Should Utah have given Coach K one more year?

I thought Larry should’ve gotten at least one more season when he was fired after 2020-21 and I was one of the minority voices with that opinion among Utah fans. Many fans had lost patience with him and wanted to move on, and didn’t seem to realize we might get a coach who was even worse.

Looking back, I still think Larry should have had one more season, but I’m more convinced now that he was in decline and probably wouldn’t have done much with that extra season. It was probably right to move on when we did.

I’ve had my frustrations with Coach Smith this year, but I think he’s probably at least as good as Larry K was. Their trajectory at Utah is similar: crappy first season followed by improvement and NIT in their 3rd year. Larry made the NCAA Tournament in year four and it doesn’t seem like Smith will match that. But I think there’s a good chance Utah will get a bid for the NIT or CBC this year.

I’m all for replacing Smith if a great candidate is there to take over. If not, I’d prefer to stick with Smith.

Admittedly, I don’t really care too much about basketball (college or NBA), but I liked Krystkowiak, and thought his termination was premature. That said, I believe that there was a cancer in the locker room, and I’m not sure how much he had to do with that. I don’t know if he was personally the primary reason why all those recruits couldn’t transfer out of SLC fast enough, or if he was just negligible in not determining which [of the] player(s) was/were, and rooting him/them out. But either way, I think that was the root of his biggest failure while on the Hill.

No disrespect, but the only people that can say that Coach K was deserving of another year are those that didn’t live the experience. Coach K’s last few years with the team were as bad an anything we’ve seen from Smith albeit with a more athletic crew. It’s telling that, either due to burnout or a loss of interest in the game, Coach K essentially went into retirement after leaving Utah while still relatively a young man. Oh, and to the OP, Lazar Stefanovic was a bum in Utah and he’s been a bum at UCLA. He’s essentially a foreign Hunter Erickson…just a guy.

No no no. Absolutely not. The man was not a good basketball coach. The fact that we may have hired the wrong guy in Smith does not make firing Krstkowi-hack wrong. Do you remember our offenses under Krystowiak? Dribble the air out of the ball, pass around the wing, chuck up a shot at the last second and hope it goes in. It was like watching paint dry. The only time it wasn’t like that was when he lucked out recruiting two solid NBA players that nobody else knew anything about. (delon and Poeltl).

Our current offense is much more fun to watch. Mike does a pretty good job of penetrating and finding open guys. Smith is a much better offensive coach. His problem is he can’t seem to sell anyone on the idea of playing for the Utes, in a mostly empty arena, which is NOT Smith’s fault.

If anything, Krystkowiak should have been fired a year earlier. I realize that wasn’t really feasible with his awful contract, but he should have been let go BEFORE the wheels fell off the program, not after.

No.

How many of those players were already on their way out? The offense coach K ran was hard to watch. I think Smith could have a very good program with more talent. The players play harder in his system than any coach since Big Rick.

Coach K got burned out. The program was stagnant and his “old school” offense and style didn’t resonate with the up coming players. Recruiting is everything. Coach K had NBA experience and connections that helped him recruit. Smith doesn’t offer anything to attract top talent.

no, Smith either!

One interesting connection between K’s last season and this season is Caleb Lohner, who was a Freshman in 20-21.

I had wondered if Lohner had not flipped to TDS, would he have made enough of a difference to result in a record that might have saved K’s job for another season. The 20-21 team’s regular season record was 11-12 with 8 of those losses being within 9 pts. That team’s frontcourt lineup was Allen, Carlson, Jantunen, Battin. Lohner averaged a solid 7pts 7reb (24mpg) in his Freshman season on a good TDS team (19-5) that made the tourney, which indicates he was a productive role player, especially defensively. If half of Utah’s <9pt losses are flipped, that puts them at 15-8 – decent/good, not great. Enough to save K’s job for another year? Possibly…but I doubt it would have been enough to change the growing sentiment that he had stagnated, had a concerning trend of losing key players every year, and that fans were ready for a change.

No. The amount of guys transferring out of the program every year was a HUGE problem. He was losing 25-50% of his rosters just to transfers, and that was before the transfer portal became a thing.