Posted on 11/01/2023 4:14:56 PM PDT by pissant
That team had some players who went on to the NBA, but none of them were stars at the next level. That proves how good of a coach he was.
Three national championships and a very great coaching tree. RIP Coach Bob Knight.
LOL! I hope he put it in his will.
Kent Benson and the hook shot!
After IU, he went on to Obama-up the NCAA.
Team sports are really a form of tribal warfare practice. Your comment probably applies to many of the young men joining the woke military these days. The transition to robotic AI soldiers cannot come soon enough.
Isaiah Thomas was the other important player I forgot. I’m sure many others. Landon Turner is another.
Bobby always believed that the bottom line was to totally operate as a team. Nobody got to be a star.
That was his non secret secret.
He gave some really great motivational speeches for anyone to attend.
RIP.
I have three boys and when they were growing up IU basketball was really big at our house. My boys were glued to the TV watching it and got a kick out of it when Dick Vitale showed up.
Downtown Indy back then held a Gus Macker tournament and the boys always wanted to enter into that. Basketball everything.
Isiah Thomas was the only Knight player who became top tier in the NBA, although a number of other did have long, productive pro careers. I don’t follow the NBA at all so that’s not something I ever tracked, but Mike Woodson comes to mind.
Scott May might have been that good but he blew out a knee early in his first NBA season and then had two more knee operations after that, all in his first three years. That was back when a serious knee injury was often career ending.
We’ll never know how good a pro May might have been. He graduated the same year as Adrian Dantley and Marques Johnson. He outplayed both of them in their head to head matchups in college. Different styles.
Landon Turner was coming into his own as a dominant big man with a style suited to the modern NBA, but then came the accident.
The ego cases coming out of high school never wanted to play for Knight. He relied on very good players with a work ethic. The great contrast was with Dean Smith, who always had the future NBA All Star team on his bench — and who was running a completely fraudulent program with regard to the academic side of things. The NCAA declining to sanction North Carolina when Smith’s program got exposed was one of the things that led to me giving up on college sports.
My Dad once told me he heard Knight say the reason Uwe would drop the ball a lot was because his hands were small.
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