official answer. A program that won 20 games 6 times in 7 years wouldnt have been the least attractive job of all time. There’s always a couple names that shocks people on these type of lists.
You can’t be serious. SHU alum that took St Peter’s to the Elite 8 and we ‘re going to pass on him? P.ease.
What pisses me off is guys like Neptune and English without anywhere near the success that Holloway has had are both sitting on top of big NIL pots.
How much do you think Nova is paying Dixon? IMO it has to be close to $1 million . That amount is probably around 2/3rds of our entire budget and Dixon alone can guarantee Nova a successful season regardless of whether Neptune can coach or not.
Never said it was gospel.
I just said while it appeared to be the obvious hire, we still discussed the possibility of who else were candidates in the college basketball world. These were just a handful of prominent names that either moved programs or were available at the same time we hired Sha.
But instead of engaging in a conversation over who might have been a different option, you decide to trash the podcast we did.
Keep flexing those internet muscles, it’s a solid look.
and consider the very valid frustration from fans was our lack of going deeper in the tournament .
Actually I can be serious. Willard saw NIL was coming and bolted. SHU needs a salesman/fundraiser more than a coach. If Nova and PC piss you off do the fundraising for the school. Guarantee you if Pitino was our coach he’d be doing everything He can to meet with rich alums before and after basketball time. Thats part of the gig here whether annyone likes it or not. Everyone saw NIL coming except the SHU admin who thinks now is the time to sell kids on a practice facility.
Don’t be stupid either. The decision was made once SPU made the tournament. Willard announced it after the TCU game. SHU didn’t search and say well he made the elite 8, time to stop the search he’s our man. The decision was made when he won the MAAC and the school knew Willard was gone. The fact he made it to the elite 8 gives people the opportunity to say look what he did he was the obvious best choice, but he was getting the job if he lost to Kentucky first round and everyone knows it.
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Yeah valid frustration of consistently not going deeper in the tournament. Yet when the move was made the belief was now we are going to go deeper in the tournament. We just haven’t made it yet. So let’s defend taking 7 steps backwards after years of having 20 wins on selection Sunday.
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Ill give you Coleman.
Chaunce went from 16 points per game to 12 now, and his efficiency is worse
Wusu is worse- more responsibility given to him, and less performance. I agree this one is on Shaheen because nobody in their right mind looks at Wusu and thinks this guy should be our primary ball handler. And yet we are ten games into the year and he is. That is one of the worst coaching blunders in all of college basketball specifically when you aren’t dealing with any major injuries
Take out yesterday from Scotty and he is worse. Dual is also worse- again, more responsibility than last year, no jump made. Poor efficiency.
Aligbe is worse as well.
Lots of these players have more minutes than last year, and are either putting up the same numbers or their efficiency is terrible.
Most of the examples that you gave are players being the exact same as last year despite given much more opportunity.
And, if we are always going to say that we have to be patient, because by the end of the year Shaheen will coach them up, then I’m not sure he can coach in this current college basketball environment. You need results quickly with all of your transfers….these excuses allow for the same thing to happen next year- he had a lot of transfers and then need time to gel, needs more continuity, etc.
That stuff doesn’t really exist anymore in the current college basketball climate so he needs to change his style….clearly getting a bunch of low impact high potential players has been a disaster and he isn’t nearly as good a coach/talent evaluator as he thought himself to be…so he needs to delegate the talent acquisition to someone else or change what he is looking for immediately
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Absolutely. When you need funds, and your coach is not doing anything to increase the funds, then it is a major issue.
It's not just coaching anymore. You need to be a fundraiser/general manager/coach. If he just wants to coach, im sure this is a good prep school or a public school that will allow him to do that. But you can't just be a coach in college basketball anymore.
I agree with the thought that Pitino would have never come here. I believe he had his eyes on the SJU job and he wouldn't have come here for one or two seasons to then move in conference.
He's smart enough to know that would have been bad optics. Would he have considered it? Sure, though it would have taken a lot more than $2.5 to 3 million per to lure him. I'm less confident that we would even approached him.
