pancakes3 wrote:The wizards are squarely in the middle of an awful season, potentially historically awful but for the Pistons.
Their newly acquired star player who's supposed to be keeping them 30-wins-ish competitive turns out to be arguably the worst player in the league.
And yall are writing dissertations of criticism for Kuz not being Pippen and for WUJ not being Pops.
Kuz/WUJ are certainly flawed, but they're not the reason we're this bad. Well, WUJ a little, but I'd say 70% of the reason is Poole, plain and simple. You're talking about WUJ lacking the balls to sit Kuz when he slacks on D? How pissed would you be if WUJ sits you because of the lack of defensive hustle but Poole is out there getting 30 mpg? And as WUJ, what are you going to do? Not play the guy you just gave $140M to? Not only is that a waste of money, you're destroying what little trade value he has left.
There's nothing to do but suck right now. You could put Bill Auerbach in there with Pops and Phil Jackson holding clipboards and we'd still be a 20-win team. Kuz could put in 110% effort starting tomorrow and we'd add maybe 2 wins to the season. It's Poole. He cratered the season. Probably the next few seasons.
And I'm a little offended that this is coming off as me defending Kuz, which I don't want to do. But I'm acknowledging that he is who he is, good and bad. I wouldn't want Julius Randle on this team either, but I can recognize the value that Randle brings to a team, and what he doesn't bring. That's all.
A couple of things:
1. Poole sucking (which I don't think anyone on this entire board disagrees with) has nothing to do with how Kuzma approaches the game and how WUJ in turn chooses to coach him.
2. I also happen to think WUJ has mismanaged Poole as well from a coaching perspective. He should have been benched a long while back (I said as much in the Poole thread) and reined in because he's obviously playing like he doesn't care on most nights (though, he's been somewhat better as of late).
3. Sure we suck, we were always going to suck going into the season. No disagreement there. But how you go about tanking matters in my book. Are you letting the Kuzmas and Pooles of the world play like idiots, or are you holding guys accountable, building good habits, and developing the guys you need to. You can both suck, and try to run a competent, merit-based team. It doesn't just mean WUJ should play rotations to keep vets happy, and as long as we suck, there doesn't have to be any sort of accountability. In fact having zero accountability for the Kuzmas and Pooles of the world is probably going to in the end hurt their trade value because they do stupid things with a basketball as a result. And let me clarify that I am in no way saying Kuzma has been anything close to as bad as Poole.
4. Why is it whenever there is criticism of these guys someone has to bring up comparisons to all-time great players, coaches, moments? No one has expectations that these guys are all-time greats, but the fact that they are not all-time greats, doesn't mean we have to spare any and all criticism. Nate was basically using this line of reasoning with yesterday's game: that because Deni didn't pop off for a 37 point (all-time great) quarter, that we were all overacting for taking out a young guy (who has struggled with confidence) who had an early hot hand because of some arbitrary rotations WUJ has in his head.
