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Originally Posted by spreedom
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.
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I brought up the Pau thing because it was the most memorable. And because it highlights a major problem Dantoni has. He sacrificed his best player arguably(kobe out) being on the floor so he could put clark in, a career scrub, and his reasoning he gave was he wanted to "go faster". Taking your best player and bringing him off the bench for an inferior player to simply run faster isn't winning basketball imo. That would be like if the bulls had butler come off the bench because they wanted to go faster with a guy like nate robinson. I don't necessarily hold him accountable for the lakers win/loss as a whole because they have been a mess for a long time now but he's not without blame.
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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.
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I'm not saying they wont win regular season games, just like Harden will win games without dantoni because many nights great offense will prevail. But what I term "loser ball"(my fault) is to the fact that they will not win when it counts. Last night I watched probably less than half of the game but most of the 4th quarter. And it was clear as day that Capela is their best Center. Yet who did dantoni play? Nene. And that's not some type of matchup play on defense because Capela is miles ahead of Nene at this point. He did that because Nene can shoot a face up jumper and Capela cannot. He also played Ryan anderson with Nene making their front court maybe the worst rebounding/defensive front court ever. Decisions like that, and I'm sure there were more but I did not watch the whole game, are why I say "loser ball". And Harden is no different. As long as a coach is going to allow him to lead the league in Turnovers by not holding him accountable for sloppy play, and allowing him to play literally 0 defense at times when he wants to catch his breath, not to mention the fact that in the playoffs the refs will make it harder to get ft's like they always do and he has to actually make shots conisistently... all of those reasons are why he also is a loser brand of basketball. So to answer the question about another coach? As long as that GM and Owner hold presser's like the one they had this summer basically saying "he carried us, its not his job to also play defense" and the Coach does not or will not hold Harden accountable then the coach won't matter they won't win. But no, I've seen nothing personally from Dantoni with any team that would indicate they would win in the playoffs.