Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryan_Wilson
He's not breaking ground this year by playing at a pace faster than everyone else. The entire NBA has incorporated this run and gun faster pace philosophy when it suits them. And he's certainly not coaching the rockets to a top 10 defense. This is the guy who benched Gasol for some scrub(earl clark) in LA because he wanted to play faster. Instead of adjusting the offense to help one of his best players(maybe the best once Kobe was hurt) he benched him because he wanted the offense to go faster. That's not a genius, thats a guy who doesn't know how to get the most out of his players, loser ball IMO. We all give RC crap for some of his rotation choices but he gets the best(most of if not all the time) from his players. He makes adjustments to the offense to cater to a guys strengths. He tries to mix in some zone schemes and such to make the defense better than what it is. He's coaching winning basketball and getting the most out of some pretty shit rosters around here. Dantoni may have laid groundwork as you say but other teams are doing what he did better and they are coaching while they are at it. Adding a guy like Harden to this just makes it worse IMO.
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The D'Antoni hire for the Lakers was a disaster from the beginning. I agree that he could have done a better job, but to pin that failure solely on how he used Pau Gasol is strange.
And if we're talking about getting the most out of players (which I agree should be the majority basis by which we measure coaches) let's do an exercise with these Rockets. What do you think their ceiling is with D'Antoni? How about if they had a good-but-not-great coach (Steve Clifford, Scott Brooks, someone like that) instead? How about with Carlisle? I think the absolute ceiling for this team is about 48-50 wins. Want to bet against them getting pretty close to or exceeding that?
Instead of talking about what D'Antoni
doesn't do well, acknowledge what he does do well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DevinHarriswillstart
Problem is that the rest of the league has caught up. D'Antoni can coach an offense, but he can also let lesser offenses go to town on his non existent defense.
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FWIW, the 7 seconds or less Suns were generally a top 12-18 offensive team in terms of defensive efficiency... with THAT personnel. People talk about their struggles because back then, what we all (myself included) looked at was PPG yielded. D'Antoni isn't going to change the world defensively, but let's not act like his Suns were a bottom 5 defense.