Post#133 » by Phenomenologist » Sat Nov 8, 2008 7:52 am
The reason people blame Sam Mitchell is mostly to do with the fact that it is almost entirely his fault.
It seems like he developed his coaching strategy straight out of "Coaching Basketball for Dummies" or something. Everything he does is by rote, and he has no ability to adapt to changing situations. To wit, he chose to double team the Hawks on the interior despite them having zero double team worthy players, and despite the fact that Atlanta's perimeter players (most notably Bibby) were absolutely murdering us from the outside. I can just imagine him perusing the chapter on "Double Teaming", where he encounters a line that says something like: "It is typical to double team the opponents best player, but..." and without reading any further simply implementing that as though it were some definitive strategy. In fact, there is no reason to double team Atlanta - they don't have a dominant interior player, and JO, for all of his offensive troubles thus far, is still an excellent man defender (and Bosh is quite good as well, having forced Horford into quite a few terrible shots). Conversely, our wing players, outside of AP, are fairly atrocious defenders. So, it's a bit odd then when Mitchell insists on using our perimeter guys to help on the inside, when said perimeter players can barely deal with their own covers, let alone successfully play help defense. Clearly, given our team makeup (and given Atlanta's lack of a go-to scorer inside), we should be playing them straight up and using Bosh, JO (and Bargnani) to help if (and when) penetration occurs. This was the WHOLE point of getting JO to begin with. The idea was to funnel players to him when our wings were inevitably beaten. What we're doing now makes absolutely no sense.
Another great illustration of Sam's incompetence can be seen in his instructing Moon to leak out on the break despite the fact that the hyper-conservative Calderon is essentially useless in transition, and despite the fact that Moon is a vital rebounder on our extremely rebounding challenged team. Everyone wonders why we started the season so incompetently on the boards, but it's not really that surprising when one of your starters has his rebound rate plummet from 13.2 to 3.6 (nearly 9 per 40 minutes to 2.4 per 40). He went from being the top rebounding small forward in the league to a complete sieve, and this is mostly to do with the fact that he's been told to leak out (though I suspect that he's also not 100% healthy, as he's been quite the butter fingers to this point). Either way, this is a ridiculous notion. Adding JO makes us, if anything, an even more half-court oriented offense. This is especially true when you consider that he has absolutely no lift anymore and couldn't dream of making an outlet pass on the break, as he experiences extreme difficulty in even securing a rebound to begin with. Check out his numbers on the glass - he's been truly awful thus far.
Yet another indictment: Jason Kapono's stat line read 7-15 on FGs tonight. Do you know how many of those 15 attempts were 3 Pointers? zero. That's right - the guy who shoots nearly 50% from 3 took 15 shots and attempted not a single three pointer. That is absolutely egregious. And I'm watching these games. He's passing up wide open threes to take far more difficult long twos off the bounce. He happens to be such a good shooter that he still puts up halfway decent numbers anyway, but he actually shoots considerably better from 3PT range then he does from long 2PT range. Add in the extra point, and the expected value of points he's essentially flushing down the toilet is mind boggling. I have no idea why he's so intent on being thought of as more then just a "one trick pony". His one trick is incredible, and it's what earned him a 24 million dollar contract (well, that and an overly generous Bryan Colangelo). Unless the situation absolutely demands Kapono take a long 2, he should be firing from 3. And that should only happen at the end of a shot clock situation, or when he's really not open from 3 on the kickout, in which case I'd prefer him to pass the ball back to our PG or interior player anyway. We shouldn't even be running plays for him, except in very rare cases when we have no other offensive weapons on the floor. If Jason kapono doesn't shoot threes then he's a middling scorer (~50% TS) who offers little else. it's really that simple - if he doesn't jack treys, he can't play. And the fact that Sam Mitchell hasn't got this message across is mystifying. If you'll recall, the coaching staff in Miami basically gave him this very ultimatum the year before he came to Toronto. And even though he only partially acquiesced, he was still good enough to have a career year and put up a very respectable PER of nearly 14.
A more general observation is that Sam Mitchell offers his players little consistency. For example, we were struggling tonight (but still only down about 10-12), when he started erratically varying the rotations, and putting ridiculous (and unpracticed) lineups on the floor. These atypical groupings looked completely lost on both ends, and it was during this period when the lead ballooned from "long shot" to "entirely out of reach". Also, his substitution patterns in general leave a lot to be desired. He insists on benching anyone who gets the hot hand, rather choosing to force the offense through a player that is ice cold (the Pistons game was a perfect example, where Calderon and Bargnani got hot, and both got benched/stopped getting touches. Instead the ball was force fed inside to the ice cold O'neal on every play, except the one where we ran an ISO for the equally ice cold Anthony Parker). I mean just look at what our opponents do for some idea of what a competent coach does: Prince gets hot so he takes every shot. Bibby is smoking from downtown so he keeps firing away (the fact that we still insisted on double teaming inside and leaving Bibby wide open for trey after trey was incredibly maddening, but that's another story). As Dagger pointed out, "feeding the hot hand" is imperative in all sports. Clearly, every player can make the required physical motion to drain a shot, so much of the game to game variance in this regard comes from the psychological end. When a player is feeling it, he actually has a better current grasp on the physical motion he has to make in order to hit a shot, so he becomes a better shooter then his overall averages would suggest (just during that very short period of time). That's why feeding him until he loses that window is an absolute must. Yet Sam Mitchell seems to prescribe to the "you're hot, you're benched" school of thought instead - it's truly inexplicable.
There is so much more to complain about with regards to Sam Mitchell and his staff, but I've run out of energy. The OP wonders why everyone is so quick to jump on Sam Mitchell? Well, it's because he makes ill-advised decision after ill-advised decision, in the process almost singlehandedly running a fairly talented team into the ground. If things keep up as they are, you should all prepare yourselves for another season of mediocrity, because there's no way we're doing beans in the playoffs if something doesn't change.
ADD-ON: Obviously not everything can be blamed on Sam Mitchell, and certainly our players weren't stellar tonight, but many of our issues can be traced back to Mitchell's poor game planning and strategizing. Defense is very much an effort and strategy affair - results are much more malleable then offensive ones, because they depend much less on physical talent and much more on positioning and communication. If we had a stud like Tom Thibodeau as our head coach, I can almost guarantee, we would never put up the type of stinker we put up tonight.
