fatlever wrote:battery, it is certainly fair to say that players deserve blame for not playing hard, regardless of the situation and i dont think anyone here should absolve the players from their poor play. but what amazes me is that you fail to recognize the massive negative impact that larry brown's attitude had on this team since last april. honestly, its like you have made your mind up and you are more concerned with arguing only to support your point of view.
this has happened everywhere larry brown has ever coached. the man might be a basketball genius, but he has some serious social issues that always eventually undermine his ability to coach. coaching is half teaching the game and half managing people. larry brown is an absolute horrendous manager of people and he has shown that in ever coaching job in his career. the man is stubborn to a fault and absolutely refuses to make any adjustments to his coaching style or personality, consequences be damned. he is only an effective coach when everything is going his way and when he is 100% engaged in his job.
two things happened this year. 1) larry brown was not engaged in this job. he obviously did not want to be here and it showed to everyone. 2) everything was not going his way and he refused to make any adjustments to right the ship.
I never said I was some big Larry Brown fan. MJ could have hired God over the summer and I would have still criticized the players. Heck I still blame Jokafor for quitting on Sam Vincent that December. Point is, it doesn't matter who the coach is right now until they start bringing in players I think we can win with.
You have no proof LB was disengaged, all we see are players playing much worse than last season and we lost a couple of key defensive players/leaders. Knicks fans were killing D'Antoni when they were 3-8 saying he was terrible coach, but it wasn't until Amar'e and Raymond stepped up and called out everyone in the locker room that the team started to play better. We don't have any of that leadership here, if we did then perhaps we get back to playing like we did last season. But instead we had Gerald and S-Jax criticizing DJ publicly. It was clear they did not believe in DJ, I mean who could blame them, they saw how terrible he was last season.
And Silas brought up DJ in his post game PC and said he had lost his confidence. Now this is a professional athlete we're talking about here, a point guard who is supposed to be fearless and play with confidence. Larry was very demanding of DJ, trying to make him better but it just didn't register with him and thats what seeped into the rest of the team. Then you had angry vet Nazr chiming in and that made it a bad situation. It happens, but if DJ played better and we had more leadership from our veterans then things would not have gotten so bad. And when you're not winning every little thing gets magnified. Like what happened in NY, Miami and like whats happening with the Lakers now because of their recent poor play. Sh*t happens, players need to step up and be accountable. The good teams have leaders (players) who lead them out of the tough times, the mediocre teams don't.
And we gave up 100 points to the Detroit Pistons tonight. If we didn't have such an amazing run in the second, we could have easily lost this one and you would not be making this post. Think long term, not short.