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This team has entirely too much talent to finish 11th in the East and miss the playoffs with a 32-50 record or whatever it'll end up with unless Clifford is fired. Offensively they're no juggernaut, but there is absolutely no excuse to have 3 points in the first nine minutes of the fourth quarter.

It's like every game we play is Super Bowl 51, we're the Falcons and every team we play are the Patriots. It's sickening. I can't deal with having Clifford and his nonexistent gameplans anymore. Someone, anyone, would be better suited to coach this team.

Not really. There aren't that many good coaches. In fact there are a bunch of terrible coaches right now.

Maybe we can trade Clifford and a 2nd round pick for Carlisle

He's got one more chance. The only reason he's not done yet is because MKG and Batum haven't been playing. If the entire roster stinks as much as we stunk today, then he is gone before the end of the year guaranteed.

I just can't put all of the blame on Clifford today, the players sucked too.

His lack of flexibility is horrible though

to me regularly losing double digit leads and inability to execute endgame strategies is on the coach

I think its time to get a coach with a more modern approach to the game.

I'd remove Cliff, give Stephen Silas a look

He's completely average, just like everything about this franchise.

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How much would you give up for Brad Stevens?

Clifford, Frank, Monk, two unprotected first round picks... what else... Cody? IDK, obviously Boston would turn down anything we could possibly offer them

Tough position for our FO - Cliff is a likable communicator that players enjoy playing for (I imagine there's a healthy degree of loyalty to him) with an above average defensive acumen, but he's proven incapable of making adjustments (on the fly or across the season) and has failed miserably to get us into any semblance of late game offense (for quite some time). We continue to have issues with inbound plays and at times (on offense) it seems like we just have no one at the wheel. The next 10 will be telling - if MKG being in and out and Batum being away actually meant anything. I'm not hopeful it had as much impact as others might suggest.

EDIT: I'm not suggesting that replacing Cliff is a silver bullet - there are no silver bullets - and the players last night should shoulder a lot of the blame, but we have to start chipping away at the mediocrity somewhere, might as well start with Cliff.

I have been saying get rid of Clifford for years. I would offer a first for Carlisle or Erik Spoelstra.

I am about ready to move on from Dwight also.

We have looked bad on the past couple games but this reaction is a bit over the top. We are 5-7 and could win 50 games this season. Firing Cliff would be dumb IMO.

Cliff has no clue. From posting up Dwight, to constantly running plays for long 2s... to isos all down the stretch.. to not taking Dwight out when it turns to hack-a-Dwight... he doesn't get basic NBA strategy. He's gotta go we cant win with him its clear

yosemiteben wrote:We have looked bad on the past couple games but this reaction is a bit over the top. We are 5-7 and could win 50 games this season. Firing Cliff would be dumb IMO.

This has quickly become a Raptors like “what have you done for me lately” fan base.


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BigSlam wrote:

yosemiteben wrote:We have looked bad on the past couple games but this reaction is a bit over the top. We are 5-7 and could win 50 games this season. Firing Cliff would be dumb IMO.

This has quickly become a Raptors like “what have you done for me lately” fan base.


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Seriously.

It was a very, very bad loss. Embarrassingly bad.

But how many times have people said just get to .500 until we are at full strength and past the most difficult part of our schedule?

We were 5-3 and everyone was thrilled. Now we're 5-7 and it's time to fire Cliff. Let's pump the brakes.

BigSlam wrote:

yosemiteben wrote:We have looked bad on the past couple games but this reaction is a bit over the top. We are 5-7 and could win 50 games this season. Firing Cliff would be dumb IMO.

This has quickly become a Raptors like “what have you done for me lately” fan base.


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Quickly as in, ever since we started having expectations in like 2014?

but the thing is, cliff hasn't really done anything for us. we haven't made the 2nd round of the playoffs and we missed the playoffs in half his years. all this is when the east sucks too.

and we're never at full strength, almost no NBA team is consistently at 100%. thats a bad excuse, Boston beat us without their top 3 players, all of whom are arguably better than out best player.

I'm surprised that Clifford's grand quest to rewrite the history book on team defensive rebounding hasn't yielded better results.

Clifford sucks, but he won't get fired. Pretty much all of his issues have been apparent since his first season without improvement and the front office has never had a problem. A lot of his issues are deeply ingrained ideological beliefs that can't be changed. We've had two good couple month runs out of his entire tenure here where we didn't look like garbage and one of those happened during an unprecedented tankathon in our conference and still only yielded and 8th seed and sweep. People will make the same excuses for him we've heard for years, but hes honestly just not good enough as far as i can tell. His understanding of modern offense and general strategy is terrible and his defensive acumen, while solid, is actually pretty basic also. He can't adjust or game plan to save his life. We are now in an era where coaching is actually important and Clifford just doesn't have it imo. Its not good enough anymore just to to have the players on your side. I'm not even reacting to our recent losses. If we rattled off a nice little win streak it wouldn't change my mind unless I saw an actual difference in coaching philosophy/ability, or some actual sustained success. If we want to ever be consistently better than mediocre he probably needs to go.

I'm 100% on board with giving Silas a shot and searching for a good replacement in the meantime in case Silas also doesn't have it. If Silas can implement Cliffords basic defensive strategy and has a better understanding of modern offense and general strategy (which shouldn't be difficult) then I think hed be at least a small upgrade over Clifford.

The main issue with potentially firing Clifford is that by trading for Howard we might have backed ourselves into a corner where we have to keep him around just to try to keep the Dwight situation from imploding the team. If the Dwight experiment goes wrong we arent going to be able to give him away and we'll end up either having to either package him with a pick or player to get rid of him, or buy him out and maybe use the stretch provision.

There are folks who have been anti-Cliff here for a LONG time. Telling them that they are fickle because they are seeing yet more of what they don't like for yet another year is pretty insulting.

FWIW I told my son tonight that if the Hornets miss the playoffs again that both Cliff and Cho would be gone.

I've been a Clifford supporter for some time, but last night was something else.

yosemiteben wrote:We were 5-3 and everyone was thrilled. Now we're 5-7 and it's time to fire Cliff. Let's pump the brakes.

Ok I pumped my brakes but it still look like we’re going the wrong way towards a winning season.

When Batum returns and Clifford don’t roll out a starting lineup of:

Kemba
Lamb
MKG
Batum
Dwight

...by January then I’ll want him fired.