Can we at least agree now that coaches don't really matter that much?

How do you explain the Knicks?

 

As an outlier. Sample size for them was very small, and they experienced huge changes in their player make-up throughout the year. Unless you're telling me you think Mike Woodson has them ready for a .700 record next year?

Perhaps I should ask you how you explain the

KIngs
Blazers
Wizards

, who showed very little change this season after getting a new coach? Maybe they just had bad replacements, or maybe there's something else at work...such as the actual people on the floor.

 

He also has been able to keep that team afloat with a very much in decline Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. There's no way that team would be first in the conference with a lesser coach. A coach, like Popovich could also make the difference between a borderline team like Utah, Phoenix, Houston, or Milwaukee, and push them a couple of seeds higher.

 

Fair enough about sample size. I don't know if they will be a .700 team next year. It is conceivable with the talents they have. They were clearly underachieving with D'Antoni before Linsanity happened.

I believe that it is very difficult to quantify how much a coach affects the team. Coaching changes are usually accompanied by other changes. And the worth of a coach can only be observe over a long career with different players. There is a big difference between great coaches and bad coaches. Those in between probably don't have a whole lot of difference.

 

But how do you know this without making a raft of assumptions?

Sure, there's a big difference between Phil Jackson and Eric Musselman in terms of overall record. But this gulf is probably not as big as the gap there is between Phil's "top 4" of Jordan, Pippen, Bryant, Shaq...and Musselman's top 4 players: Kevin Martin, Jason Richardson, Ron Artest and Antwan Jamison.

 

Ok this is BS. Of course coaches matter. The problem here is you're replacing a good coach with another good coach, hence you don't see much, if any effect. On common sense alone, your coaching staff is responsible for so much stuff like deciding minutes for players, rotations, game plan and player development.

Its like if you took Love from the wolves and replaced him with LMA, you aren't going to see a huge difference in their record.

 

Spurs would say otherwise.

 

Just to set the record straight, the McHale backers originally thought this team would have a BETTER record this year because of no AB, being a young improving team, and the 65% winning percentage after the trade deadline carrying over into this year. See here: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=205018

I actually agree with those assessments about our improved roster -- AB did cost us a few games, and this time around we had a much better player in Dragic from the get-go. Morey also gave McHale Parsons to replace C-Bud, AND two 7 foot centers. He also gave him a lottery pick that McHale never used.

Nobody here thought the Rockets should be contending for a championship, BUT we did have the talent to make the playoffs this season, which happened to be the organization’s goal. McHale underachieved by not getting it done.

 

Of course coaches matter.

good talent + good coach = contender.
good talent + bad coach = competitive but underachieving.
bad talent (or bad mix of talent) + good coach = competitive but overachieving.
bad talent(or bad mix of talent) + bad coach = bottom feeder.

 

Their backups played as good or better than them. Yes, we should have made the playoffs this season.

 

Meh is right here. The final record for McHale versus Adelman coaching the Rockets this year would be pretty similar.

We went 9-10 in our last 19 games. The reason people think we're so bad is because we lost 6 games in a row, most recently. What if we had gone LWLLWWLLWLLLWWLWWWL to finish the season? Then we'd be "up and coming!" Yes, we lost some games we should have won down the stretch. But we also beat the Lakers twice and Chicago once. Those games don't matter for some reason?

 

I'm kind of torn with this question, since the Rockets have now been officially eliminated from the postseason.

But it's a pretty good rip, nonetheless.

I purposely decided to keep my own comments about this lockout-shortened season here to a minimum. I'm a windbag of the first order, but I didn't think alot of hot air from me would make much difference in how this season would go for the Rockets.

This is (and in hindsight and posterity, will always be) a difficult season to quantify, because it is not a standard NBA season for a lot of different reasons. In some ways, it's worse than the 1998-1999 "season", at least in terms of quality (or lack thereof) of play across the league, generally.

But the Rockets themselves were going to be in flux regardless of the league circumstances that affected every organization adversely.

I thought at the time that losing Rick Adelman was not the wisest of moves for the Rockets to have made, because the organization (despite suggestions to the contrary) was not actually looking to "tank" this season (or any other season, as it turns out) in order to try to secure a lottery pick. The Rockets were never going to commit to this strategy in any meaningful sense anyway, particularly with Daryl Morey as general manager. Morey's entire goal, since he has been more-or-less forced to turn over the roster sans Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, has been to improve and revamp the roster through free agency and trade. Whether or not he is relegated to this course through his own involvement in the transformation of the Boston Celtics in 2008 or through upper management's insistence on competitive consistency, it is the one he has pursued most aggressively and most openly. Noting his disappointment in his "failed" attempt to trade for Pau Gasol was the litmus test, for me.

