Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman 'calling shots' for stars in big win

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This was published 6 years ago

Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman 'calling shots' for stars in big win

By Roy Ward
Updated

Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman admits his stars were deferring to each other too much so he has started to, literally, call the shots.

Vickerman increased his substitutions and starting focusing the offensive play calls on specific players during his side's 95-69 win over the bottom-placed Sydney Kings at Hisense Arena on Monday night.

Melbourne coach Dean Vickerman has increased his substitutions and starting focusing the offensive play calls on specific players.

Melbourne coach Dean Vickerman has increased his substitutions and starting focusing the offensive play calls on specific players. Credit: Brenton Edwards

The results were impressive, with Chris Goulding (23 points, seven three-pointers) having his best offensive night this season while Casey Prather (21 points), Casper Ware (15 points, seven assists) and Josh Boone (17 points, 17 rebounds) all found ways to get on the scoreboard.

Melbourne's offence floundered in their away loss to Cairns last Saturday night, but after this win Vickerman said he would continue to call shots for players and run line-ups that allowed certain players to become the focus.

"The focus for this game was more about how do we get different people shots in different periods of the game," Vickerman said.

"We did a better job of structuring that tonight as this group is great.

"They all want to sacrifice for each other but sometimes we have to structure it better and say this is your time to go, this is your time to sacrifice and tonight we did a better job of that and had a better job with our rotations to allow that to happen."

Vickerman and his coaching staff have used analytics and other advanced statistics to help show which line-ups work best and he has pushed himself to keep rolling over his players instead of keeping the same line-up for too long.

"Our starting five is a high usage group, they all have the ability to score and are very capable," Vickerman said.

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"So I still believe you have to put your best scoring talent on the floor at different times then it is about how you rotate them through to make sure at different patches people are getting their looks.

"But we haven't solved that problem yet, it was good tonight but until we make improvement on the road it is nothing."

The Melbourne coach also noted his side needed to have such an impressive offensive game against the league's elite defensive sides like Perth Wildcats or New Zealand Breakers who sit in the top two ladder spots ahead of United.

"The defence of Cairns, Perth and New Zealand are the ones we are really going to be tested against and Illawarra Hawks in Wollongong is the next challenge," Vickerman said.

"We saw here how they disruptive can be, but we took a little step forward tonight in trying to solve this problem of having a lot of [scoring] talent."

Melbourne United play Illawarra Hawks in Wollongong on Saturday night at 7.30pm.

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