Hoops

Sixers coaches future

The fans pay a lot of money for season tickets. They expect value for money. Value comes in the way of a good team that will win championships. Its what keeps the fans interested and coming back. They don't want to pay money to see a whole lot of rookies on the floor developing their game. At the same time there isn't a lot of money to pay rookies under the current salary cap and the amount needed to entice the top players to sign up. Its a vicious circle because as a result of not much money for rookies, how many of them make themselves available when they could be earning a decent salary somewhere else? NBL level basketball is about entertainment. Fans want to see the skills that seasoned players bring to the court and they want to see success. The way to attract the best young kids is to make it financially worthwhile. Its what will encourage them to sign on and work hard towards their goal of making it to the top. Atleast they can make the committment because they are also earning a salary. Perhaps the key to developing young players is in the way of a separate salary cap to the other players. That way it won't reduce the amount needed to entice the best but at the same time there will be money there for the developers. However, if a club is going to invest in young players and pay them a decent salary at the same time, a committment needs to be made by the players to stay with that club for atleast 5 years and not just go off to Europe or wherever at the expense of the club that has been paying them to develop their game. Its easy to pass the buck onto the coaches for not doing a good job at developing players, but the problem is much deeper than that.

I don't know what people expect when it comes to developing players but how much more are coaches supposed to do when winning a championship is heavily on their mind. This is their job and what the club expects of them. They cannot jeopardise winning games to give development players too many minutes on court. Young players are developed by training with the squad. Their training jumps a level when they train at NBL level. If you train at the higher level, your game also develops at that higher level. 15 or so hours per week training (not sure how many) is going to get much more out of a development player than 5 minutes a week on court during games. If a player doesn't show much improvement over a couple of years with this type of training, the player has to take responsibility for that. The coaches top priority is to win games.