Powder Blue wrote:The Rebel wrote:While Shaw is improving what I see is a below average coach that is being bailed out by Lawson, Chandler, Mozgov, and Gallo playing much closer to their capabilities.
Decided to get all up in my ass this morning huh?
#1 I never said Karl was terrible and I never said Shaw was great, I also never mentioned COY. I like you was ready to move on from Karl, I'm not about to re-hash his whole tenure here with you again. We're arguing over spilt milk. Every year there was an excuse, you outlined most of them...sorry if they got old to me.
#2 Scottcarman was saying that he'd rather have Philly owners than ours, that's where my competitive comment came from. Rebel I'm pretty sure you do not support their tanking model but I could be wrong. I do think that we are competitive this year, that 57 win squad was 9-9 on 12/3 and I suspect we'll be 9-9 after tonight. Lotta games left to play.
#3 Shaw didn't build this roster and we all know it's flawed. The inability of this team to contend is not all on his shoulders.
So here we are at the beginning of December one game over .500. Forgive my optimism after our recent 8-2 stretch. Shaw is far from perfect, playing JJ at the 5 is a poor decision. Overall he's got the guys playing better....or maybe it's just the players and he deserves no credit.
Rebel I'm not sure I recall what your expectations were this season for you to be so frustrated and disappointed. I expected 7-8 seed, without a better backup pg I don't see us being able to best that. Not making the playoffs will be underacheiving. Rebel I welcome your opinon as to what you expected this season?
Sorry if it feels I went after you yesterday, but the fact is calling people casual fans because they do not agree with you irritates the piss out of me, I also hate the whole argument of I like this guy better than the last guy. Especially when Shaw is worse than Karl, and Karl was not a great coach.
#1 I will agree Karl had a lot of excuses, but my problem is that has not changed, last year Shaw had to many injuries to deal with (forget the fact the team only started playing well when those injuries happened) this year guys are still trying to come back from injuries. In other words nothing has changed on the injury front, although if I remember correctly you hated Karl scapegoating the players almost as much as I did, yet you ignore it from Shaw despite the fact that it is pretty obvious Shaw is the bigger problem than the lack of talent.
#2 I will agree tanking is a terrible idea, if you were a fan from 1989-2002 it is not hard to figure out why tanking really does not work, people bring up the Thunder and Spurs, the Spurs did not really tank, they had their 2 best players out injured for the year and last I checked the Thunder have not won anything.
#3. This roster is flawed in that they do not have a superstar, but this team is extremely deep with above average talent at all 5 starting spots and a top 3 bench, Shaw does not seem to know how to use it, but that is on him. You have 3 7 footers on the bench, yet you use Hickson at center while teams dump the ball into the post to below average centers who score at will? Our best backup PG is Foye (I know he is a combo guard) and our best backup SG looks to be Harris, yet Foye is the backup SG while a hobbled Robinson is trying to be a backup PG despite obviously not being close to recovered from his injury.
As I said I think Shaw is improving a little bit, but talent will rise, there was no way this team was a bottom dweller as they looked their 1st handful of games, but the difference is you seem to give Shaw a ton of credit while I give him a little.
Also if you think this is a playoff team this team needs to win 50 games, and even with Shaw improving, what I have seen the last 2 nights tells me Shaw is going to prevent that.
I will post my thoughts from the Portland game in that thread, but as I said Shaw almost cost us the game in Utah as well. In Utah he went with Faried and Hickson against 2 7 footers while the lead was being taken away.The Nuggets lost a 20 point lead when a bad team went with their 3rd and 5th best bigs on the court together. Nobody on the Nuggets could get into the lane on offense, and nobody on defense could defend the paint properly. You can use undersized players if your goal is to run, as Gobert and Kanter cannot run with the Nuggets bigs, but when you insist on playing a slow half court game than it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that guys cannot overcome 5 inches of height difference in the post. Is that due to lack of talent? I don't know, I know Mozgov was in foul trouble but there are 2 other 7 footers that were available and sitting on the bench, you cannot claim that you did not have an answer on the roster and that you were just outplayed when you refuse to even try to answer that. You have your players being screwed by the whistle and yet you stand there with a smug look on your face because you do not believe in working the refs, yet once again it is a fact that the Nuggets commit the most penalties in the league, while fouls against them are ignored constantly.
This team has the talent to win 50 games, but the coach is looking more and more like he will prevent that from happening.
