Chocolate City Jordanaire wrote:fishercob wrote:Chocolate City Jordanaire wrote:I disagree on Javale. I agree on poor guard play.
I think poor coaching had as much to do with Indy losing as anything else. A. J. Price, Jeff Pendergraph, and Kyrylo Fesenko are players that Frank Vogel didn't use this series. Price is a guard who plays good defense. I remember him from U Conn. He could have done much better than -25 in 19 minutes, which is what Darren Collison did. He wouldn't have turned it over as much as Barbosa. Pendergraph doesn't lack strength or athleticism. Seems to me that he's quicker than Hansbrough and at least should have got some minutes. Fesenko is huge. The Pacers needed to play big but they didn't. Hibbert was not that good in game 6. Perhaps the pace of the game was a factor.
I think Vogel's team played passively. The Pacers were really disappointing in the end.
It's always the coach's fault isn't it, my friend? AJ Price wouldn't have solved any of Indy's offensive problems. Indy just lost to a better team.
Indy's problems were too many turnovers, and that allowed Miami to get in transition. That got James and Wade going. Further, soft PG play let Chalmers score more than he should have.
Specifically, game 6 was the coach when you look at the success Indiana had going inside in quarter one, how Miami adjusted to the screens Indiana was setting and how the Heat forced many, many deflections and turnovers. Indiana stopped going inside. Darren Collison and Leandro Barbosa played too many very damaging minutes. Price could have helped their offensive problems just by not turning it over. Who cares if he didn't score. He is stronger than Collison and not as clueless as Barbosa played yesterday.
Vogel coached a crap game yesterday. David West was trying to play PG. Hibbert didn't get nearly enough shots. Vogel stayed with the same lineups instead of trying what I said above. They lost to a better team but not before they did the same dumb things with their bench in the third quarter as they had done with their bench in the second. Failure to adjust is on the coach IMO.
I disagree. "Failure to adjust" intimates the notion that if something is not working, you must try something else. That presupposes that "something else" is a better option than just executing better. Putting essentially untested youngsters who haven't been good enough to crack the rotation for most of the season/playoffs in to an elimination game strikes me as a recipe for disaster. It's not Vogel's fault that Barbosa had butterfingers or that Collison isn't a great ballhandler.
When Miami's complementary guys -- Miller, Chalmers, Battier -- make their 3's, good luck. You want their guys to not "play soft" off of them? You're then providing no help to the guys defending Wade and James = game over.
Indy has inferior talent to Miami. On top of that, the players didn't play well enough to win last night's game. On the flip side, Miami was phenomenal defensively, Wade and James were great, and their role players made huge shots. Give them credit,