The Doc Rivers Thread

[ANTETOKOUNBROS]

We’re as good as we’ve looked on both sides since Bud finally. Having Khris back soon should open deadlier possibilities on both sides of the ball.

[BigO]

LET ME ADD ONE BIG ONE. In the last several games during crunch time, Doc has taken Dame out of the game and put in a defender for him. Offense vs. defense. What other coach would have the respect from Dame to do that?

[mediocrityrules]

There are a lot of things that irk me about the way DOc coaches, but the one that kills me is how long he always seems to wait before bringing Giannis in in 4th quarters. No matter how the game is going, he waits until under 6 mins remaining to bring him in, and it's usually 2-3 minutes later than it should be, and the game is much closer than it should be.

He's also already playing Giannis 35MPG and 38 would be too high, so he would need to cut earlier minutes to do that.

Dame is 19th in MPG (35.9) and Giannis is 25th (35.0) so far.

That is... well, not good.

As a comparison, in 2022-23, Bud's last season, Jrue was the top Buck at #52 (32.6 MPG) and Giannis was 56th at 32.1

For the "It's only an extra 3 minutes a game" crowd, that's an extra 200+ minutes over the course of a season, the most tired minutes a guy will play where they are most likely to be injured.

To be clear, I'm not asking him to play more minutes, I'm asking him to play more 4th quarter minutes. He usually plays 10-11 minutes in 1st quarters now. In the past he'd play 3-4 minutes, sit for 3-4 minutes, and come in for the last 2-3 minutes of the first. Get back to something like that, and take those 1st quarter minutes and move them to the 4th.

[pifhluk23]

The NBA listed him as a top 15 coach of all time... He has largely outperformed expectations even in the series that his teams blew leads they were mostly never favored to begin with. Casual fans think he's a bad coach because of blown series leads but that's just dumb hot takes.

[AussieBuck]

The dude has a long list of Bud like playoff freezes but he does seem more open to listening to his assistants at least on this stop. Seems like ywen there's an obvious change to make, it will at least be tried before it's too late.

[ShootingtheJ]

The dude has a long list of Bud like playoff freezes but he does seem more open to listening to his assistants at least on this stop. Seems like ywen there's an obvious change to make, it will at least be tried before it's too late.

Agree. I also think it's important to acknowledge that his playoff flameouts were with players that no one else can win with either.

[humanrefutation]

The NBA listed him as a top 15 coach of all time... He has largely outperformed expectations even in the series that his teams blew leads they were mostly never favored to begin with. Casual fans think he's a bad coach because of blown series leads but that's just dumb hot takes.

It wasn't just because they blew leads. It's because his teams seemingly never adjusted when necessary.

Hopefully what we've seen thus far shows that he's willing to make changes. He won't have 10 games to figure that out in the playoffs, though. He'll need to identify changes that need to happen game-to-game.

To be fair to him, though, he was saddled with some significant playoff choke artists in Paul and Embiid at his last two stops. This is the first time since Boston that he's coaching guys with title winning experience in Giannis, Middleton, Brook, etc, and a player clutch enough to have his own "Time."