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I've been baffled for awhile that we don't have a legit big man coach to work constantly with Andrea. When you look at the way he's playing he's regressed across the board since his switch to the centre position and from my perspective would really benefit from a big man coach who is well respected.

You expect the number one overall pick to be a star. And I know the argument is big men take longer to develop. So I looked at second year stats of recent high picks who were big men. Many also the number one pick overall. Here's their second year stats:

Dwight Howard 36.9 min 0.531 FG% 0.0 3PT% 12.5 Reb 15.8 Pts
Yao Ming 32.8 min 0.522 FG% 0.0 3PT% 9.0 Reb 17.5 Pts
Tim Duncan 39.3 min 0.495 FG% 0.143 3PT% 11.4 Reb 21.7 Pts
Andrew Bynum 21.5 min 0.558 FG% 0.0 3PT% 5.9 Reb 7.8 Pts
Andrew Bogut 34.2 min 0.553 FG% 0.200 3PT% 8.8 Reb 12.3 Pts
Andrea Bargnani 23.3 min 0.390 FG% 0.393 3PT% 3.4 Reb 9.6 Pts

As the number one pick and a big man he's supposed to compare to these people. If we didn't expect him to be a star he shouldn't have been taken with the number 1 pick. And you can't use the age argument as Bogut and Bynum are comparable there (Bynum even younger).

Bynun has Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and has had a break out year.....
who do we have for Andrea?????

So basically you expanded on my post and threw some numbers with it and made a whole new topic ? This couldn't have gone in the Official Bargnani Thread ?

This topic has been brought up a number of times before. If I remember Colangelo has said that it's something they've looked into, but quality big man coaches don't exactly grow on trees (in the same way that quality big men don't).

I've been saying that. He needs a coach....

Apparently it's Alex English.

ILL COACH HIM.....IM A BIG MAN

Yes this derserves it's own thread. The official Andrea Discussion thread is ridiculously stupid. I don't want to scan through 35 pages of posts to find out what people think specifically about our glaring lack of a big man coach. Seriously people why don't we just have one thread called "Raptors" with about a billion posts and let everyone sift through it to see what they can find??

I'm aware this has been discussed in the past, but from where I'm sitting Andrea's lack of development is the single most pressing issue for this franchise. A solid, respected, big man coach seems to be a requirement at this point. If our managment is content to say they've looked but couldn't find someone and leave it at that....then we are in trouble. This lack of coaching needs to be a priority and we need to try someone.

My point as always is that you do not need to be a former NBA big man to be a coach. In fact, it probably is better that an outsider of that postion can communicate the fundamentals.

Agreed, the big man coach that should be brought in does not need to themselves be a former big man in this league. I just want a respected big man coach (whether a big man veteran of the league, or someone else with a strong track record of developing bigs) to get their butt in here ASAP and focus solely on developing Andrea.

I remember watching a Dirk Nowitzki segment on RapsTV that showed his training regimen and his work with his personal coach, some guy from his days in Germany that he still works with to this day. He is a hard worker and is always trying to improve his skills. Now, I'm aware that many would point out that Dirk doesn't play like a typical big man, but I think Bargs has similar skills and would be better suited to shape his game similar to Dirk's. They're both great shooters and are very quick for big men. Dirk has improved his post game and rebounding over the years, while maintaining his great outside game. We should go after Dirk's guy and improve upon what Bargnani is already good at, rather than trying to make him into a completely different player.