blazza18 wrote:paulpressey25 wrote:There is a scenario out there that Bud has overachieved with this roster the past three years. Not sure I subscribe to it, but plausible.
Outside of being pretty stubborn and having a ceiling of what he is as a playoff/situational coach, I think Bud probably got the best out of what he had.
It's a yes and no for me, it's not an easy answer.
Bud got the absolute best out of squeezing the numbers and the analytics. The decision tree of our offense is strictly constructed by value: first try for layup/dunk/free throws (highest value), if that fails try to find a three (second highest value), and if that fails too give it to Mids to do his best. It literally doesn't get better than this, and it's Bud who did it, we owe him that. The difference from someone like Kidd and many other NBA coaches is night and day.
However, Bud did nothing to prepare and condition his stars for the pressure of the playoffs.
When his big boys get stuck and can't score for whatever reason, or get tired, or get in foul trouble during random games in the regular season, Bud bails them out by:
A) resting them immediately
B) using the team system to convert bench and role players to scorers by simply putting them in the right spots and giving them value options (very effectively, it has to be said)
C) never letting his stars play with foul trouble
D) Going deep in his bench to keep the pace of the game artificially high but without having to do it with his starters
E) Never having long training sessions (Buds training times are always organised towards finishing as early as possible to keep high minute players fresh)
F) Other little details like he doesn't even let anyone go for offensive rebounds in case they get tired for **** sake.
The problem with doing that is that all those options typically disappear in high pressure games in the play offs. They just do, everybody is looking to your best 2-3 players to do everything.
You have to let your starters grind it out every now and then, but our starters are so pampered throughout the year that they just don't know how to deal with it. Lebron knows, Kawhi knows, you don't have to condition those type of guys because they know how to prepare themselves, but as it turns out you absolutely have to do it for the Giannis and Khris of this world. They just don't know, I'm guessing they must have this expectation in the back of their minds that the coach will bail them out again like he did all year.
And it's now hard to explain to Giannis specifically who is a notorious creature of habit, how the hell is it that what he always used to do (that got him 2 MVPs by the way) was actually wrong, and he probably has to change his whole annual routine all of a sudden.
That's my interpretation, I might be wrong but that's how I read it.