SOUL wrote:NavalAviator94 wrote:fklt wrote:
oh, boo hoo, you still defend vogel every now and then dude. a position that might be bordering on being a flat-earther and here you are feigning surprise at that?
skiles was a jerk, and he was the best coach we had during the rebuild. really don't know how hard it is to say that.
I honestly liked Skiles disciplined approach but he clearly lacked patience. He was 100% correct on Elfrid Payton and it would have saved us a lot of grief if Scott and our GM could have seen eye to eye. When you couple that with what the team ended up doing from a player standpoint, after he left, you have to wonder if he saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it - right or wrong.
elfrid would be an ideal backup for this squad (10x the player jerian grant is), and the kid was coming off a promising rookie campaign. no matter if skiles was "right" or not about someone becoming a long-term starter, the front office is going to see what they have in the younger players before doing anything with them.
skiles also took little jabs at oladipo and harris too, benched payton and vuc.. the guy was absolutely a grade A dick and you can see why most of the players quit on him.
quite frankly, it doesn't matter how "good" (compared with vogel (lol) and vaughn (lol, wow grats skiles!) he was when you're a piss poor motivational coach that has very few players that ever liked playing for him in his coaching career. it's akin to being an effective boss that berates employees and gives them no incentive to want to stay in their position. might look good on paper but once you start calling people around and realizing how difficult that person is to work with, it won't get you far.
Your points are definitely valid and I've since went back and looked at the situation with the benefit of hindsight. When you look back at it you can clearly see what happened and you have to look at it from a players perspective as well. Up until January of 16 when the rails fell off, Skiles was a very good coach who brought needed discipline. Unfortunately, I truly believe that he wasn't in the right place mentally to coach again and that had an additional effect on a young teams performance. He admitted to Griffin in Jan that he might have made a mistake coming back. I think he tried to make himself believe if certain changes were made he could do it but in reality, he just didn't have the motivation and a number of players took the brunt of it. Coaching is a grind when you are a young developing team and the culture he walked into was not the best either. The latter part being confirmed by some current and former players.
Elfrid, for all his warts likely suffered a great deal because he knew that his coach, who was also a very talented NBA PG didn't believe in him - that's got to be tough. He was right but at the same time, that likely caused Elfrid to lose belief in himself that was further exacerbated when Vogel and the new FA's they spent money on came in were terrible. I honestly think that Elfrid may have a chance to redeem himself with the Pelicans because they were playing so well with him until he got injured.
From the trade perspective regarding Harris. I honestly can't fault it really because the team wanted to win and we needed a PG who could score. We also got a pretty decent backup PF who could shoot the 3. Both on expiring that gave us cap space in the summer. Remember, we had Aaron Gordon who looked to become a better player than Harris and we also drafted Hezonja who was beginning to play well under Skiles tutelage near the end of the season.
From a team perspective your HC just quit. There was speculation he quit because of Hennigan(denied by all), and there was also speculation that the players we had may not be any good if your HC quits because, who does that? We have a team owner who is in poor health and everyone wants to give him a chance to see the team win again.
So what do you do under those circumstances and you have cap space? You hire Frank Vogel because he helped bring a young team to the playoffs consistently and Paul George kinda looks like Aaron Gordon. As a GM, you want to show the league it's not you and that you can absolutely get along and support your coach so you spend that cap space to get players he believes will win and we right the ship. The problem was that style of play was going away and the rest is history.
At the end of the day, the people that suffered the most were the young guys like Elfrid and Hezonja that really needed development, the fans and ultimately Mr. Devos who never got to see the team win again. Skiles made the mistake of saying he was ready to coach again and at the time I believe he though he was. Unfortunately, that set off a chain of events that set this franchise back a few years.
The ship has finally righted so to speak and I hope the team is able to make the right decisions going forward. At a minimum they are changing the culture for the better and are clearly investing in player development. Those can only lead to good things and even more so if they can be patient.
