Hoops

Lemanis reappointed Boomers coach.

The August-September window each year is an extended one, so that's the chance to have the full squad.

2017: Asia Cup
2018: WC qualifiers
2019: World Cup
2020: Olympics (hopefully)

On another note, I am wondering how often the A team will be able to get together under the current schedule. It looks like we will only have NBA players once every two years, rather than once a year as was the norm when we qualified through Oceania. I think this could be a problem when it comes to having a cohesive unit.

The team under Lemanis has been far more competitive against top teams than the 88-2000 era, where we benefited from lesser depth in international competition.

The Lemanis Boomers against top 4 teams in 2014 and 2016 were 2-3 with an average differential of -3.

From 88-2000 we were 0-17 with an average differential of -21. Chalk and cheese.

Out of interest the Tall Blacks, filled with NBL and NZNBL players, are 0-7 and -12 in their past four major tournaments.

Past blowouts don't make it right, especially since now we have the cattle.

Pretty sure the Boomers have dropped at least 2 games at every major tournament by 25 plus, so I hardly see our loss to Serbia as something unknown for us, or something particularly glaring. We played great for every other game in the tournament.

Serbia did something no other team thought to do, and that was crowd Bogut at the three point line. Hopefully our offense is a bit more resilient in future

They were eventual silver medalists because of our failure, lol. It's not like they were god given silver medalists.

The way we lost was worrying.

wow we lost to the silver medal winners what a disgrace. we lost to the gold medal winners too. our coach must be crap.

Yes a few bad calls = 26pt blowout in the semi vs Serbia. We weren't even in the game anymore after the first minute!

To many haters, should've medaled except for a few bad calls, he did a great job, get over it.

Also I wouldn't be comparing Lemanis to Brett Brown or anyone else. You can't compare the fact Lemanis has the best Aussie squad ever, and he only matched 4th which we've done three different times in the past with much inferior players.

Lemanis was in charge of our semi choke, seems everyone is forgetting this: Serbia 87-61 Australia. It was the most important game as it guaranteed a medal. Pathetic.

The biggest problem in Rio was that we're Australia and not a world respected country that gets calls.

The biggest problem in Rio was that we took Goulding instead of Newley.

"I can live with Lemanis at the top job if he puts together an assistant coaching staff with a more diverse skillset."

... and listens to them better than a certain Mr A. Gaze did to his.

I guess we will be able to appropriately judge him after the next proper tournament, and whether he learns from the mistakes made at Rio.

The team getting worse as the tournament went on, rather than better, has me worried about his ability to respond to opposition scouting more than anything. But that was our first ever decent tournament run with the current generation, so there's always going to be a learning curve.

I can live with Lemanis at the top job if he puts together an assistant coaching staff with a more diverse skillset.

Brown was a mediocre Boomers coach. He tried to copy what other teams were doing more than create a style that suited his team and Australian players in general.

He tried to make the Boomers a physical, half-court defensive team (and he built a nice base at that end) but then we weren't able to compete with good teams at the other end of the floor.

He was candid enough to admit after the 2010 WC how tough the step up was as a coach and how tough it was countering the quality coaches and teams.

He did make improvements before 2012 but overall that was a poor tournament. Lemanis has been leaps and bounds ahead of Brown, albeit with the benefit of building on his defensive base.

The "international" style means everyone is a couple of inches taller at their position, and most bigs can stretch the floor. So it means Damien Martin isn't such a defensive stopper. It means Kevin Lisch can't get his shot off. It means you can't play two centers at the same time all the way through a tournament. It's not an entirely different style, everyone is just bigger, longer, faster, can play multiple positions, etc.

It's modern basketball.

And to be fair on Lemanis: we were one incorrect flop call away from winning Bronze. When that offense was juicing, it was great to watch. But like any offense predicated on ball movement and equal opportunity, when it got scouted, it got real ugly, and we had no counters because of Lemanis' selection & rotation issues. I didn't like how he stuck with the two-center approach all the way through, and the decision not to bring Newley for lineup flexibility (to counter the scouting by juicing the offense with a few wrinkles) hurt us more and more as the tournament went on. Ideally in that situation you simplify the offense and exploit matchups, but without wing depth we couldn't put any interesting lineups on the floor.

On the other end, we got torched by every stretch-four because we had to try to guard them with a center. I also didn't like how he ran very few plays for Broekhoff, and just relied on him "getting his" in the flow of the offense. That's not how you get the most out of catch and shoot flamethrowers when you don't have an elite one-on-one player to draw defenders; you need to run plays for them constantly to hand-feed them.

The inability to get off last second shots out of timeouts really, really pissed me off too, but whether that was a coaching or an execution thing is another question. There is no excuse for not getting a shot up in those situations: you give the ball to Patty and get out of his way. No time to get cute.

Again: we should have nabbed bronze if the refs didn't botch an obvious call, so you can't be too hard on him, but coaches who can't get their rotations right really, really grind my gears. The fixes were so easy, which is why not implementing them was so irritating. I found myself yelling at the TV a lot more than when Brett Brown was the coach, and I think we need to be careful that we are judging the process and not the results.

