Amaker & co. have a ways to go, too

When the chapter of Michigan basketball history about this season is written, a lot of it will chronicle the inordinate number of games Wolverines missed due to injuries and suspensions. And it’s true that Michigan would be in a different position right now if it was at full strength all season.

But it would be simple-minded to believe that the issues facing the Michigan basketball program rest solely with sanctions and suspensions. There’s another problem that’s not simply just going to go away with time — the program’s leadership.

When Tommy Amaker was first hired in 2001, he was the perfect man to re-build the serious image problem facing Michigan basketball. During his four-year tenure in Ann Arbor, Amaker has built a relatively clean program and has represented himself well as the face of Michigan basketball. That could not be said during the tenure of his predecessor, Brian Ellerbe.

But the reality is that Amaker and his staff’s on-court coaching abilities are sub-par at best, and any fan, recruit or administrator who thinks otherwise is simply being naïve.

While it’s easy to slam the program after such a dire season, Amaker has done little over his eight-year head-coaching career to prove that he is a solid Division I head basketball coach.

At Seton Hall, Amaker took the Pirates to a Sweet Sixteen and assembled one of the best recruiting classes in the nation. But during the 2000-01 season, just before Amaker was hired at Michigan, Seton Hall was a preseason top-10 team and floundered to a 16-15 record, which led the Sporting News to say that “of the 319 coaches in college basketball last year, no performance was as suspect as Amaker’s.”

At Michigan, it’s safe to say that Amaker’s coaching tactics haven’t put his teams in the best position to win. His teams run almost no semblance of a structured offense, something that even his players will admit. Amaker relies on his players to create for themselves. While that has worked at times, it has also led to a chronic number of droughts when Michigan can’t score for four or five minutes at a time. It has limited the Wolverines from creating open shots.

And it completely ravaged the Wolverines this past season when both Lester Abram and Daniel Horton, Michigan’s two best playmakers, were unavailable. During their final 13 games, a period when they won just once, the Wolverines were in a situation similar to being an option football team without a fast quarterback. But even when the Wolverines had both of these players last year, the team still suffered when the guards could not create. Without a detailed offensive game plan, the ball movement that you see by the elite Big Ten teams such as Illinois and Wisconsin is nonexistent in Michigan teams.

There have also been numerous instances when Michigan has been in a game only to falter in the waning moments. It happened during the season’s final two games against Iowa and Northwestern. It happened against Arizona and UCLA during the nonconference schedule. Last season, Michigan had leads against Michigan State and at Minnesota, to name a couple, that slipped away as well.

While every team is expected to blow a game here and there, the Wolverines have, during Amaker’s tenure, lost many more games in the final minutes than they have won. Those aforementioned games also fail to include losses in consecutive years to Boston University at home and the failure to ever win a game against Indiana and coach Mike Davis, whose recent teams have been mostly mediocre. It’s hard to place all that blame on the players, who have actually, for the most part, consistently played hard and have supported Amaker during his tenure.

Putting it statistically, Amaker has been just 64-60 since he has been in Ann Arbor. Comparatively, Ellerbe was 62-60. Although it’s unfair to compare these numbers alone, they are something to think about.

Despite the program’s leadership flaws, I’m not suggesting that Tommy Amaker should be fired immediately, especially considering that the chances of that happening are infinitesimal. With all that has happened to Michigan basketball over the past four years off the court, Amaker deserves to come back next year and coach with a healthy, sanction-free nucleus of players that he recruited.

Barring any transfers and injuries, Michigan should be one of the most, if not the most, talented team in the Big Ten next year. With Illinois, Michigan State and Wisconsin losing much of their cores, Michigan, in theory, has the potential to contend for the conference title. But under the current coaching philosophies, the Wolverines will likely fight for a double-digit seed in the 2006 NCAA Tournament.

With the program’s leadership structure, I’m far from convinced that Michigan basketball will ever achieve its full potential. The only way that I see Tommy Amaker succeeding at Michigan is if he hires assistant coaches that are excellent minds of the game and are able to handle the majority of the in-game coaching. This would leave Amaker to do what he does best, recruit and be the face of the program. But this is an unlikely scenario at best.

I feel bad putting such a negative outlook on the future of the program. Tommy Amaker is a nice guy, and I want him to succeed at Michigan. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

 

Bob Hunt covered the Michigan men’s basketball team for the Daily during the 2003-04 season. He can be reached at bobhunt@umich.edu.