Should Kevin McHale lose his job after the first round loss?

Yes. That last defensive stand was piss poor. Perfect ending for us - bad defense bite us.

 

McHale has got to go, but the last play wasn't his fault.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNgf_-Yqu9c&feature=youtu.be

McHale tells them to stay on their guy (Bev on Lillard) .

Harden tells them to switch. http://i.mobypicture.com/user/TomMartinKATC/view/16856780


Welp.

 

There was no switch

 

He took Lin out of the game. That gives you speed...

 

he was pointing at a big ass in the stands.

 

Parsons was on Mo, Bev was on Lillard. Before the inbound, Harden tells them to switch.

 

I'll be surprised if a decision is made sooner than later. McHale can be a serviceable coach if the Rockets add a third star, but if they are relying on better play from their role players, they need to move on.

 

There is no way you can defend McHale. We had one foul to give. Must have been able to draw some defensive strategy with that in mind.

 

Fire him, please.

 

We a formidable coach that is actually competent in running plays and disciplining the players. Everytime I see McHale, he looks clueless on the what the hell he is suppose to do.

FIRE HIM.

 

I've never thought about not watching one of my teams based on a personnel move they make but I don't think I can watch the Rockets consistently next year if they bring back McHale.

 

We need a coach with discipline. You can't have players just playing lose and not responsible for their action. Popovich would have scold at you if you missed the assignment.

 

Harden wants a new coach ... :grin:

 

McHale is an average coach. Been saying since mid season of last year.

The Play Offs tend to be stacked with the better coaches in the NBA. Among that group McHale is NOT an average play off caliber coach. He's a bottom tier Play Off coach.

He's fine if your team is young and developing and you're hoping that he develops along with your players.

As soon as you're anywhere near a competitive play off caliber team (middle seed or better), he's NOT a good enough coach to compete against the better coaches.

The best thing Morey can do is NOT pick up McHale's option and see about acquiring a better coach.

 

i don't think mchale was a very good coach for us this season...especially if he is giving players instructions and they are not following those instructions. i also thought mchale was really bad at setting up and calling plays out of timeouts this entire season. i only saw a handful of offensive plays run out of timeouts that actually worked as he drew them up (albeit that's a bit of conjecture on my part). and, at one point, he said "i don't know what to do". you never want to hear that out of a coach. that's akin to a submarine captain not having an answer prior to mines destroying the submarine. even if you don't know what you are doing...you should never let on that you don't know what you are doing. but, the biggest weakness i see about mchale is he doesn't know jack about teaching the team defense and how to play defense.

but, les will keep him next season because they are on good terms and les knows rome wasn't built in a day (in our case, a season). he's not going to throw away the progress to start over with a new coach.

 

Fire Mchale Sorry ass! This is all on him!

 

For those of you who are just assuming McHale is gone better be ready to be dissapointed. The players like him, especially Dwight and Chandler, and he made some adjustments to almost come back and win this series. I would love to can his ass, but I just don't see it.

 

Ive told my friends this. i cant invest this much timeand energy if they dont make this obvious move.

 

Can everyone who follow morey twitter keep sending "pls fire mchale!!!" Twit. Keep twitting until morey GET the message. Flood his email, colleagues email, write blogs, columns, every website forums, suggestion box, anything u can think of.

The rockets deserves better than this. What a waste of talent.

 

No. I'll swim upstream a bit.

If you look in the mirror and see spinach between your teeth and you don't pick it out, who's fault is that? Your parents? Possibly.

The biggest overarching problem the Rockets have is a lack of discipline. The Rockets ranked 29th in the league in turnovers and have had 87 games to see film of themselves making a variety of mistakes -- mostly correctable. Is it the coach's responsibility to eliminate those mistakes? All he can do is point out the mistakes, do a walk-through of what should have happened and hope the player(s) can incorporate the corrective behavior in future similar scenarios. The painful reality is it can be a slow process.

Most players know what to say when they lose. The diagnoses almost always sounds good. But if the same mistakes keep happening over and over again, in spite of the lip-service to the contrary, I would submit the player(s) just don't get, either because they are in denial or they don't really think the mistakes will get them in the long haul -- "Hey, we won 50+ games playing this way."

The coach does have the responsibility to call every player up for any of these kinds of mistakes. No exceptions. Is it possible for a coach to be too player friendly? Possibly. But I see McHale similar to Rudy in that regard. There were plenty of nights when fans blamed him for Rockets losses, but fans never tire of seeing the video of him saying, "Never underestimate the heart of a champion." Is it possible that great players who become coaches might be better at X's and O's depending on what position they played when a player? Sure, I think so. There haven't been so many post players who became head coaches, off the top of my head.

I recall an article recently where Kyle Lowry said he made a mistake not listening to McHale; that he could have learned more had he not been stubborn. So what do we make of that?

This loss hurts bad. But for those of us who were deprived of watching the Rockets all season long because CSN Houston couldn't bring themselves to cut a deal with Dish and DirecTV, we got a bit "desensitized," as another thread asks. And there is a bit of poetic justice to this loss (some might say karmic) for those who couldn't be satisfied with Fox Sports Houston. Many fans got screwed out of watching their favorite team for the whole season. Unfortunately, this is just salt in the wound for those fans.

Mistakes have been made at the personnel level, too. The Rockets let Lin go only to covet him later. And now fans are quite animated on one side or the other about him. For all the grit Patrick Beverly brings to the table, I would submit your starting point guard needs to be more consistently an offensive threat. He's great defensively, but not so much offensively. Harden is more the point guard for the team... except he isn't a point guard.

The Rockets look so good on paper. But they are a young team and an undisciplined team. Dwight Howard is the most experienced player on the team and for the series, pretty much lived up that billing. Everyone else has to be considered still in a playoff learning mode. Harden can't be both a point guard and a shooting guard. Terrence Jones may mature, but he also may not be able to start all games. Several players may have to adjust to "sharing" starts in games, depending on who the opponent is. It took 2 home court losses to decide Jones couldn't guard Aldridge. A costly lesson. Considering the complaints by many about the twin towers not working well, it is an example of how starters shouldn't be considered so hard and fast a rule.

It's easy to second-guess coaching AND player AND personnel decisions. There are definitely coaching mistakes. And there are surely player mistakes. I think any honest reflection reveals it isn't so black and white as one or the other. Players have to grow and correct mistakes. They are supposed to be grown men, responsible for their skill level and knowledge of the game. And they are supposed to have discipline. If one counts up all the player mistakes -- bad passes, not finishing at the rim, dribbling into trouble, bad free-throw shooting, silly fouls... and the points scored off many of them, it is a significant force. It can break momentum in a few plays and break up a potential run to get momentum. Am I supposed to believe that the whole coaching staff sits idly by in film sessions and practices and lets the players just keep repeating this behavior? It is a coaching staff -- not just McHale. Sure, "The buck stops here," is the rallying cry, but not always a fair one.

None of us feels good right now. But I am not going to blame it all on McHale. If he got out-coached, then how did we end up in the 4th playoff spot ahead of the team we were playing? Every year coaches get fired; some before mid-season, even. It is an unfair bar that most of them don't deserve to measured by. Only 1 team out of 30 every year is going to win that championship trophy. A team like the Rockets certainly looked good on paper to start the season and they beat Portland 3 out of 4 times during the season to win home-court advantage. But the teams are very closely matched as the season records and series games demonstrated. To me, in the end, Portland just had a bit more discipline and one terrific point guard. And their coach wasn't solely responsible for either.