JonFromVA wrote:ijspeelman wrote:JujitsuFlip wrote:Watching some of this Knicks and Pacers game 7. I gotta say, I love the Pacers offense. Lots of ball movement and man movement.
There has to be a head coach prospect out there who can run something like that with a retooled Cavs team.
I agree that we can run a lot more movement, but as currently constructed if there was a coach out there that could turn us into a top 2 offense in the league, they'd already be hired lol.
If the Cavs end up keeping Garland, getting both of Garland and Mitchell moving off-ball (and obvi others) would do wonders for the offense and spacing.
Pacers also have a fairly deep bench which allows them to go 100% all out all the time. Watch TJ McConnell play his heart out for 18 minutes each game
The easy thing to do is pilfer the assistant coaches running these systems, because while the head coach gets all the credit; they're not always that deeply involved in the nuts & bolts.
JBB in his quest to not lose his job has always leaned heavily on his starters and a couple of backups he trusts. He could have the deepest bench in the league (which he was proclaimed to have when we were going 18-2) and he won't play them.
All the stats say that the strongest part of our bench was that Dean Wade was on it. And while we got him back for our last two games, he didn't seem to be at full strength.
We saw over and over again that while Sam Merrill kills teams that don't play good defense, he's a liability against teams that do. He's another Luke Kennard.
Tristan Thompson gave us amazing minutes that were later proven to be performance-enhanced, and he never showed much after returning.
Georges Niang proved all year that he's a neutral player when his shot is falling and a negative player when it isn't. But let's be clear-- he was signed to be our backup 4 and JBB let Altman's decision on that ride over and over again. Marcus Morris, despite a few good games, didn't prove to be consistently different.
Okoro needs to shoot more contested shots, which we already knew. He also got screwed the most about the fouling rules as he missed a bunch of calls in the playoffs that he would've gotten before the all-star break.
LeVert is a streaky, inconsistent player. He was inconsistent at most things besides 3-point shooting in the postseason, and he was awful at that.
So while all of these guys are great in the exact right situations-- particularly when they can just out-effort weak teams where everyone is on the trading block in the doldrums of the season-- we needed to reveal that they're not playoff-level rotation pieces when everyone's giving maximum effort.