People want to believe that Brian James is a mentor for big guys. To me thats just wishful thinking. Look at Purdue's bigs. It is night and day on technique and development. They have an assistant, Brandon Brantley, who played for PU in the early 1990's, stands 6'8" and was a 10 rebounds, 15 points, 1.75 blocks per 40 minutes player. He's been there 12 years as an assistant. He works with the bigs. He coached Matt Haarms, Isaac Haas, Trevion Williams, Zach Edey, Caleb Swanigan and everybody else that came thru West Lafayette.
Izzo had Dwayne Stephens, a 6'7" blue-collar forward who played for Judd Heathcote. He worked with MSU bigs for 19 years and left this year to take the head coaching job at Western Michigan. Interestingly, he had taken over "managing lineups and substitutions" for Izzo recently, but thats a different subject.
We don't have that.
What we do have is a guard for a head coach and 3 guards for assistants. As a player, Chris Lowery was a pesky 5'10" defense-minded point guard at SIU. His reputation as a defensive wizard precedes him. Talor Battle was an unflappable 6'0" guard who excelled at Penn State, scoring 20 a game in conference play as a senior. Two time first-team Big Ten. Good rebounder for a small guard. Bryant McIntosh was a 6'3" point guard, a bit more of a facilitator than Battle. Chris Collins was a much-heralded 6'2" shooting guard at Duke, whose legendary former coach has occasionally joked that Collins played no defense at all, though he had a very good senior year on the offensive end.
With all those guards on the coaching staff, Boo Buie's improvement has been most obvious. Buie learned from Collins initially, but stepped up with elements of McIntosh and Battle on the offensive end, elements of Lowery on the defensive end. Coaching and individual development. Exactly what you want.
Now look at the bigs. One thing Nicholson does well is set screens to free up guards to shoot. Guards know the value of a good screen, it feels like this was practiced over and over and over. So thats great - it leads to a lot of points for NU - it facilitates the guards. Nicholson's defensive technique improved last year - with the arrival of Ty Verhoeven and Chris Lowery. Nicholson has publicly thanked Verhoeven for his mentorship and Lowery has called Matt the team's best defender. Credit to both on the defensive end and possibly the mental part of the game.
But... there has been no improvement on the aspects of post play where Nicholson establishes position, receives a pass and gets a shot up. Its footwork, using your body, with your back to the basket. Our assistant coaches don't know much about that. Brian James is acknowledged as a guy who is really good at drawing up plays - an X's and O's guy Thats a real talent. But to think that he is adept at teaching big guys the techniques that elevate their games is a real stretch - or perhaps a suburban legend.