ParticleMan wrote:Brad plays the long game. He isn't that concerned about the regular season. He uses it to sort out his roster, develop guys, and come up with an 8-9 man rotation by playoff time. This is especially the case given the young roster.
This is why we overachieve most playoffs. We've reached the ECF 3 of the 4 years, and I don't think any prognosticators had us as faves for reaching the ECF in any of those years. Ironically, the one year they did, we failed, owing to the he-who-shall-not-be-named-led implosion. But the point is, Brad arranges everything for the playoffs. That's the goal here, not winning Atlantic division banners.
So I'm willing to give Brad till the playoffs. We've looked terrible this year, no doubt. We can toss around a lot of reasons, covid, injuries, roster turnover, blah blah. But the fact is we've been terrible, and for the most part we've looked terrible. Time is running short. But there's still time. And there's still talent. There's still a chance.
If we have another implosion in the playoffs, Brad should be fired. If we have another run to the ECF or beyond, all this "fire brad" talk is going to look stupid. I honestly have no idea what will happen. I'm not seeing how he can turn this around but I'm still hoping he will. Either way these next few months are going to be critical for the direction of our franchise.
I agree with this. This playoffs would tell a lot about Brad’s future. We reached the ecf last playoffs, but we lost bad in that series. Brad’s failure to adjust and poor leadership lost us that series, and a chance for a finals stint. Brad’s failure started with that poor inbound pass defense with less than a second, against the raps. That series would have been over early, if not for that disaster defense. Instead we gave them hope, and ended up playing 7. The following series, you could clearly see that Tatum and the guys were dead tired. It didn’t help that Brad can’t solve the zone, which was pretty laughable. That elimination game was just horrible. We were down like 8 or 9 pts with over 3mins remaining, and we chuck 3’s like we were down big with a minute remaining. Our guys panicked, because our coach looked clueless. Anyways, we did reached the conf finals, but in reality, we underachieved the past two seasons. This season would be a 3rd.