""I really don't like Lemanis as an Xs and Os coach"

In Rio the Boomers smashed the Australian record for assists by a country mile. Lemanis produced one of the best systems I've seen in a decade covering international basketball."

Yes it was poetry in motion at times. To say Lemanis isn't up to international basketball is laughable. The guy was 1 point away from a medal and his team put the entire world on notice.

"This "international" style label once again ........

It's basketball, same rules( well mostly) same round ball same court, same hoops, same objective, the difference is the offensives which are played, not the bodies that play them, a good player is a good player, your USA players tend to be very very athletic because most are African American , usually great muscle strength and your Europeans tend to be bigger in build than most and very aggressive, Aussies p,at a fast smart game, each bring challenges of their own, this drivel of "international style" is ridiculous, do you see them picking "Aussie style "players in their national teams, no they don't ' they just pick pllayers to suit "their" style of play.

This "international style" is a Joyce terminology and everyone saw his well that played out for him."

Well there is an Australian style of play, but you don't need to choose specific players for it because it seems all of the top Aussie players play like it.

This "international" style label once again ........

It's basketball, same rules( well mostly) same round ball same court, same hoops, same objective, the difference is the offensives which are played, not the bodies that play them, a good player is a good player, your USA players tend to be very very athletic because most are African American , usually great muscle strength and your Europeans tend to be bigger in build than most and very aggressive, Aussies p,at a fast smart game, each bring challenges of their own, this drivel of "international style" is ridiculous, do you see them picking "Aussie style "players in their national teams, no they don't ' they just pick pllayers to suit "their" style of play.

This "international style" is a Joyce terminology and everyone saw his well that played out for him.

"I really don't like Lemanis as an Xs and Os coach"

In Rio the Boomers smashed the Australian record for assists by a country mile. Lemanis produced one of the best systems I've seen in a decade covering international basketball.

Mick love your point about how he needs to be supervised a bit to avoid some of the team composition fails.

I don't think any Aussies are up to the job of coaching that level of basketball, however if you bring in a foreigner they wont be familiar with the talent pool, which is a problem. It's a tough one. I really don't like Lemanis as an Xs and Os coach, and I don't like his rotations at all. I also think he really fails to understand which NBL level skills and bodies translate to the international game and which do not. However, I think he is pretty good at the motivational side of the equation and some other big picture stuff. I think he needs at least one assistant with international, euro or NBA experience. And I think someone else needs to sign off on his selections so we don't bring five seven footers who can't shoot to Tokyo...

Spot on hendo

Really the only choice, after the Olympic campaign. He's done a good job thus far.

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

2019?

6'4 Delly/6'6 Exum
6'0 Mills/6'8 Ingles/6'7 Broekhoff
6'10 Simmons/6'7 Adel
7'1 Maker/6'10 Bolden
7'0 Bogut/6'10 Baynes/6'11 Landale


Might see a few changes in that centre spot.
Can't be sure bogut will be healthy.
Humphries or Mathiang potentially?

There shouldn't need to be any ties mended with Simmons. He wasn't ready in 2014, and the Boomers don't exist just to furnish his ego. If he's going to be a tool about it, we can take the rest of our talent with us and still be a pretty damn good chance to medal without him.

But having said that I don't think things are really that bad between Lemanis and Simmons. Simmons was fairly active on Twitter about the Boomers during the Olympics and it seems like he probably got past himself a bit.

Adam Gibson approves.

AJ Ogilvy doesn't approve of this decision.

Not to mention that if he doesn't have a giant NBA contract, he won't be impossible to insure for the Boomers!

Good move - Lemanis deserves another crack with some of our best talent ever coming online in the next 4 years.

I really hope we can get Simmons, Maker and Exum involved with the team early so Lemanis can start laying down the foundations for how he wants the team to play.

As much as Bogut's injury sucks for him right now, it may be a blessing in disguise for the Boomers once he is healed, as he might be able to put a bit more into the national team if he is not grinding out an 82 game season!

Yes great news, deserved another shot. Nice to see BA making decisions on results.

Yeah I agree that no ties should need to be mended, other than some kids hardening up if they cracked it over being left out.
I'm glad that Andrej is being given another shot.

He shouldn't need to mend any ties with Ben Simmons ... he was far too young and immature to be part of an Olympic team in the first place, let's hope Ben Simmons grows up and comes to his senses and looses his ego
Congrats to Lemanis he did a better job than any other boomers cosch

Just hope they don't reappoint that idiot Joyce for the women... he ecimated the Opals success

And get a decent replacement for Bogey integrated into the Boomers asap

Good to see. He did well with the team at Rio.

Now - let's see if he can mend the ties with Ben Simmons and also build the relationship with Thon Maker.

I'm glad he decided to go again, wasn't sure that he would.

Deserved another shot.

http://www.smh.com.au/sport/basketball/andrej-lemanis-reappointed-australian-boomers-coach-for-run-to-tokyo-2020-olympics-20170320-gv2dr2.html

Who's coaching the Mens Mavs Team? Heard there was a change.