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Why is it that when it comes to coaching, they get none of the credit and all of the blame?

Discussion in 'Houston Rockets: Game Action & Roster Moves' started by meh, Dec 17, 2012.

  1. catch22

    catch22 Member

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    seriously, mcfail and sampstupid has cost us way too many games with their bad decision making during games, this is not even up for debate

    we have a group of talented young player who are also unselfish, that is why we are winning some games, i am struggling to see how is this related to coaching
     
  2. jscmedia

    jscmedia Contributing Member

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    Look everybody knows McHale and Sampson have a devious plot to make either Lin or Harden look either good or bad every game! So obvious.

    Go Baby Rockets!
     
  3. Outlier

    Outlier Member

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    Yeah, the coaches have nothing to do with the winning. These talented young players are doing it all on their own. :rolleyes:
     
  4. catch22

    catch22 Member

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    they are below average coaches. are they helping rockets in winning games, Yes, but so can many other coaches out there.
     
  5. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    So, in your opinion it is not up for debate. I disagree. So what is your evidence? Do you have the list of factors you considered in coming to your conclusion?
     
  6. PeppermintCandy

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    I was a huge skeptic of the McHale hire, particularly because I'm such a big Adelman fan, but I think McHale has done a good job so far. He 's instilled confidence in holdovers like Patterson, Smith and Morris, allows Harden to fully embrace the go-to guy role, and is getting maximum value out of Douglas, whom many considered washed up.

    And IMO, he's giving Lin room to develop his game and make mistakes, while tempering expectations of Linsanity.

    It would great if he could find a bit more playing time for the rookies, but that's a quibble. Overall, he's shown a lot of trust in our young guys and they've responded.
     
    1 person likes this.
  7. catch22

    catch22 Member

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    compared to adelman, McHale has achieved nothing so far in his coaching career. even adelman is not a great coach
     
  8. catch22

    catch22 Member

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    not up for debate so far, in my opinion. what's your evidence that mcfail has done a ok job? more ok than the average coach in NBA?

    harden and asik are playing great that is because morey has done his job finding good players for the rockets. on the other hand, mcfail has failed to deliver with his decision making during games. we lost at least 2-3 games because of wrong substitution and no call for timeout.
     
  9. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    My argument is somewhat technical at this phase. If you would like me to go into more detail I will gladly oblige.

    Using the "eye test" you can break a game down into tiny time slices. During any one of those time slices you can find some disagreement with the coaches or players decisions. But as a fan you have no understanding of what prompted the coaching staff to make their decision. You cannot see beneath any one decision to ascertain what prompted a coach to make the decision that he did. Did he make the correct decision, but execution screwed it up? Was the player you so wanted to see on the court so gassed that he would be ineffective? And so on.

    However, if you step back from tiny time slices and look at the performance of a team through say 24 games the you are forced to look at overall performance. The unreliable and often wrong "eye test" is taken out of the equation. Doing so eliminates the personal reactions to the coaching style, which means that you can factor out of the equation your personal judgements, based on terribly sparse information, of the coaches decisions.

    So, the youngest team in the NBA, with a completely new roster is 12-12. In historical perspective that is really really good. Using historical averages one might expect the Rockets record should be 6 and 18 or so. The only team that young that had a better record were the 2008 - 2009 Blazers. And didn't they have a few phenomenal players named Roy, Aldridge and Batum?

    And that is about how I would teach an introductory calculus class.
     
    #69 jtr, Dec 18, 2012
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2012
  10. Aleron

    Aleron Contributing Member

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    how many wins per year do you think the coach actually changes?

    The difference between PJ and the completely useless is about 5, heh.
     
  11. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    By this logic, it's impossible to find a good coach since you go by accomplishments. You wouldn't want Scott Brooks 3 years ago, because he was a bad coach back then. But now that he's a coach that took his team to the finals, and has become "good," OKC wants to keep him. The same with Phil Jackson back when he was a bad coach before the Bulls won. Or Riley being a bad coach before he won with the Lakers. And then they became great coaches magically, and they became unavailable.

    In fact, a coach therefore will always suck by your logic as long as he doesn't have super talented teams. Because it's been proven in the NBA that no coach can win without supreme talent. And the Rockets don't have supreme talent.

