FanPost

Shaka haters need to chill.

It’s really tough being on Texas basketball Twitter these days. All across the timelines of the beat writers and team pages are the same overused jokes and complaints about Shaka Smart. Shaka inherited a team of players recruited by Rick Barnes and were a UNI heave from being in the second round year one.

Then Isaiah Taylor leaves early just to go undrafted, and granted he was right looking back on it as he has a nice little cup of coffee in the league. But there wasn’t a single point guard on the roster the next year because of this. He was then forced to ask Snoop to run the show, and we’ve seen multiple times over the years that he just isn’t a primary playmaker. We also have the Tevin Mack situation. All of these led to the 11 win season, and all 3 of the players who had the biggest impact for said season were notably, NOT Shaka’s guys. To try and build depth on the fly to compete in this conference he had to settle with taking D.O and Eli, who although they’ve shown flashes, aren’t exactly power 5 studs.

Now stay with me here, year 3 was just tough. When AJ1 was looking like an all conference type of player and we had a 20 point lead on Duke in the pk80, we saw a glimpse of how great this program can be even if just for a few moments. We then had to ride the greatness that was Mo Bamba and his 20 foot wingspan, while forcing freshman Matt Coleman and Snoop the rest of the way to wind up losing to a team that would go on to make the elite 8.

Fast forward to to this year, We’re now looking at one of the weirdest rosters in the country, two seniors, who were both clearly flawed and not cut out to be consistent leaders on a night to night basis. Every other player who received any significant playing time has been an underclassmen. This was a weird transitional year in the sense that the only junior on the roster was Jones, forcing younger guys into roles they weren’t ready for. In a perfect world the lineup this year would’ve looked something like this:

PG: Coleman- Ramey- Eli

SG: AJ1- Jacob Young- Febres

G/F: Snoop/Mack- Liddell

F: Mack/D.O- Hepa

C: Hayes-Sims-Hamm

But it didn’t. We all know how it happened, and I’m not trying to argue that Shaka has been perfect on the way, he’s definitely been through his own bumps in the road learning how to coach in a power conference. You can certainly blame him for putting all his eggs in the De’Aaron Fox basket instead of pursuing a secondary option or a grad transfer going into year two. The lack of off ball movement that’s sacrificed for spacing in his system has led to a lot of those long scoring droughts through the first four years. He didn’t adjust enough to help his young guards get easier shots in the half court and I spent a better part of January and February screaming for some type of set play to get Febres more open looks.

The most common Shaka-hate bullet point is that he’s underachieved with the groups he’s had so far. My counter to the former would be that these one and done players we’ve brought in under Shaka, although each of Jarrett, Mo, and Jax are remarkable talents, none of them were built to be guys who can just go out and win you a close game. Hell look at the final 4 this year for an example of such- Auburn lives and dies with their upperclassmen guards, Techs best big is maybe the fourth best player on their team, UVA has an upperclassmen backcourt they relied on heavily to this point, and Michigan State has a 1st team all American leading them at the 1. Shaka simply hasn’t been able to reap the rewards of experienced guard play yet.

I’d like to finish my rambling with optimism for the future. Matt Coleman will have had about 70 starts when we tip off the 2019-20 season. Throw in another hundred or so between Febres/Ramey/Sims and all of a sudden the core pieces of a team capable of making a deep run in a March tournament you guys actually care about. To add more fuel to that flame is the fact that Shaka has definitely recruited remarkably well given the teams setbacks. Hepa and Liddell have shown they should be solid rotation players on a winning team and they’ll only get better. Any contributions from the combination of what remains out of the Eli, AJ, Hamm, Cunningham, group become more of a luxury and something that thins the gap with the top teams in the big 12. This is all without mentioning that another 5 star big is on his way to the 40 acres in Austin’s own Will Baker. He’s a very different style of player to the others we’ve had however as he’s more of a stretch big who uses the post as a complement to his game (think somewhere between a floor of D.O and a ceiling of a Gasol brother). Throw in two more top 60 ranked kids in Kai Jones (whose one of those late bloomers with a high ceiling Shaka keeps finding) and Donovan Williams.

What I’m trying to say is, and you’d honestly be better off skipping to this part from the very beginning so I’m sorry if you read all my nonsense and theories, is that Shaka doesn’t deserve near as much blame and hate as he’s received. The future is much brighter then it may appear now, and leaping into it with an NIT title would only make things even better.

P.S because it’s such a long shot as of right now I opted not to include any mention of Jaden McDaniels, who if we were to somehow land, would by far be Shaka’s best recruiting effort among many good ones and would vault next years team into every preseason top 25.



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