I'm ignorant about a lot of things but most of all offensive schemes. Can someone please just give an example of a great offensive minded coach and why they would theoretically turn us into a contender? It can be two sentences or 200. If you post I will read and try to learn something. Or maybe there's a good Youtube video that you can curate bring to our attention. I remember McHale was a bad one. "Play harder!"
I think Ime is a good coach and is greatly respected by his players. I have to keep reminding myself that this is only his 3rd year as a head coach and only his second as a playoff coach. I can only hope that he and Stone can honestly access his performance and make the adjustments to either hide his weaknesses (hire an offensive assistant with teeth) or take away his options to fall back on his tendencies (get rid of FVV and force the Amen/Jalen/Reed backcourt). He needs to learn to play the hot hand and quit making unnecessary formula driven rotations.
Jalen/Amen are redundant on offense. They both are at their best driving to the rim and neither can shoot. Can't play them together unless one becomes a dramatically better shooter. Or we trade away our current best player.
Yeah it's more of a personel issue at this point. We need consistent offense from the perimeter and you are just straight up not getting that from Jalen, FVV or Amen for that matter.
Amen is already developing a mid-range and floater, that is something Jalen has never been able to accomplish. If you have to trade away Jalen to put Amen at PG, then that’s what you have to do. You build around your superstar not try to force a fit.
Amen's package within 15 feet is far superior to Jalen to the extent that they aren't in the same ballpark. He can bully people and embraces contact, can draw fouls and has better athleticism/better finishing. I'm actually curious as to who the better shooter is from 10-15 feet. It *should* be Jalen but there's a good chance it isn't. As it stands, Jalen has the better handle of the two but it's also more developed. And not monumentally better. Amen is the 1A on this team. Even moreso than Alpy even though Alpy is the better player right now. Sengun is playing for the future on this team and after game 1, seems like that is solidified. Next year can't be sometimes you sometimes me whatever mumbo jumbo. It's Sengun 1A and Amen 2A until Amen develops his offensive game at which point it will flip. Fill in around them and go from there. No more Fred. No more Jalen. Dillon is fine and Jabari needs to be there as well. Just need Reed to either develop or a Jalen alternative like Mathurin or Kon Knueppel in the draft. He just won't be there at 9. The only area where Jalen and Amen complement each other is on the fast break. That's it.
Amen isn't a guard... not a point guard, not a shooting guard, he's a small forward who is an elite defensive player and is a pretty good passer that thrives in the dunker's position. Jalen's success or failure is irrelevant to Amen. He needs Dillon Brooks out of the way.
It's really just disheartening seeing Jalen just dive head first into the lane off ISOs and missing. If he's going to do that you might as well just play Cam and let him be a be a bull in a china shop. Jalen can make pocket passes, but he has no idea how to kick out efficiently once he's full speed into the paint.
Just like the players have to evolve their games, Ime has to evolve his coaching on offense, especially with this team. Part of the reason I wanted Fox on this team is because of what we do (and don’t do) offensively. If he continues with his current way of doing things we will definitely have to trade for a guy that can make up for his lack in this area.
He needs an assistant and it should be Rockets legend Kevin McHale, who had elite offenses in his time here. Ime: Kevin, how do we score more points? Kevin: Simple. Play harder.
You're allowing 200 sentences you say? I don't think there's anyone who can turn us into a prime offensive team or contender - that's way too big a gap. What someone can do is give us a better mix of offense and defense. Maybe drop 1-2 spots in defense and go up 3-4 spots in offense. That can swing a lot of close games. In order to be a prime contender you have to be a top 10 defense and top 10 offense. The humongous majority of champions in NBA history fall in that category. This season we were #12 in this stat called offensive rating. A further look into this though shows that we're "cheating". When people say you should be a top 10 offense, they don't take into consideration that someone may come along and game the numbers by playing a crazy number of rebounders. Offensive rebounds contribute to offensive rating, but that's not the type of top 10 offensive team that wins a title. In reality we're the 6th worst shot making team in the entire NBA in the regular season and the 2nd worst in the playoffs. This means the offensive rebounds are not leading to points in a linear fashion because you still have to make a shot after you grab the offensive rebound. This was not a novel experiment, a lot of coaches who have never won anything have tried this and failed. When you look at NBA champions in history, they are typically very good at TS% (actual shot making) and we're simply not close to that. So basically we're nominally the 12th best offense but to say we're a better offensive team than the Clippers (ranked 15th) is not taken seriously by anyone. We're probably somewhere between the 12th and 24th best offensive team in the league. Let's focus on TS% because that's more accurately showing our shot making abilities rather than being mixed in with our players' natural rebounding ability. Under Silas's final 2 seasons - where we were letting children and morons decide shots for themselves - we were 18th and then 29th. You probably remember we intentionally worsened our team to chase Wemby in Silas' final season. You have to ask yourself: what would have happened if we kept Silas and gave him $80m per season to spend on FA signings. Let's