Okay, these are fair points overall. I’m not a Joe Hater, overall he’s done a great job.
He became head coach after Will Hardy took the Utah job and Udoka got fired, so he took over because of that crazy circumstance. He jumped like four other coaches & got a team that just went to the Finals. That was pretty crazy and no 32 year old would have been 100% ready for that moment. And Joe did many good things that first year, in particular identifying Hauser and Derrick as better than Grant & Marcus, which has been proven correct.
He clearly has spent time thinking about a winning basketball system and instituted a framework around four main elements
1. Player positioning
2. 3PT attempt rate
3. Turnover margin
4. OREB margin
The system broadly works, like Bud’s 5-Out Hawks and D’Antonio Suns. Unlike those two coaches, the system produced a title. But the downside is his system deprecates passing, cutting, 2PTA and generally moving his pieces to gain an advantage on possession by possession basis.
What I mean is if you have 100 possessions and you play prevent D, shoot more 3’s while winning turnovers and offensive rebounds, you’re hoping to be up 12 or 20 coming into the last 4 or 5 minutes. But if you’re not, your system doesn’t give you any advantages in a possession game because you are not manipulating the D through ball and player movement to get high percentage 2s. And 3 being worth more 2, the math only works if the sample size is large enough.
If you have a tie game with 10 seconds left, a 90% dunk is way more valuable that a 40% three, even though threes are worth more than twos and yada yada … the math needs a large sample to pay out and in a tight game, under Joe’s system we’re frequently just taking bad shots.
So yea, Joe’s a good leader, he conducts himself with integrity, and he won a title, but sometimes the way he wants us to play is very cold, mechanical and without grace & teamwork, the “beautiful game” so to speak and that coldness sometimes zaps the joy out of the fandom experience. And, just me personally, I wish we’d go back to last years shot profile.
But overall yea, it’s not like we’d be better off to fire Joe and just hire someone else
Smart2Nesmith43 wrote:redslastlaugh wrote:Part of sports is rising to the occasion and playing great in the moment.
In the 79 Final Four, Larry Bird was 16/19 from the field to beat DePaul and go to the Final
16/19 is 84% from the field
Nobody said Bird rode his unbelievably hot shooting, or that variance determined the outcome. People just said that Bird played a great game.
Smart2Nesmith43 wrote:2022-2023 Heat wide open three pointers attempts / percentage
Regular season 13.7 / 37.1
First round 10.4 / 42.3
Second round 14.2 / 37.6
Conference finals 9.6 / 58.2
Finals 10.0 / 38.0
Embarassing they lost 3 games to the Celtics despite riding the hottest shooting streak of all time.
So what you are saying is that Miami's players rose to the moment. Not really sure how that's an indictement of Mazzulla. I wonder in what magical world we live in where the Heat players decided to knock down open shots just in the conference finals at a rate that not even Steph Curry could sustain but were very average at every other point in the year., but it has nothing to do with variance, just being clutch. Of course, being the clutch gods that they are they returned to shooting completely average once they got to play in the biggest games of the season. You know like clutch players do.
In the real world, Mazzulla keeps cranking out 55+ wins season like it's nothing with top 5 units on both sides of the ball, goes deep into the playoffs every year, there's barely ever a peep from a player being unhappy about how things are going and he is willing to work on his weaknesses. Is he perfect ? No but I dare you to find somebody available that's better. Firing the coach in and of itself accomplishes nothing. Ask the Bucks fans that demanded Budenholzer's head without a succession plan in place how it's going now.
If you somehow feel like Mazzulla isn't getting the most out of this roster and the Celtics should dominate like the KD Warriors or the Jordan Bulls, I invite you to take another look at those rosters and then what Joe has to work with. Which is a team whose best player isn't close to being the best in the world and the second best player is like a border line all star.
I also love the disconnect about how it's completely expected from a rookie player to improve over the course of his career but a coach is a finished product the moment he sits on an NBA bench. Because your precious Spo looked far more lost in the beginning, including during the 2011 finals, than Mazzulla ever did. I think he turned out fine and so do you clearly.
