PocketRockets wrote: Okay rock...
There you go. Yao on booze or okur is a mismatch in some sense b/c of yao's defensive abilities. What about running plays other than isos? That's not an adjustment that you can change however in the midst of a series b/c all year that's all they did. Give it to tmac or yao on the low block. Teams that didn't make the playoffs knew what we were going to do, much less playoff teams. Pop/Jac would have enough smarts to double dirk and terry (when he was hot) and get the ball out of their hands and make the other mavs beat us. JVG also let the other players think it was okay to watch the tmac show all season. That hurt us in the playoffs.
1. The "simple" offense run JVG was run by Pop in his 4 titles and Pat Riley in his last one. High screen n roll, perimeter and post isos, and good 3 pt shooting. No, niether of the the three have a playbook that has just 3 plays, but the offenses are largely the same.
2. So you're adjustment against Dallas in 05 would have been to double Dirk(who shot 35% for the series) or Jason Terry(who did kill us that series). Well JVG did bring help over on Jet, and the games we won were the games where Stack, Finley, Howard, and Daniels didn't kill us when we did.
Fine, so how do you propose JVG make up for the bigger, faster Mavericks once Kieth Van Horn got hurt??? Dallas back then relied on matchup problems created by Nowitzki. T-Mac took that away, but the rest of the Mavericks were too good. We lost because Sura wasn't quick enough to hold Terry without Help, Wesley was too small to guard Stackhouse and Finley without help, Padgett was expected to guard Josh Howard(!?!?!?!) or maybe Ryan Bowen was given that job only then it was 4 on 5 on offense.
Yao on Booz, I'm still not sure what you're saying about that. What should Jeff have done???
PocketRockets wrote: Sure I'll give you Pop/Jax had good players, but how do you know jordan/kobe, etc would become the players they were without a good coach like Phil? This is a chicken/egg argument b/c you don't. You underestimate good coaching b/c you don't know what type of ego's these players have. You think any other coach could get rodman to play the way he did for the bulls? You have to know how much rope to give players and when to pull back.
Jordan was already a good player before Jackson as was Shaq. Look at the Bulls back then. You saw an obvious trend of improvement against Detroit before and after Phil's arrival. We're seeing now how "great" a coach PJax is. He didn't have the talent and he couldn't get out of the 1st round. Now he does and they're a favorite to win it all. Popovich went 17-47 in 97 before Duncan got there and now he's talking about hanging it up soon(see when Duncan retires). Larry and Hubie Brown are excellent coaches who have rarely had the talent needed to win a title, and LB only has one because of it. Doc Rivers is worse than all 4 of them yet he won a title last year because the talent his team had. There's no getting around this. Yeah, a coach is important for an NBA team but they take a backseat to the quality of players that team has. So there's no chicken/egg argument.