payitforward wrote:nate33 wrote:It's still extremely disappointing that the defense is so terrible. ...We have a team of pretty smart guys, and all but Lopez, Westbrook and Avdija were on the team last year running the same system. Why are they so clueless?
Rhetorical question. The answer is coaching.
Coaching is one of those activities where a broad spectrum of practitioners are pretty close to one another, & it's much easier to be worse than those guys than it is to be better than them.
Only a very very few NBA coaches have a provable positive effect on their teams as compared to the results you'd get from that "broad spectrum." We are not likely to get one of those very very few guys. But, that doesn't mean that we need to have one of that other group -- the guys who manage to make their players worse.
The coaching choice has to go beyond Xs and Os and is really about creating a positive dynamic with the team, forming good relationships with players, and building a culture. Just about any coach is going to be solid with their Xs and Os.
Van Gundy and Spoelstra in Miami, Nick Nurse in Toronto, Brad Stevens in Boston, Popovich in San Antonio were all hired internally. They all have different styles, but you have to pick someone who you can trust and will stick with for several years. Firing a coach for not meeting some short-term goal is short-sighted and leads to a merry-go-round in leadership, which does not give a franchise the stability it needs.
