I think Chot's DDO struggling without shot creators is because his DDO is heliocentric, meaning it's centered on a ball-dominant player. That's why you need shot creators for his offense.
DDO dosen't necessarily have to involve a heliocentric offense where a player has to iso. You can get it through dribble handoffs, quick PnR action, off-ball cuts. You just need guys who are good at dribble penetration.
For off-ball offense, here's the thing. For all-of Jordan, Kobe, Steph, and Kevin Durant being able to score, those four did a lot of work off the ball. Still, their teammates could still move and get in scoring positions and opportunities. Teams just took advantage of the scorers' gravity. Shot creation only came in emergency situations. I think we should have applied these when we had JC in the WC.
The DDO itself is inherently not a bad offense. The DDO relies on the principle of the "three or key" offensive mindset where the aim of the offense is for the players to get scoring opportunities by driving in the key and shooting threes. The best shot in basketball is a freethrow shot with a 1.4PPP for an average 70 percent freethrow shooter, and you get the most freethrow attempts by attacking the paint. The next best shot is a layup in the paint, and the three point shot is next. The worst shot in the game of basketball is the midrange shot which the DDO systematically reduces or eliminates.
Now, before someone labels me a Chot hater, let me first say that in his "debut" during the 2012-2014 era, Chot's offense was actually revolutionary. During that time, the prevailing offense is the more traditional lineups and systems. Chot's offense took advantage of the analytics at the time when it was still in the infancy of being exploited. He ran a 4 out 1 offense with Douthit and an even more revolutionary 5-out offense in the 2014 World Cup with Dray Blatche as his big. We've seen opponents struggle against our high paced attacking offense. Chot let guards such as Alapag shoot three pointers a foot or more away from the three point line when this was frowned upon even in the NBA (even Curry did not take shots as far as that back in 2012-2014). He was also a great motivator during that time and he rallied both his team and the crowd with him.
The problem then with Chot's DDO is that he relies too much on it, and he has little to no variety, and this was greatly exposed when he came back as coach during the 2017 FIBA Asia Cup. Once they have already been exposed and opponent's coaches have seen and figured out his one-dimensional offense, the flaws of Chot's DDO are exacerbated:
1.) He has little to no post offense opportunities on his DDO. He made traditional bigs like Fajardo and Douthit just stand in the dunker spot for potential dropoffs and putbacks. This affected their mindset and morale in both offense and defense. This was also the reason why Fajardo was almost useless in his lineups since his strength in posting up is not utilized, and thus Chot had to do with the smaller bigs such as Ping.
2.) The attacking lead guards have too exert a great ton of effort just for them to breakdown their guards since their are little to no screen/handoff setups as they start their dribble drive. This gives them less energy for defense, and thus our defense became a doormat.
3.) His DDO was too vanilla during the 2012-2018 era. As IPC have mentioned, he could have greatly modified his offense so that it was less reliant with his lead guards while keeping the "three-or-key" mindset.
4.) Chot had great problems when his opponents run a zone. Since he has this "attacking the defense through dribble-driving mindset" ingrained in his players, once a zone is ran, Gilas' offense almost always becomes a net negative. The zone is broken down by attacking the areas where that zone does not have a person manning through quick passes. We've seen South Korea running a 3-2 zone defense for almost the whole game against us to great results. We've seen Castro and Romeo still trying to attack those zones through dribble driving, and they just hit brick wall after brick wall.
Couple all of these with his flair for the dramatic, we will see why he had little success once he came back to Gilas on 2017 onwards.
As Marcus Douthit himself said on a post/tweet, you cannot utilize an offense for multiple years without opponent coaches figuring you out, and Chot does not really excel on both in-game and off-game adjustments.
