Penn State Men’s Basketball: Shrewsberry Trying to Strike Balance Between What He Knows and What Team Can Do

The challenge for any men’s basketball coach is the gap between the smartest play he could draw up and the smartest play his team could actually execute. It’s a strange place to be in, having an even more effective solution to a complex issue while also having to embrace the limits of what your team is able to do. In turn a coach might be left settling for a more vanilla response to the flow of the game.

For Penn State men’s basketball that has been much of the Nittany Lions’ 2022 season. It has not been a year of overly complex basketball but rather a methodical approach that has in no small part ended with its fair share of iso-ball. Hope your man beats their man, it doesn’t get much more simple than that.

At times it has worked, Sam Sessoms in particular has proven to be a sometimes streaky finisher but reliably able to get to the rim.

And yet in those crunch time moments it has felt predictable and often times has resulted in misses more than makes.

Again, the challenge arises in these moments: the smartest play Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry could draw up vs the smartest play everyone can execute with confidence.

“That’s a balancing act right there upon itself,” Shrewsberry said on Monday. “You have to have people that have corporate knowledge. I was at Purdue for two years, Sasha Stefanovic had been there two years before I got there, right. So there’s things that we didn’t have to practice. We didn’t have to go through. And I could call it and he could do right – he’s got corporate knowledge. He just needs to hear it and he knows exactly what his role is, what he needs to do in a certain play.”

Getting Penn State to that point is going to take time according to Shrewsberry. In his defense the Nittany Lions are more than anything else a group of transfer portal acquisitions that have played only a handful of games together for a coaching staff that has only coached a handful of games together.

So are things ever going to get more complex than they are right now? Maybe one day, maybe even this season, but Shrewsberry’s merits as an Xs and Os coach aren’t based on the smartest plays he calls as much as they are getting Penn State to a level where it can get the basics done correctly. Often times a coach is judged on the plays he draws up out of a timeout, but if those plays feel basic and lacking in creativity it might be more of an indictment of talent and growing cohesiveness and comprehension more than the play itself.

Summarized; a team that doesn’t attempt the complex isn’t doing the simple because the coach can’t think of anything else.

“Even though we’re 21 games and there’s still things that catch us off guard,” Shrewsberry added. “So we haven’t been super complex in terms of what we’re trying to do, because we don’t have a bunch of guys with corporate knowledge.”

“You go into next year, you have some guys back that have been here for a year, now some little things that I say they understand and they understand it completely. […] it hurts me at times, like there’s a lot of things I’ve seen and I’m like, we can really do that but I’m not sure if we’re quite ready for it yet. So I think in time you’ll be able to see more.”

Of course that does make for hair-pulling moments internally. Imagine knowing a more complex, maybe even more successful approach to a late game situation but settling for something slightly less complex with a slightly lower success rate. Which do you pick? The play that your team can do, or the play they might mess up?

Imagine having a better answer and settling for something not quite as good.

“If you had a remote control and I could just hold it on the side of the basket I think we would be really good,” Shrewsberry said with a laugh. “But you also have to prepare guys for last minute situations – what we should be looking for, right? It doesn’t change a whole lot in terms of what you’re looking for or how you’re trying to attack it at certain times. Now doing it in game pressure moments and pressure situations, and that’s what they need to understand is like, you prepare him for these moments. You prepare them for the game [but] you prepare them for these moments and then they get to step out and do it. […] we’re still learning, we’re still growing.”

Penn State will do even more growing on Tuesday night as the Nittany Lions host Michigan State.