Post#87 » by Nivek » Tue Jan 17, 2012 5:24 pm
C'mon CCJ. I know you want to fire Flip, but we don't need to play make-believe to do it.
Eddie had an Arenas who was one of the elite offensive weapons in the league. Flip had A slowed-down broke-down Arenas who'd lost his burst and his leaping ability.
Hinrich was in decline by the time he got to DC. And he got hurt.
Flip had Haywood for 49 games. During a season in which Arenas was a shadow of himself, Caron Butler played like ass, and Jamison began his age-related drop-off (something a lot of guys do at age 33). Mike Miller and "injured" went together in a lot of sentences that year. The team was 19-33 when the front office decided to blow it up. They went 7-23 after they dealt Jamison.
And let's recall that the year before Flip arrived, Washington started 1-10 under Jordan, and finished 18-53 under Tapscott. Flip didn't inherit a powerhouse or even a playoff team. He got a bad team. At the time, most thought it was primarily due to injuries and that the team would turnaround when Arenas returned.
But, Arenas was bad, and it turned out some guys had gotten older and started to decline, some guys got closer to the end of their contracts and started worrying about personal agendas, and the team talent base got thinner at exactly the moment they needed more depth because the youngsters were so limited.
I am not arguing that Flip has done a great job because I don't think he has. I think he ought to be fired. In fact, as you well know, I don't think he should have been hired in the first place. But, we don't need to make up stuff to justify canning him. And pretending that Flip and Eddie had remotely situations is making stuff up.
Eddie went 25-57 in his first year with a young roster (and a sometimes-injured Arenas). The next year, he got Jamison.
Flip went 26-56 during a "blow it up" season. Then 23-59 in a season kinda similar to Eddie's first year with the team. But Flip hasn't gotten a Jamison. And he doesn't have a Haywood or even a Larry Hughes, much less the offensive machine that was Arenas. Go back and look at that roster Eddie had in year 2 and compare it to this one. Position by position, is there ANYONE on this roster we'd take over the guys Eddie had that season?
I think most of us with a brain would take Arenas over Wall, Hughes over Young, Jamison over Blatche, Haywood over McGee, Etan over Seraphin. Closer calls on Dixon vs. Crawford and Jarvis vs. Lewis. I think most of us would take Booker over Ruffin. The point is that Eddie had a lot more talent than Flip by his 2nd season with the team. I just don't see any way to logically argue otherwise.
"A lot of what we call talent is the desire to practice."
-- Malcolm Gladwell
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