Isaac
Years ago
Boomers and scouting international teams
From the Boomers-Italy post-game:
Simone Fontecchio said Joe Ingles is one of his idols. Joe Ingles at the press conference: "Shit... I think he needs a better idol." (Went on to praise him, said the team had to google where Simone played bc they never got to see him play until they scouted Italy two days ago.)Would they honestly leave scouting this late?
The pools were announced back around February, though Italy didn't qualify until early July 4ish.
Is it just a matter of focusing on the next game only, to avoid complicating the scouting info? He might be talking about the team checking out of curiosity and going through their scouting reports in the game lead-up, though I would've thought the scouting reports themselves would've been in the works from at least early January? I'm going by what I've seen of NBL team scouting reports; not sure how similar they'd be to the Boomers' process.
Fontecchio is the starting SF in their depth chart so doesn't seem to have just appeared there through injury omission as an unknown, etc. He started and played 35 minutes against Serbia in the qualifying games. 21 points in that game and 17 against DR. Surely they had footage from that? Top scorer for Italy across three games.
An alternative is that they just don't scout the individual players a huge amount. I think it was Popovich who talked years ago about how the Spurs focused less on mastering a response to the opposition's strategy, and more on perfecting their own strategies, being something of which they were in complete control.
(Obviously it's a bit useless making any serious judgements from a brief, paraphrased post-game comment!)
