Prohm isn't the one out there shooting 34% from the floor when KU is playing, at best, half-assed defense for an entire half of the game. That's what I mean when I say the biggest disparity on display tonight was talent.
We have exactly one obviously-good player: Hali. That's it. Quite literally everyone else has major flaws in their game, and giving them a new head coach (promoted from the current coaching staff nobody else trusts anyway) is not going to magically fix that or make the situation any better. Save that for the end of the season when there's actually candidates to interview and hire and potential to work with. All that can be done right this second is further damage.
And even at that point I'm not confident it'll get any better, 'cuz were looking at a complete, multi-year rebuild that we will most-likely be handing to someone else of Prohm's resume caliber when he came in.
You should be able to play with guys 2-10 and piss pound FAMU.
I keep beating this dead horse, but my problem with this staff is that over and over and over again we are seeing extremely simple things being botched, and this is by many guys over multiple seasons. The "execution is on the players" explanation works when it's a couple guys, or it's one season. Worst to me is that often it's not just the hard stuff, like a guy is a half-second late back to the roller when hedging hard on a pick and roll. It's stuff like the Iowa game. The game plan was to double Garza with the other big. When a reasonably decent double team was executed it worked. TO or bad shot. The problem was the double teams were ridiculously poor. Poor as in, when I was coaching middle school kids how to (and how to not apply) a double team, or how to deal with double teams on offense, you sometimes exaggerate a bad double team to help the kids learn. That's what it looked like at times. Positioning was terrible, timing was terrible.
Or, in the FAMU game they were overplaying passing lanes all night long. KU was doing the same when they went on the run in the first have to get initial separation. Yet there is almost no movement without the ball. There's no reason for a team to do anything else because our response is to just keep creeping further and further from the basket. Watch KU and TCU. You overplay passing lanes at all, and they are making you pay with a back cut. It's not that you have to score a bunch on it, but you get that thought in the defense's head and you then have some room to operate on the perimeter.
What I think Prohm and his staff are decent at offensively is getting a ball-dominant, aggressive scorer decent looks a lot of different ways. Haliburton can obviously score, but he's a very different kind of player than Niang, Burton, or Shayok. What they have done in those seasons doesn't work with this team. I really don't want to hear that it's simply that there isn't talent there. Haliburton is tremendous. Bolton's quickness in getting into the lane and to the rim is probably the best ISU has had in a long time. Conditt is raw, but he has good hands, good feet, and nice touch to go along with great length and athleticism