hell no. just because jbb isn't a good coach doesn't mean we should've kept mchale. mchale was a puppet for morey. he was not the coach, morey was. he was just the motivator and game manager. the decision to fire him 11 games after a wcf appearance was because the team lacked any resemblance of cohesion. he had lost the locker room. since his only job was to be a motivator, once he couldn't do that, he was truly useless here. the only reason the 'experts' keep saying it was a terrible move by the rockets is because they all love/respect mchale as a player. from a rockets/business standpoint, it was a move that was long overdue. the only reason that jbb was given until the end of the season wasn't because they thought he'd be better than mchale. they did it because les doesn't want to pay mchale's salary AND a new coach's salary at the same time. les will have to do just that next season, but 2 seasons of that was apparently too costly. they also took a chance that things couldn't get any worse under jbb, and they didn't get worse. the players played harder, albeit not much better. there was a hail mary chance that by going with jbb they would be able to keep the same system that got them to the wcf rather than uproot everything under a new coach during the regular season. sure, you can make that argument to the media, but the real reason for sticking with jbb was the money. the added bonus of waiting for the summer to replace mchale: 1) we get to keep our pick. and there's no way i would've been ok giving it up for a 4 game sweep. and 2) there are a LOT more coaching options available at season's end than 11 games into a new season. was mchale a good coach? not at all. do we miss him? no because we weren't going anywhere with him. look at how the players quit on him. if he stayed, we'd have lost a lot more games. goes this mean jbb is a good coach? not at all. its time to scrap the whole coaching staff and force morey to give up control of coaching. hire real coaches and get out of their way.
Were you not watching the first 10 games?????? They STUNK!!! They were on there way to losing like 10 IN A ROW!! It might have been too early but clearly they wern't responding to McFail. It was going to happen sooner or later Obviously you were not watching the games
I would say McHale is a better coach than JBB and it was stupid to fire him when they didn't have a better coach candidate to replace him with. Should have fired McHale earlier and when there were better coach candidate out there...I wanted him fired in 2014, but last year he actually won me a bit. If we fired McHale and hired Steve Kerr in 2014....
Firing Mchale was the right move. Hiring his assistant Bickerstaff was the wrong move!! The should've cleaned house and gotten somebody else to coach this team!
From what Morey said in the 790 interview, he seemed to imply that McHale got canned because of the crappy training camp. That was totally on the head coach. Once the season started, it was too late to fire him. The chances of landing a good coach at that point were pretty much zero. I thought it was kneejerking by Les. A promoted assistant was not going to turn the ship around. That said, the real mistake was extending McHale a year before that. It was a total head scratcher.
Mchale was bad for an NBA coach, but he was still good enough to coach in the NBA. JB wouldn't make a noticeable difference on an AAU team.
Answer: We'll never know. It's because JBB is so bad that McHale looks good. We could have pulled a high school coach into the job and done no worse with this team.
Mchale would have had the Rockets firmly in the 5th seed at least and easily IMO. Dwight and DMO would have had more touches which would have gotten the Rockets more wins when Harden couldn't go all world and put the team on his back. Mchale should have had this full season and fired if he didn't make it back to the WCF again.
McHale lost to the Trailblazers two years ago with a healthy Harden, healthy Parsons, and Playoff Dwight who was averaging 25 and 15. He got outcoached like hell by Portland's coach. That in and of itself was inexcusable. He should have been fired right then not extended the following year because James was playing out of his mind.
Just because McHell was the Lakers of this season and JBB the 76ers, doesn't make the Lakers any good McFail was garbage. In fact he was largely responsible for the mess this season. He held no one accountable for years, conducted one of the most lackadaisical training camps and 3 20 point blowouts to begin the season Mauri firing Milk Hair and replacing him with his defensive assistant of 4 years here and years before that in Minny is stupidity on Murray's part
I'm one of those people who didn't like him at first but was coming around to really liking him. In many ways, he reminds me of Rudy. A highly intelligent player's coach who knows the game. His style doesn't work well with young players but works very well with a veteran group. It's hard not to like the guy. The poor guy had to bury his daughter and mother during his short tenure here but despite that, he kept coaching. I admired him greatly. I was pissed after he got fired given how successful last year was. McHale wasn't good in terms of pre-game strategy but his in-game substitutions and adjustments were damn solid. The man knows the game of basketball. This season has been horrific and was from the get-go but they should've given him the opportunity to turn it around. Last year, we were coming off a WCF appearance and his late-game coaching in the second round was a big reason as to why.
I started this thread because I always felt like McHale got a lot of unnecessary hate and now I'm hoping people can see just how solid as a coach he was. Guess not lol.
