When you hire a coach at KU, you should be trying to identify a guy that could be a HOF coach, if things go right for him.
You are looking for a guy that can for guys like LB, Roy and Self, guys that can get the players to Lawrence, coach them up, and win 80% or more.
What separates LB, Roy and Self from Dick Harp and Ted Owens?
Its not Xs and Os. Its not work ethic. Its not self-confidence.
LB, Roy and Self each had the intangibles of charisma, hardness, insight about who could play (and who could not), cunning about winning, master psychologists, and each were great strategists (on cutting edge of where basketball could go next, and cleverer than all the rats in recruiting trying to compromise them. These intangibles add up to basketball genius and are hard to recognize unless you have seen them up close before.
HOF fame coaches do it each their own way. Each one is remarkably unique. They learn from and steal from all manner of coaches, even each other, but they are just 100% originals as human beings. One Allen. One Rupp. One Wooden. One Smith. One Knight. One Crum. One Sutton. One LB. One K. One Roy. One Pitino. One Donovan. One Self. No copies. Each one did it unlike any of the others. Even Roy, who was such a clone of Dean Smith for so long, finally became utterly unique when he finally began innovating the running game the last couple years at KU and then he left the Dean Program at UNC.
At the same time, uniqueness is NOT enough. Each unique Hall of Fame has to have the other intangibles, or they wind up as also rans.
Shaka Smart is unique, and smart, and has some charism and confidence, and he can get guys to play hard, but he is a mediocre strategist, an inflexible thinker, and clearly just does not really deeply understand the puzzle parts of a team and who impact with and build around, and who to mask.
Brown wasn't Allen. Williams wasn't Brown. Self wasn't Williams.
Looking at Brown, Williams, and Self, each one made one want another coach that played it the way he did, and such a coach was never around. Even when you can find one that is remarkably similar in approach to the last great one, conditions have usually changed and so, while coming to KU means the guy will get some better than average players to coach, if he can recruit a lick, the problem is, he will not optimize aping the last coach, because the game has moved on.
You have to find guys with the intangibles that can get players.
You can't worry about whether they play a game similar to the last great coach.
They probably won't.
The game has changed and they have already, if they are the kind of coach we need, will be on the cutting edge of the way the game can go under contemporary constraints.
I actually haven't watch Tony Bennett closely.
But he has the intangibles and he is winning while he is learning.
He comes from a basketball coach, his father.
He has made a number of programs play winning basketball.
He is winning in a tough conference of 16 teams. Danny Manning is not doing it, and Danny knows a ton about basketball. But Tony Bennett is doing it. He's doing it against two Hall of Famers in Williams and K.
No, I don't like his brand of ball much.
But KU is not about playing a brand of ball we already know we like.
KU is about playing the next brand of ball that can win 80% of the games, win conference titles and play for national championships.
Tony Bennett would be a terrific hire.
And I would learn to appreciate this new kind of ball he coaches, same as I did with LB, Roy and Bill.
HOF coaches always take the game to a place no one else has taken it to before.
That is the kind of coach KU needs, when Bill retires, or moves on.
No one but a hall of fame coach should ever follow a retiring half of fame coach. The expectations are too brutal, unless you know where to take basketball next...and take it there.
