I've posted this video before, this time I want to particularly address ongoing questions about Ryan and HC position.
Many MIN fans understand that the roster we had a year before had three serious issues:
* - shooting
* - passing, ballhandling
* - defense
The difference between Rosas and Thibs vision is not on micromanagement level. In a nutshell, it is difference between strategy and tactics.
From wiki:
A tactic is a conceptual action or short series of actions with the aim of achieving of a short-term goal.
A strategy is a set of guidelines used to achieve an overall objective, whereas tactics are the specific actions aimed at adhering to those guidelines.
Thibs lost the war in MIN, because his strategy did not align with tactic. For instance, we had first palyoff appearance but we failed to build a momentum to improve as team further. We made a win-now Butler trade, but we failed to keep him etc. As I said, Thibs won some battles, but he lost the war.
Now back to video above. The author of this video analyzes MIN pre deadline stats. He gives plenty of facts that our offense under Ryan coaching generated plenty quality shot opportunities, the problem was not execution on coaching level. The problem was technical execution on players level and some in-game coaching. Our FO recognised issues after giving short run to KAT-RoCo-Wiggins core, and brought here DLo, Beasley, Juancho, JJ, Vanderblit, Evans, Spellman and #17 pick.
After trade deadline our new assembled roster without any preparation and chemistry, without KAT, showed promising improvement in terms of shooting, passing and ballhandling. Ryan "plugged" new players in the same offense and they showed whether they fit. One big confirmation of alignment between strategy and tactic in our case is how new players who brought here FO, played under our coaching staff.
* - DLo is an excellent fit
* - JJ is an excellent fit
* - Beasley is an excellent fit
* - Juancho is an excellent fit
* - Vanderbilt is an excellent fit
Back to our current HC. The only point where both pre trade deadline and post trade deadline team offense meet is our coaching staff. And Ryan is a central piece of it. Just list a few of critical connections/endpoints
* - our FO (Rosas/Gupta/Pascucci) <===> Ryan
* - Iowa Wolves (Sam Newman-Beck) <===> Ryan
* - assistant coaches (Prigioni/Gates) <===> Ryan
* - associate head coach (Vanterpool) <===> Ryan
* - player development coaches <===> Ryan
Our FO has been making an excellent job identifying, architecting team strategy(long term view, roster provisioning etc), but it means nothing if there is no communication within all underlying levels. MIN 2019-20 season showed that our FO/coaching staff and players are connected on all levels. They have a lot of work to do, they for sure must find better tactical solutions.
To sum up: I think that Ryan has been doing a good job as HC, for many reasons stated above and in video. Anyone who works in complex, large, distributed team understand that in such cases communication is critical to team success. Anyone who manages a group of talented, young, ambitious persons understands who difficult is to lead, communicate. I have been working in IT for almost 20 years. Once I was offered a project coordinator role in a world biggest sport wear/shoes company. My responsibilities would have been managing three relatively small teams: product owners in Germany, IT developers in Belorussia, IT support in India. I declined that offer because I quickly understood that there was no connection between these three distributed teams, project was in constant decline and long history of failures, I would be in a very risky situation with all factors against me. I can only imagine a worse situation to begin HC career than our situation a year ago. Thats why I support, appreciate our work that our FO and HC have done to make this team better. I hope we will win this war one day.