@EarthIsMan
Most teams nowadays, and this is true in the NBA as well, develop a system and drill it into the ground to make it as best they can. "Toggling" styles -- e.g., a man team going zone in a particular game for match-up reasons, the way a football secondary might do -- is kind of out of favor right now in basketball. It is somewhat out of favor in football, too, unless your coach is Bill Belichick. It takes rare talent and coaching to do multiple systems well.
Most coaches and teams concentrate on one thing and doing it well.
Prohm made the decision long ago to be a team that is built around the following roles...
1 PG
3 Wings
1 Big Man
Why? I think there were fundamentally two reasons...
(1.) While this style might predate his time in Ames, from what I have seen, I think Prohm really liked how the MM-NML-MT-DB-SL team was playing in the late part of his second season, both in style and quality. That team was
really good at the end of the season. I think Prohm has been coaching and recruiting to try to recreate that system.
(2.) At the same time, the guys he has recruited to it are similar to the archetypes that came from that season. I do not know if he just recruited and found he had the guys for it or found he had the guys for it and went with it, but I think it is clear that he has been trying to do something like the following in rebuilding that 2015-2016 team...
Morris/Weiler-Babb = the "do everything" facilitator PG who plays an ungodly number of minutes
Naz-Matt-Deonte-Jackson/Wigginton-THT-Shayok-TH = 3&D wings
Young/the big men this year = play defense and rebound
We did not play two big men that season because we did not have two big men.
I think, from what I can tell, we do not play two big men right now because, frankly, we do not have the sets built in to do it. I am not sure our offense is tailored to it. I do not think we play Jacobson as a stretch big because, well, Prohm never really installed that in the system from Day 1, thinking too himself long ago he would rather keep Wigginton or Shayok on the court longer instead of putting another big man out there. We
are that style now.