    So you should basically stop caring about who coach the Rockets until we have players capable of 60+ wins. But of course, by your logic, McHale would be an awesome coach by then, and therefore we should keep him because he'd be accomplished.
     
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  12. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    You seem to be very good with finding stats. Can you find evidence that support your belief that McHale's in-game coaching has cost the Rockets more games than other coaches for their teams? Because I know from just watching NBA games that you can say the same thing about every coach, including the best. So in order to say one coach is worse than another, you have to prove that one is more susceptible to costing wins than another.

    Otherwise, it would just be a baseless opinion.
     
  13. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    Oh, and to add to the above post, also please show that players perform more optimally with other coaches. Because even if, say, the Rockets blow more 10 point leads than others, it doesn't mean another coach is better. Because it's possible that the other coach would not have developed our talent as much, and the team would not be good enough to blow a lead in the first place.

    I don't think you can. Nor can I. Therefore I only look at results through win-losses, and how much players develop. And development takes into account their draft position and the likely value one should expect from it. i.e. I don't expect Patterson to become Chis Bosh as a 14th pick, while I fully expect James Harden, whom we traded most of our best assets for, to be at least all-star worthy.
     
  14. mike_lu

    mike_lu Member

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    To be honest, with a rebuilding team, you're unlikely to get a top notch coach.

    I agree with both Meh, and Torocan. Their views are not mutually exclusive. As long as your criticisms are consistent and valid, not child rants, you can criticize a coach (or player) despite team record a player stats.

    I agree with Torocan's criticisms, but in support of McHale, he does invest a lot of time with the players, and they obviously like and respect him. Our front court has improved, I think a mix of him and CD (I recall reading McHale working a lot with Greg Smith over the offseason) contributed a lot to this. And I think he holds his players attributable to improving their weaknesses more so than Rick Adelman did. Adelman focuses more on their strengths whereas McHale worked on weaknesses and we saw Martin and Chase improve their defense last year as an example.

    What I find a bit lacking with McHale is that a lot of what he says he wants to instill in the team are inconsistent with what they actually end up doing. For example, he says with the high pace the Rockets plat at, we should play 9-10 deep, but we don't. He wants to move the ball and create better shots, but a lot of plays are Harden iso plays with little ball movement, screens and highly predictable. He also suffers a little from the common fan syndrome - sometimes I feel that he's a bit too involved watching the game, and makes adjustments too slowly or not at all. And strategy wise, his offense (and defense) is just quite predictable.

    But whereas the players have gone through half the season, the coaches due to this year's circumstances, have each only had a quarter. It is too early to say whether they will improve or done a bad job.

    The X&Os are lacking, the in-game adjustments also, the system isn't well-developed nor does it look like it's heading in that direction, but if the coaches are able to bring out the best in the players through skills development, accountability etc, is it enough to offset?

    I read Deron Williams article in ESPN talking about how he believes he hasn't played well since moving from Utah to Brooklyn. Scoring and assists are still high, but effiency and shooting percentages down. deron says this is because he has been a 'systems' guy since college, and Jerry Sloan has a great system for PGs with PnRs, whereas in Brooklyn the team relies more on individual ability and iso plays. I think the article has some parallels to Houston's situation as well as offers insights to this discussion, in terms of whether/how much a coach has an impact or not on a team.

    Wins/losses is the ultimate measure for a team, but how the coaches have achieved it and whether the decisions made for example in game matters a lot. It's like poker, you can win a hand despite making low probability decisions, and it's not hindsight or whether you won or lost that tells you whether you made the right decision or not. It is what you did at each specific point in time.

    I fear McHale talks a better game than he can actually coach one.
     
    #74 mike_lu, Dec 18, 2012
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2012
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  15. roxxy

    roxxy Member

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    Just curious, what are Rockets fans opinion on hypothetically having Sloan as the head coach? Interested, not interested why or why not?
     
  16. split41

    split41 Member

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    How could he find stats for this? He provided examples for his analysis, what do more do you need? If you find problems with the examples he used, dissect that, instead of asking him to provide statistics that are based on being able to predict alternate timelines.

    It's an opinion, but it's an educated opinion. We have the ability of hindsight, we can see in retrospect that particular decisions were bad decisions. In the heat of the game, we expect a coach to be able to make in-game decisions that are good decisions (That's why they are the coach). Do we expect a coach to always make good decisions? Of course not, but we do expect them to make consistently good decisions.

