Fire Tubby?

In that last column, something in Dick Vitale’s Tubby cheerleading article caught my eye:

You have never heard Tubby Smith make excuses or alibis. He never cries or whines … he simply coaches and his team always performs to the maximum of their ability.

But then, I read Jerry Tipton’s article on Sunday’s Vandy Loss and find this:

“We’ve got to get guys to understand the value of the basketball,” Smith said. “That’s something we’ve had trouble with all year long. The same type of turnovers and it’s happening to veteran players.”

…

“One of the problems we’ve had is trying to put the ball in a guy’s hand who can execute under duress when time and score (pressure looms) and the shot clock is winding down,” Smith said. “We have to find the right guy, find somebody who can do that.”

…

Smith punctuated his post-game news conference by seeming to confess his doubt at such moments. When asked about changes he could make to turn Kentucky into a clutch team, the UK coach defended his system.

“We’ve won in the past doing it this way,” he said. “It’s just a matter of personnel.”

Let’s skip the “BUT ITS YOUR PERSONNEL!” argument for once. Also, let’s qualify this with the following: out of all the post-game articles I read, none of the other ones ended with the emphasis on Tubby making excuses about the game. The rest usually ended with comments about Perry’s & Meeks’ play or other positive notes. Tipton has been accused of slanting articles in the past, and I’m not saying he’s doing that here, but I thought I would point that out.

Back to my exclamation: When was the last time you saw Tubby completely hang his team out to dry in the media? To be making excuses about the execution of his system? Like Vitale pointed out, you don’t normally hear him talk bad about the team. Sometimes he’ll mention that somebody needs to work on something, or he’ll use “We” comments — such as “We need to work on our rebounding.” These quotes seemed much more harsher than usual.

(Maybe I haven’t been paying attention. If you have quotes from Tubby in this year or years past that has him making excuses for the team’s performance by blaming the team and not himself, please let us know in the comments. Don’t do the whole “well I heard him say this and that, I think” routine; find me a web page that cites it and paste the URL in your comment.)

Chris Diggs says that we shouldn’t be so worked up about Tubby’s post-game comments. He mentions that Pitino did it. I know Pitino would publicly remark about his players as an incentive to get his players to listen; but it gave the Big Blue Nation somebody to spit fire and brimstone at, and took the pressure off Pitino.

Calling out players in a press conference is not something that Tubby is known for. For whatever reason he is doing it, I think it is sad that he feels he needs to resort to it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Cat Commentary, UK Hoops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.