trast66 wrote:payitforward wrote:...I'm all for a new coach as well. Brooks adds no value whatever. But there is no coach that can turn back time, & no coach can change the value of our current personnel compared to those 5 teams I mention above.
The value of the personnel certainly does change if coach and FO change. Milwaukee was only one game better than us last year, then they got a competent coach. How many frogs has Brad Stevens turned into princes? Ujiri has been brilliant, that team is constructed well which gives each player higher value. Would Siakam developed here? No way. We need to hire people smarter than us at basketball to make these decisions.
I'd say we can all agree on your last sentence!
The other ones not so much.
For sure, hiring or firing a GM doesn't make a player already on your roster any better or worse, as I hope is obvious. & I assume you didn't really mean to say that (tho you did...). Of course, no one would disagree that a better GM should get you better players going forward!
&, yes, Ujiri has been really good. But, you've got it backwards -- it's not that the players are better because of how the team is constructed. The team is better because of the players the GM picked!
Go back to the 2012 draft when Ujiri was at Denver. After other GMs had picked Austin Rivers, Kendall Marshall, Royce White, Terrance Jones & Andrew Nicholson, he found Evan Fournier. & then he picked Will Barton in at #40 (a guy who has been better than at least 24 of the 30 picks from #10 - #39). In 2011, after our eagle eyes found Singleton, he picked Kenneth Faried.
As to the impact of coaches... this has been studied Trast. It is certainly true that an excellent coach has some positive effect on a team's record -- but the studies don't show much of an influence.
But, both data & common sense tell us that a bad coach can have a bigger negative influence than a positive coach can have a positive influence. All he has to do is play his worst players rather than his best ones!
Milwaukee is a great choice to support your claim -- well done! -- it certainly offers the strongest current evidence for the impact of a coach. Pretty much everybody getting minutes there is playing better than he did last year.
Budenholzer is doing a great job, no doubt. Then again, I could point to players (say Al Horford?) who played for then went to other teams & didn't lose anything in productivity. & I could also point out that something over 15% of Milwukee's minutes last year were played by guys who are no longer there.
But, the real point is that people who studied this subject didn't cherry pick an example & promulgate a global conclusion based on it. You can prove absolutely anything if you get to determine what counts as evidence!
Why don't we look at San Antonio instead? The Spurs averaged 64 wins two & three years ago. Last year they won 47 games. This year they're on a pace for a 44-45 win season.
Same coach. Same FO. The difference is simple -- personnel. Veterans got older, best player left, hard to get equivalent young guys, injuries, etc.
Brad Stevens hasn't turned any frogs into princes. When he had mostly frogs the team did badly; when he got a lot of princes, things got a lot better. Duh. That doesn't mean I think badly of the guy -- he's a good coach, I'd love to have him. & we don't differ in opinion about Brooks either ("play his worst players...").
Again... this isn't opinion on my part. There's nothing to argue about. Especially given our agreement that Ernie is an awful GM & Brooks is a terrible coach!