    "So in order to say one coach is worse than another, you have to prove that one is more susceptible to costing wins than another." No one else has coached this personnel so any coach comparison's to gauge "costed wins", I think, here, is invalid.

    This isn't meant to be an attack, but what you're asking of this other poster seems a bit extravagant. If the fact that the coaching has not been optimal could be easily found in statistics then this wouldn't even be a debate - it'd be a fact that delusional people were disputing. It's a debate because it is based on some subjectivity.

    I personally think the coaching has improved as the season has progressed, but it is still far from ideal, but this can be attributed to the coaching staff dealing with a new roster and learning more about the players personality and abilities. The last game (knicks game), while I was only to able to watch portions of it, seemed to have been better coached - I noticed more screens and plays, but like I said I was only able to watch portions.
     
  17. mike_lu

    mike_lu Member

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    I think age is definitely a key way to look at how the Rockets Are supposedly outperforming what conventional wisdom would suggest their win-loss reord would be (and hence the coaches are supposedly doing a good job).

    But the Rockets aren't a typical young team, they were put together by the Morey!!!

    The young age is deceiving, because most teams that young typically consists of not-NBA-ready high draft picks, playing in their rookie contract, and either tanking or has a losing culture that's difficult to turnaround. A lot of individual talent, but not able to play together.

    But the Rockets are constructed very differently. parsons and Patterson were amongst the most NBA ready rookies when they entered, and in the 3rd/2nd years are mature, low TO players with a very defined role (with Parsons expanding into something bigger). Harden's an Olympian and deserving of a max contract, with already superstar stats in OKC when not playing with both Durant AND Westbrook at the same time.

    Asik despite being a backup had elite defensive stats and plenty of international experience and minutes. Lin despite his inconsistencies and short track record, put up stats for his first 7 starts only few stars have put up in history. They both are $8M/yr players despite their young age.

    And not only this, you have to look at Harden, Lin and Asik's plus/minus, PER and win-share/48 min stats last year, they're not typical 23-26 year old stats, and with Parsons improvement, it is a pretty decent 4/5 starting five. And the whole team is unselfish, team-first, which is also not typical for young guys fighting stay in the league or to get their first big paycheck after the rookie scale contract is over. These are mature players, personality/emotional-wise that Daryl Morey has got.

    In fact, I wrote a thread at the start of the season saying this team could potentially be as good if not better than The 2011-12 Rockets based on personnel (via a comparison of the key rotation players in 2011-12 to 2012-13) with the question mark mainly bench production, not starters.

    http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=228078

    It is just analysts that don't follow the Rockets closely that put out the 25 to 35 win projections based on age and the short sample of games Lin/Asik and Harden has played/started. And then fan expectations get anchored down based on those projections.

    Has the coaches done a decent job keeping the team together, focused, and not let their youth/experience get the better of them? Absolutely. Did the coaches take a .300 team and made it a .500 team? Hardly the case.

    The players themselves and Morey expected this team to have a chance at the playoffs at the start of the year. It was based on the players Morey got, the talent, hard-working and unselfish culture, and hoped improvements in the players, not so much the coaches. It really is Morey's best year yet!!!
     
  18. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Are you confusing player performance with coaching? Is the Rockets roster executing better as they become more comfortable with the system and their team mates? That seems to me to be a much simpler and much more likely explanation.
     
  19. CXbby

    CXbby Member

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    You missed the point.

    Yes, McHale and co. make mistakes.

    But, so does every coach.

    Unless you can prove that other coaches we can attain make less mistakes than McHale, while also maintaining what McHale does well, it is pointless to nitpick every questionable coaching decision.

    Also, it's a new team. If we were a veteran team who have played together for years vying for a championship, the criticism in this thread would be warranted. That isn't the case. The Rockets have been together for 20 games.

    I don't need to read a 500 word essay to tell me what is wrong with the team right now. We all see it. It will get better. A smart guy like torocan is doing what smart guys tend to do.

    Overthinking it.
     
    1 person likes this.
  20. mike_lu

    mike_lu Member

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    Hypothetically ... Ask again next year. McHale is easily safe this year.

    Sloan is too old as a long-term solution. But if he is willing to have Finch on his staff and willing to groom him into a long-term solution for he a rockets, he'd be ideal. Phil Jackson isn't walking through that door.
     

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