Editor’s Note: After more than 20 years as a television and radio broadcaster, Doug Gottlieb, a former point guard at Oklahoma State, has taken his first college coaching job as the head coach at Green Bay. Gottlieb is coaching the Phoenix while also continuing his duties as a Fox Sports Radio host. Gottlieb will be writing a recurring journal for Hoops HQ to document the 2024-25 season. This is his fourth installment; click here to read all of them.


Hello again, Hoops HQ readers. Hope everyone had a nice holiday season!

Unfortunately, we have dealt with our fair share of adversity since my last diary, from a long losing streak to Anthony Roy’s injury to an arduous schedule. Four of our last five games have been on the road and our one home game had to be moved from the Resch Center to the Kress Center at the last second due to a power outage. 

It has been a hard month to say the least, but as I wrote in a previous entry, I am a perpetual optimist. I know our program is headed in the right direction.

When you over schedule to begin the season, the challenge is keeping everybody’s belief high as you head into conference play. I think losing those first three league games, two of which were totally winnable, set us on a tough path. We tried to recalibrate several times, especially knowing that we wouldn’t have Ant for a significant period, but the reality is that we are a very young team. 

When we went to play Drake in mid-December, eight of our 11 players were first-year guys. Conversely, Ben McCollum’s team, which is really good, has a few sixth-year guys and fifth-year guys. The best player is a junior, but he has played for Ben for three seasons. It’s hard to compete with that. That’s not an excuse and it certainly doesn’t mean our team can’t win because we’re young. We just need to maintain a growth mindset. We’re not doing what we need to do… yet. But we will get there.

Doug Gottlieb’s Diary: The ‘Nobody U’ Controversy, the Twitter Beef and More
It has been a very eventful week for the Green Bay head coach. Here, he addresses all the noise.

Against Drake, we tried a unique game plan, playing some triangle-and-two defense and slowing down the pace considerably. We trailed by just four with four minutes left and eventually lost by 10. I told our staff in the postgame meeting, “We have to go back to being process-oriented, not result-oriented.” Growth mindset. 

I felt like we were ready for our next game, which was at home against Purdue Fort Wayne, one of the best teams in the Horizon. We were all warmed up and then electrical issues at the Resch left us scrambling to Kress, where the Mastodons blew our doors off. They sped us up and shot the hell out of the ball.

My old high school coach, Andy Ground, was in town for the game. Andy is like a second father to me. He is retiring from teaching and I wanted him to join our staff before the season, but he wasn’t going to be available until January.

Andy stayed with me for two weeks and helped reshape my approach. We met every morning to go over the practice plan and every night to review the results. Andy won four state championships as a junior college coach and 85 percent of his games as a high school coach. I leaned on him for advice about daily routines and how to keep our players upbeat. I realized that I need to start focusing solely on the guys who are going to do whatever it takes to get us out of this slide — guys who we want to coach at Green Bay for years to come. I wouldn’t classify it as a reorg, but our approach as a program is shifting. We are evaluating more critically and consistently. That being said, we had two players leave our team in December. They are both great kids, but they just weren’t enjoying themselves and it wasn’t helping us or them. 

At the same time, we added a new player, forward Yonatan Levy from Israel. The process to get him to Green Bay took several months but we are ecstatic to have him. He arrived a few days after Christmas and went through just two practices before our game against Wright State. Understandably, he had no legs. 

We are learning how to play a different style with Ant out and Yonatan in, particularly how to work through the post more. Of course, we are also still figuring out Yonatan’s skill set and how to best utilize him. The Northern Kentucky game went down as an 18-point loss, but it was competitive throughout. We led by eight in the first half and kept it close for most of the second, despite some one-sided officiating. In the locker room afterwards, the team was encouraged. Optimistic.

It was the same thing in last Saturday’s game against Milwaukee. The Panthers are near the top of the conference and we hung tough with them on the road. Yonatan had his best game so far, leading us in scoring with 15 points. It wasn’t that we played great, but the overall momentum and vibe of the team was so much better. And the guys did not look beat up following the loss. I could see hope in their eyes.

Based on the energy of the team, I am confident that we are trending up. What has amazed me is the level of support the community has continued to show us despite our struggles. We had over 3,000 people at our last home game against Purdue Fort Wayne, even though it was on a Sunday while the Packers were playing the Vikings. And when the power outage delayed tip-off and we had to relocate to the Kress, a huge number of fans followed us there. It just shows that there is a real passion for basketball here. The city is ready for us to turn things around.