Don't agree. Read durvasa's take. (see quote below) He was a candidate for all the other things that differentiated him. Morey could have been concerned that McHale would be a Brown at the end of the game and get dear in the headlights. That could have been his final concern, along with the known of not being a strong teacher systems of Xs and Os at practice vs the other candidates. Think of the end game questions as a show-stopper test for McHale vs the proven X and O guys. Like McHale had to knock that out of the park to get the job. As MadMax says, if that his your make or break criteria for each candidate, that's a little bit extreme where the articulate interviewee who can BS on the fly win the job vs the technically superior ones.
MadMax, there are a lot of qualities a good coach must have. Some of it, you either have it or you don't. Ability to manage personalities, command respect, inspire. That's important, obviously. Knowing how to teach your system and get players to buy in. When and how to discipline players. All of that is a big part of coaching, and its what oftren separates the great coaches from those who simply really know their stuff from an Xs and Os standpoint. Then there's another facet, accessible to the analyst who may not have ever coached. Timeout management. Shot clock management. How to attack a certain type of defense to get a high percentage shot. When to double team and when not to. Etc. These are things you can get a great deal of insight into with analysis and (yes) with "stats" (dirty word, I know). That's also an important part of coaching, and its where I believe the Rockets front office are well-equipped to evaluate candidates. We'll see how it goes.
Yes. Or rather that they know what they want to do, but not necessarily the right thing to do or the right way to decide what to do.
And with this, you can safely assume that any coach would perform worse than Adelman next year? You like your assumptions, I give you that. You seem to believe hypothetical questions aren't useful. Then do you also believe that all math questions asked in school are worthless? I mean, at which point in real life do you have to figure out exactly, say, 10 time 13 divided by 4 plus 8? Math teaches give such questions. Should kids stop using such random numbers and only use real-world examples? And I'd like to add, being down by 5 with 50 seconds to go happens a lot more often in real life than any math question I've answered at any grade level + college. I think the problem is that you and I obviously have very different life experiences. For example, when I think of a GM wanting to know the answer to something, "coaching of end-game situations". I think of a GM asking a variety of experts for their opinions. And then test them himself, and/or see their results through film study. Said GM would then compile the results of these studies and see how things generally work. Said GM would also use percentages to map out how situations may work in a simulation, and see their correspondence with real-life results. etc. etc. etc. I don't immediately think, "Did the GM just give an interview to an assistant coach to answer his question?"
Does Ricky Rubio get to come with McHale to Houston... and in addition, are we going to start referring to hiim as k-mac? Does anyone know what his knicknames were in his playing days (before my time.)
The funny thing with stats, is you can use them to create perfect hindsight for some semi random occurrences, then consult with coaches etc to get an understand of why certain things work better, no, the articulate interviewee could not bs his way through such rigorous questions.
let's just chalk it all up to this, because i'm tired of the question/answer format of this discussion at this point.
He's a statistician, he'd use statistics to figure out what, and then consult a bunch of ppl etc to figure out the more important why.
Alright, BS is not the right term. But please don't dispute that an articulate interviewee has an advantage in such situations to someone who is a technical genius but has trouble summing up all the nuances into well-defined absolutes ... and ends us saying, "you can't isolate a game into simplistic hypotheticals of 2 or 3 variables and expect me to not be thinking through the 10 other variables. My staff will have 10+ answers to every situation and we'll decide during the game." Basically, dodging the question. I would. Morey's Questions Could be Viewed as Traps I hate simple hypotheticals and think they are largely traps. I have trouble gauging what the interviewee wants as an answer, so I tend to answer by saying how I think and how I prepare myself without really giving a definitive answer. I'd lose those interviews if the want you to articulate exact answers when I disagree with the whole premise that anyone should give an exact answer. They are often trick question, because they want to see how you think when there is no one right answer. Giving Too Many Answers can be Right If I tried to give a real answer, I'd explain 4-5 (some contradicting each other) and end up sounding like I don't know what I'd do...when what I'm trying to explain is there is never ONE answer to such questions....there is no silver bullet...but maybe Statisticians pride themselves are finding artificial absolutes (silver bullets) when the data is largely a bunch of noise.
I have also noticed a lot of the veterans on the forum very upset with the dismissal of Adelman and talking about how Les is selling out team interest by getting rid of coaches. I thought the Rockets under Rick were horrible in crunch for the most part. Some of that falls on execution, but how many times did we see a final possession go completely wrong under Adelman? I for one, think McHale is going to turn out to be a very good NBA head coach.
If a person has trouble giving an understandable answer to someone with an MIT graduate degree who basically eat/sleep basketball, how do you expect said person to explain the same thing to people who'd never even get into college normally? I don't want anyone with communication problems as my head coach. No matter how smart he is. I'd make him a very well paid assistant. But never the head coach. Every game in the NBA is somewhat different from another. There are always minute details. i.e. "45 seconds down by 5 vs 50 seconds down by 3", or "going against a team that likes to play zone with a great center vs a team with defense like the Rockets" and so on. If you have trouble making good, fast decisions on the spot in the heat of the battle, then you'd make a horrible head coach.
Let's just hope he wasn't wrong because Coach T is a pretty good defensive mind....but I agree - it's more of a promising sign than anything.
....not trying to argue your point because I agree with everything you mentioned but for the benefit of the masses who probably don't realize how important this is, this is the type of information that assistant coaches generally help the head coach asses in games. The head coach is the general who makes the call, but the assistants are keeping track and notifying the head coach before the situation arises of potential situations coming up(fouls to give, timeouts, player's minutes/fatigue/rotation, etc).
You assume the questions are valid. A lot of coaches would not agree that those questions even have a correct answer. It's not about trouble giving an understandable answer; it is about disagreeing that there is a correct answer, so you either explain how you'd deal with the situation and how you think and prepare for them, or you end up giving 4-5 contradictory solutions. How can you not agree with what I just said? It is exactly what happens in interviews. Answering simplistic hypothetical questions with 1 or 2 variables has nothing to do with being able to make quick decisions on far more variable in a real-life situation. Imagine if you ask a Presidential candidate a simplistic hypothetical...he's going to BS you sound bites and abstract solutions when in fact he might be the best decision-maker ever.
I gotta say, the more and more I read about McHale the more I'm coming around to his signing. My concerns seem to be similar concerns Houston had - late game Xs and Os management and the need to keep him surrounded with a good support staff to focus on that. I'm kind of excited to see how this shakes out.
Who said "communication problems.' I said the exact opposite...the guy with the best communication skills has an advantage when faced with simplistic hypotheticals over the actual best real-life, decision-maker/communicator for the job. see: Politics and Business. No successful coach has communication problems.
You assume the questions aren't. How do you know that if the coach has multiple answers and articulates that to Morey, they wouldn't be viewed as answering correctly? How do you know that Morey isn't fully aware that a fluid situation with multiple variables may well have GASP! more than one solution? Hell, I even know that and I didn't go to MIT for statistics. Where do you get that "statisticians pride themselves on finding artificial absolutes"? What stops statistics from giving multiple answers? That is a pretty big and baseless assumption. And even if it were true, which it is not, a good statistician would understand the limitations of his field and compromise and collaborate to fill in the gaps. Which is exactly what Morey does.