say he also signed FVV and Brooks. Holding the coach constant, you would certainly expect the team to rise up the rankings in TS% given the mandate to start winning immediately (holding people accountable for dumb shots, boxing out, defense and practice habits). Then you bring in FVV, Brooks, Jeff Green and Landale. You have one more summer of improvement from Jabari, Tari, Jalen and Alpi. I would say that even with Silas, we would probably rise a minimum of 4-5 spots. I'm speaking strictly offensively. I'm under no illusion that Silas can do what Ime has done defensively. So now we're 2 years into Udoka's tenure and we're still 24th in TS% despite having far better offensive talent right now than at any point under Silas. Ime got us more possessions via offensive rebounding, but because we're so poor at converting it's not moving the needle. You have to wonder how with 2 more years of development, with Alpi and Jalen better players than they were under Silas, with people playing their roles, how come we're not seeing the individual development lead to team improvement on offense? As for what another coach can do it's really about rotations, player placement and crisp execution. Kenny Atkinson took practically the same exact roster as JB Bickerstaff and moved them from 13th to 1st in TS%. Two things contributed to this: Garland is having a much healthier season (that's not an Atkinson thing) and he moved Evan Mobley out of the paint so that his guards can attack the paint more easily. This is called spacing the floor and Mobley didn't have to become a dramatically better shooter. He just had to take a couple of more 3's and maintain the same %. That's it. It's little chess moves that can improve you, there's no major thing you can transform. You can run a Princeton offense well or you can run it poorly. Many people try it, but not everyone can teach it like Rick Adelman for example. There's no coach in the world who's going to take you from 24th in shot making to top 10 with the same exact roster unless the previous coach was tanking or historically bad at offense. But you can certainly with the right tactical choices and the right MIX of players in your rotation change the opportunities available to your scorers. That can have an compounding effect of giving your scorers more confidence/rhythm, and that stuff seems to help too. A good example of this is how MDA insisted on keeping the paint spacious for James Harden. A bad example is how JB Bickerstaff had Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley in the paint, making Mitchell and Garland's jobs excessively difficult when trying to get to the bucket. The most important shot in basketball is still 2 points at the rim and when you affect that ability even slightly, it has a domino effect on the whole offense. That's why I believe the right offensive assistant can sell a vision to Udoka where he can not be so paranoid about defense that he needs two rim protectors on the floor at all times. He can trust his less defensively inclined guys more, give everyone some time to adjust and we can have a better mix. I think what an MDA or Mazula would have done for us is they would have been on Sengun's a$$ to keep taking 3's in the summer and all season because it's inevitably going to be a major problem for him and us. They wouldn't have just let it slide. We would be looking at a Sengun with twice as much practice at making 3's, we would be able to bring him out a little more often (not a lot), and Amen/Green would find it a lot easier to get drives to the basket in a less obstructed paint (which also delivers bonus FT's usually). Right now and all season, teams just sit in the paint and hope we make our jumpshots - which is a good shot for an average NBA player, but not a good shot for our particular roster. We should be hunting 2's at any cost and avoiding jumpers as much as possible.
It's more the personnel than the coaching..... It's just typical fan behavior to believe they know better. Bringing up the Cavs and Atkinson as an example just ignores that the Cavs have a much better roster that has more experience.
Perhaps.... You can look at game stats from last season (and beyond) and this season. I'm not going to crunch the numbers but it would seem like this season was more of an outlier. However, it does look like he hasn't shot it very well throughout his playoff career. We can agree to disagree here.
To add regarding my notion that it’s more personnel than coaching… consider the nature of our young core and how young players have developed through the AUU in recent history. I won’t sit here and say there is nothing the coaching staff can do… but I really think they have to dumb down a lot for our current core.
So what I am understanding here is that a great offensive coach is not necessarily one who has some specific way of doing offense (princeton, triangle, picket fence etc.) but it's more about priorities of focus within the offensive sets. Bickerstaff and Atkinson can be working with mostly the same team but the way they mix the ingredients to get better results (TS%) is what separates them. This includes substitutions, prioritizing how sets are initiated, and what KPIs will guide decision making to improve the offense. Like how Silas wanted to treat Sengun like a traditional center down in the block. Bad offensive coaching. When Udoka moved Sengun up to the elbow this was a move in the right direction? Right? Is it safe to say, and I say this with no confidence, that since we are a team largely constructed of players that can't shoot, Udoka is being a smart offensive coach by emphasizing offensive rebounding? To do anything else would be dumb?
No, he needs an offensive assistant to teach him how to run actions to get the 3rd pick of the draft open rhythm looks after creating mismatches throughout the game plan, thus leading to better results and justifying the playing time. You'd probably be an Ime type of coach, missing the entire point because you can only view things on a shallow plane.