And that one fact is the reason why it made no sense to not try to reconcile whatever rift there was in thinking between Adleman, Morey and management. Adelman was willing (and by all accounts, able) to preside over any project or plan that the organization would commit to. As a former player, Adelman was always going to be partial to players, and would be fiercely loyal to a team that performed above expectations at his direction. All Adelman has done in Minnesota is what he's always tried to do as a coach...and that's to win. He was hardly going to be a deterrent (or as large as detterent as was offered) to any push towards improvement-via-trade.

As things turned out, Adelman wouldn't have made that big a difference this season. The personnel, in key respects, was largely the same, with roughly the same number of surprises and disappointments. So if the feeling was that there would be no reason to pay what Adelman was asking for with no hope of improving the roster through trade (even though that way was the course being committed to), then the move to let him go on was, as is most decisions nowadays, strictly about money.

Big whoop there.

I was impressed, fro the most part, with Kevin McHale's performance this season. Taking everything into consideration (including McHale's own history as a head coach), I'm fairly certain he did the very best he could. And like any coach who's worth the title, he had expectations from everybody on the roster, a particular vision of what he wanted his players to play like (back from his Boston Celtic playing days), and he tended to let the players themselves determine their fates. All told, not too bad from a throw-away coach in a throw-away season.

I believe that any coach who's serious is trying to win with whatever he has. Larry Brown has won practically everywhere he's ever coached. He's only had one true superstar in Allen Iverson that I can remember on any roster he had (no offense, Danny Manning...winning an NCAA title isn't anything to sneeze at), and he always finds some way to get teams to play well.

Just look at the freefall the Charlotte Bobcats are in this year without Brown.

A good coach does matter. The Miami Heat's Eric Spoelstra got outcoached at least on two separate occasions by Dallas' Rick Carlisle in last season's title round. I cringed in that game 6, where Spoelstra was being asked during a sideline interview how he would counter the Mavericks' tactic of going small against the Heat (pretty much the same tactic that swept the Lakers out of the postseason). Spoelstra resorted to giving his best Pat Riley impersonation, spewing nonsensical platitudes about will and courage and adversity.

No strategy. No adjustments. No acceptance of what was happening right in front of his face.

Granted, it might have helped if somebody reminded Lebron James that the games had four quarters he had to play in, instead of the three he must have felt he was contractually obligated to participate in.

But I understand now why Chris Bosh was pouring over the Bible so much during that series, and crying from time to time. Aside from the fact that he's a real man's alternate to a lady.

Sooner or later, you can't get serious about winning in professional sports until you get enough talent to win. A good coach does whatever he can to get the most out of whatever he has.

It is still a players league, after all.

I'd personally not worry so much about who was coaching the Rockets, as much as I'd worry about just what the heck they're going to do about getting some better players on the court in the near future...

...I don't think David Stern is retiring anytime soon...

 

I agree with the OP. I liked McHale early on but as season went on I thought he made some bad coaching decisions. But lets face it, when you have better talent, it tends to make coaching much easier. The Rox don't have A-list talent right now and ultimately when the going got tough, there was no one on the roster to count on to make the big play consistently. I think McHale panicked and got desperate and resorted to that damn small lineup. Ultimately when plays were there to be made, the Rox just didn't have the personnel to make them consistently.

 

I didn't say that "because of McHale, the Rockets failed in so many areas." What I said was that he changed an offensive system far more than many of us expected after he was the surprise hire. Not that he "failed" in a host of areas. I enjoyed our defensive improvement, although one could argue that it was the change in personel, not McHale's coaching, that gave us that improvement. I really liked how Parsons was developed, and McHale deserves some credit for that. We'll never know how Adelman would have used Parsons, but my own opinion is that he would have seen a lot of minutes this season. His play demanded it. That opinion could be argued. And for the other point that you made, that "If as you claim Adelman would've given us a lot more wins, then it stands to reason that the Rockets roster must've been much better this year." In fact, I think the difference was a few wins. As it turns out, those few wins, in my opinion, could have been the difference in making the playoffs. I also don't believe that Adelman would have had Camby and Dalembert sitting on the bench to end games during our run at the playoffs. I won't understand that if I live to be a hundred. But otherwise, McHale was just fine and dandy.

 

Not everybody wanted tanking after last season. We were excited how well the team played. And we drafter Marcus Morris, who a lot of people including myself believed to be very good NBA material.

It was the firing of Adelman that got everyone believing that management DIDN'T WANT TO WIN NOW. If you wanted to keep winning, why would you want to fire a coach who had got this bunch of players playing so well after the trade deadline? At that time, many people conjectured that Adelman simply didn't want to stay because he wanted to chase a ring and this team obviously still had at least a few more years to be contending. But that was quickly debunked because both Morey and Adelman said that the coach wanted to stay and tried to work it out.