I also think he knew he had a good, low-pressure job at Iona and if he came to SHU, there would have been plenty more pressure but without the resources he would have needed to get the job done. SJU provides him with everything he needs to meet the expectations.
The last part of it is for as much as he's driven by ego, I don't think Pitino had any interest in succeeding Willard. He's Willard's mentor and I don't think he wanted to be in a position of potentially making Kevin look bad, if Pitino had the on-court success he's accustomed to.
70 year old guy who would’ve waited for what next if Posh and Soriano had a good year and there was no coaching change? I think he was jumping at first chance. I could be wrong. But my overall point is we didn’t even offer and do the proper due diligence. Some might call that malpractice
maybe we did. how do you know his name didnt get thrown around at one point even casually
It’s Pitino. It would’ve leaked by now. He gets every piece of publicity he can. Again tell me the school didn’t want him, but don’t tell me he wouldn’t have been interested. If I remember correctly the school wanted Sha but the only missing piece on the resume was he didn’t get to the tournament. Once he made the tournament it was a done deal.
And when we were sitting at 21 wins (13-5 BE) on Selection Sunday 9 months ago, there were no complaints.
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Look at the PG position and player rotations. It’s not hard to see why we’re this inept on offense and why it’s cost us so many games. We did a bad job in roster building and have done a bad job in coaching this group. It’s taken 10 games to realize who the best players on the team were?
Every coach is tasked with blending new players into a team and that takes time. Sha is tough too, remember how long it took Richmond and Samuel in Year 1? But not everyone is struggling like we are losing buy-type games and with shooting and offensive production near the worst in the country. It’s unacceptable. It’s how they spend what budget they have. Sha made a mistake trying to recreate the 10-deep St. Peter’s team by using midmajor players or young touted players who didn’t pan out. You can get away with that philosophy in the MAAC without NIL being a factor and in an era where players weren’t transferring.
He doesn’t have a rotation, there’s no flow, and as a result we’re losing games we shouldn’t. I mean, look at PG.
And if you think about it this is the third year in a row he has tried that. First year he tried hockey substitutions and after seeing players like Trey Jackson, Tae Davis being completely overwhelmed realized he had to shorten his rotation. Tried the same thing again and quickly realized players like Malachi brown Nganga, Sanders couldn’t be trusted. You would think he would have taken away that I just need to have a short bench and rely on my superstar starters because that has led to most success, but instead to finally get his idea to work he got outside of Jenkins, a bunch of role players so he could play more of them with little drop off. Problem is none of them can put the ball in the hoop reliably. He needed to spend on a few superstars and fill the rest of the roster with riskier players. Look at it this way I would assume Prince/Zion/Manny probably got at least 100k each being upper class man probably a little more. Those three combined probably close to 400k. That 400k could have probably got another scorer. Those three aren’t doing much to help us anyway. Probably could have also done without Toumi and used his money to get us some hungry D2/JUCO players to fill out the roster.
I think some people are forgetting their history.
When PJ left, SHU had a really hard time finding a replacement, eventually settling on Blaney, a 55 yr old coach who's best stop was Holy Cross. Not exactly setting the world on fire. And this is after all the success PJ had (which was objectively more than Willard's).
SHU was not a destination job then and its certainly a worse looking job now. Whoever you're hiring was going to be a reach. Reaching with a star alumni who just made the E8 is a good start.
Now, did Felt actually go through a hiring search? Were there actually other candidates? I would bet against it but this all fell into place after Willard decided to head to Maryland a week before the TCU game.
So untrue! Sha was going to get the job no matter what based on his Elite 8 run with mid-major players. Sha is a loyale and favored son of SHU. The protests by SHU alum would have been deafening if he wasn't hired by SHU.
So, all of a sudden Sha turned out to be a bad choice for Head Coach despite his winning 25 games last year? Instead, we should have hired a 70 year old coach who screwed a cocktail waitress on a restaurant table. SJU hired Petino because that's who Repole wanted. Petino will reap the benefit of Repole's deep pockets which unfortunately includes Kadari.
