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Just checking in to see your guys first impressions of Casey.

Curious to know!

he has absolutely no idea how to run a proper offense. other than that he's ok I guess. at least the guys are playing hard for him and defense seems to be improving

Pretty awful on offense. Without Nurse, he is back to the bad offense he ran in Toronto before last year.

Meh on defense, though we just do not have good defenders.

menten wrote:he has absolutely no idea how to run a proper offense. other than that he's ok I guess. at least the guys are playing hard for him and defense seems to be improving

Pretty much this. He's probably the best coach we've had since Flip Saunders, though obviously that's not a terribly high bar to match.

I don't think he's as bad an offensive coach as some are suggesting, but it's pretty clear we don't have the type of players that are going to be successful in that system. SVG had very specific ideas of what he wanted each position to do and built the roster accordingly. We've got a lot of one-trick-ponies in our rotation right now. Casey seems to be expecting them to read and react and really play off of each other without a ton of structure.

Billl wrote:I don't think he's as bad an offensive coach as some are suggesting, but it's pretty clear we don't have the type of players that are going to be successful in that system. SVG had very specific ideas of what he wanted each position to do and built the roster accordingly. We've got a lot of one-trick-ponies in our rotation right now. Casey seems to be expecting them to read and react and really play off of each other without a ton of structure.

i agree with this... the roster we have is just plain awful hopefully ed stefanski moves some of this junk to get better starting wings and scorers for the bench how will he do it idk lol.

Too early to tell. He's still toying with line-ups, and we're without Kennard, who some here thought should start, who regardless is a rotation SG.

Reggie Jackson isn't a 2-guard and I think that has been tried and realized. He moved Johnson out of the startling line-up, let's see how long that lasts though.

We need shooters at the wings. No coach is winning here without it.

When Kennard comes back I hope he force feeds him minutes at SG and makes it work. None of this short leash stuff. Bullock, Galloway are not going to get it done - Kennard is our only hope there, force it and accept the growing pains.

Casey has never been known as a great x's and o's coach. He's struggled at making adjustments. His offenses have always been clunky and stagnant. Now he has to deal with those deficiencies with our crap roster.

It's early days. The main issue for Casey is he has inherited a flawed roster so it's difficult to judge the guy too much.

Regardless, as others have mentioned above his offense definitely needs some work but at least the guys are playing hard for him.

The Drummond post ups are really bad.

I love Casey so far. You can tell he hates this team plus he is the anti SVG, he tries to shoot as many 3s a game.

Casey is trying to find a lineup and i love the fact that he isn't loyal to anyone. 8 games in, he benched SJ. RJ doesn't even close games bc even Casey knows he sucks. Other than Bullock and Ish ALL of our wings and guards may be out of the NBA in 2 years. What Casey supposed to do?

My main gripe with him is that he gives certain players a bit too much freedom. Drummond should not be shooting jumpers, and Stanley Johnson should ideally not touch a basketball at all.

MrBigShot wrote:My main gripe with him is that he gives certain players a bit too much freedom. Drummond should not be shooting jumpers, and Stanley Johnson should ideally not touch a basketball at all.

Drummond should not be trying post offense at all. It is so !@#$ing dumb that Casey has him doing it.

In fairness, I don't know what wizardry it would take to run a good offense with this roster.

Not saying he's done a great job or anything, but we're asking him to make lemonade from some pretty rotten lemons.

I've seen some good and some bad things from him so far.

Giving freedom to Drummond and Reggie Jackson is not going to work.

He has no problems sitting players when they deserve, Reggie Jackson was benched at the end of the game in a game he was horrible.

SJ was removed from the starting lineup after he had a fair chance to prove he could start.

Henry Ellenson is as good as gone.

Bruce Brown is getting a solid chance to become a real NBA player and part of our future, despite of him being a 2nd round pick and SJ being a former lottery pick.

This is clearly Blake's team, during SVG's era this was SVG's team.

Not really Casey's fault if Luke is injured and Bullock has been absolutely garbage. They're 2 of the best shooters in the league, with then we're a flawed roster, without them we're unwatchable.

I've been happy with Casey really, he's still trying to feel this team out, you can tell he's a competant coach. Problem is he has no shooters, or the ones he has aren't hitting anything, their 3-point game isn't working. I'm still waiting on him, thus far I've liked his rotations and such and he gave SJ a chance and finally moved him to the bench.

Snakebites wrote:In fairness, I don't know what wizardry it would take to run a good offense with this roster.

Not saying he's done a great job or anything, but we're asking him to make lemonade from some pretty rotten lemons.

It’s not even lemons. It’s the soil used to grow the tree.

If he can get Dre and the team playing hard on defense night in and night out then I'm happy with that for now. Blake's good enough to run the offense on the fly, if we had outside shooting this would be a 50 win team.

ComboGuardCity wrote:

Snakebites wrote:In fairness, I don't know what wizardry it would take to run a good offense with this roster.

Not saying he's done a great job or anything, but we're asking him to make lemonade from some pretty rotten lemons.

It’s not even lemons. It’s the soil used to grow the tree.

f
Nah. Calling them the soil implies potential. This roster has none.

Its pretty easy to use a narrow scope to attribute the flawed roster in relation to evaluating Casey's offense and overall performance so far.

Perhaps we should look a little bit deeper?

As I said in a post a few days ago all of Drummond/Jackson/Bullock have regressed this season. Casey hasn't gotten anything extra out of the young guys (Kennard/Stanley/Ellenson.) Brown has been playing, and been decent defensively but awful on offense. Galloway is the same enigmatic player.

Blake has been overall great, but again how much are we to attribute that to Casey. Its pretty tough for a guy to come in midseason trade and thrive, especially when you are both your old and new team's #1 option.

Only Ish has been clearly better.

Sure the roster is very flawed, but the good coaches are aware of their player's skill sets and design things to help put them in position to make them look better. That simply isn't happening here. Its not all that hard to coach good players, if they have the right attitude anyways.

Casey's offense looking/being bad isn't anything new. Toronto was 30th in assists in 16-17, and 29th in 15-16. Where is Detroit this season? 30th in assists. Toronto's offense surged after Nick Nurse took the offensive reigns for 17-18, shooting all the way up to 6th in assists. Where are they this year? 4th in assists.

Casey just doesn't run an decent offense. Its basically just a shift on the fly, do what you do kind of thing.

Casey's personnel and lineup decisions have induced some head scratching as well.

To conclude, my first impression is DO NOT LIKE.