LISTEN2JAZZ wrote:I can't be excited about this change because it's still a downgrade from the coach we should not have fired over the summer.
The Bucks lost 6 of the last 7 playoff games they played under Budenholzer. In several of those games the Bucks were leading throughout and had healthy leads going into the 4th quarter. Bud's system was great in the RS. Awesome. Not so much in the playoffs. He was a good coach with a good system, but against top competition it was overly reliant on spectacular individual performances, the luck of positive 3 point variances, and was prone to losing to reliable opposing offenses.
If Budenholzer had been retained, virtually no level of success would have been good enough this regular season to erase the doubts that would be in the back of everyone's mind. Would the team again collapse in the playoffs? Were they contenders or pretenders?
That all made it imperative to move in a new direction. Griffin was part of that, not just with schemes and in game adjustments, but also youth development and rotations. The Bucks went all in on the role player youth movement. Griffin was hired to implement that youth movement, but proved incapable of managing the overall system in 43 games. It might be unreasonable to expect Rivers, or Atkinson or some other veteran coach to put Humpty Dumpty back together this season. But that is no more unreasonable than expecting Griffin to suddenly get the machine to run smoothly or expecting Budenholzer to make the changes necessary to avoid his nearly annual post season fiasco.
Budenholzer was a warm and fuzzy that we have all missed for the last 43 games, but he looked very much like the coach that would again end up with post season disappointment. I think the Bucks are better off aiming higher.