With that said, Sha is not above criticism. His strategy of trying to build a 10 deep rotation has backfired and the product he put on the floor thus far is poor. Some of that is poor judgment on Sha's part but most of it is attributable to our meagre NIL budget.
The job was his before the elite 8 run happened. Did Willard know after we lost to TCU that Sha would go to the elite 8? If he knew that he should’ve been able to come up with better game plan vs TCU
If we didnt hire Sha we would have needed our head examined. If Pitino brought Repole with him, that is another story lol
Maybe any game plan would've been something. Other than getting the first flight out of there, I mean.
Agree 100%. But it’s getting to the point where people would rather have no game plan than no game.
Yes, 13-7. Aside from UConn (5), there were wins over Marquette (7), PC (23). ISU was a good team, too. We got a bunch of wins from GU, Depaul, SJU, yes, but no one should apologize for these wins in a relatively down BE.
This sort of negating any positives (like a 25 win season) sounds familiar, for some reason.
So 2 wins over NCAAT teams who both blew us out in the rematch. You shouldn’t apologize for any wins but let’s not make it look like the 20 wins we got were similar to the 20 wins we got in previous years when the big east was much deeper. Not for nothing but in a lot of rematches teams took care of us. Not good when you want to be known as the team who improves the most during the year.
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Regardless of who the wins came against, 13-7 in the BE is a good season. Seton Hall has played 45 years in the Big East. It was our 6th-best season.
1992-93 (Carlesimo) = 14-4
2019-20 (Willard)= 13-5
1988-89 (Carlesimo) = 11-5
1991-92 (Carlesimo) = 12-6
2015-16 (Willard) = 12-6
2023-24 (Holloway) = 13-7
Unfortunately, the team wasn’t ready to go during the non-conference last year and that put us too close near the cutline to sustain true madness during Championship week. I also came to enjoy the NIT title run, so I have no problem with last year. It was disappointing to be left out of the NCAAT but it was a fun year at least after December.
I didn’t like the mediocrity of Year 1 but benefit of the doubt was first years can be crazy. And this year is a disaster. Plus, during all 3 seasons we’ve been blown out A LOT.
1992-93 (Carlesimo) = 14-4
2019-20 (Willard)= 13-5
1988-89 (Carlesimo) = 11-5
1991-92 (Carlesimo) = 12-6
2015-16 (Willard) = 12-6
2023-24 (Holloway) = 13-7
Unfortunately, the team wasn’t ready to go during the non-conference last year and that put us too close near the cutline to sustain true madness during Championship week. I also came to enjoy the NIT title run, so I have no problem with last year. It was disappointing to be left out of the NCAAT but it was a fun year at least after December.
I didn’t like the mediocrity of Year 1 but benefit of the doubt was first years can be crazy. And this year is a disaster. Plus, during all 3 seasons we’ve been blown out A LOT.
took us a long time to get to the 6 tournament appearances. id trade one sweet 16 every 8/10 years for never winning in the tournament. or even an elite eight
6th best BE season is a tough pill for some people to swallow here.
So what constitutes a blowout.
For argument sake it never feels good to lose by double digits or not take care of business vs the bottom feeders in your conference.
Just for comparative analysis I took only the Kevin Willard good years 2015-16 until he left after 2021-22. 7 years in total.
During that time we lost by double digits 26 times.
10-15 points - 13 times
16-20 points - 7 times
21-30 points - 5 times
30+ - 1 time
He also compiled a record of 22-7 vs DePaul and Georgetown during that time period.
Those two teams combined during that time in conference play to go 65-185 (.260%).
We accounted for 10% of their total wins. And remember 14 of those 65 wins came against them playing each other.
I don’t understand why everyone thinks this 7 year run was unblemished.
Seton Hall has a track record of highs and lows in every season.
Right now we are in a really bad low for the current season.
Last year, 9 of our 12 losses were by 12+ points (12, 13, 19, 20, 18, 26, 21, 30, 19). Also why our metrics dragged.
In Year 1, 8 of our 16 losses were by 13+ points (16, 13, 26, 14, 22, 21, 13, 22).
Idk what a fair ratio or standard is but feels like a lot to me.
