Sort of true. If you have true leaders on the floor that hold other players accountable and force everyone to play hard then yes. We have a bunch of guys that want to have fun, but are not really leadership types. When you have that type of a roster, where your best player is more of an introvert, you need good tough leadership at the top. McHale is just not good at that, good coaches hold all the players accountable, just not the ones in the dog house. McHale p***y foots around Harden and Howard, and he needs to be tougher on them in particular - higher expectations are what is needed. DD
Those are the only two with talent that don't get enough PT. Brooks was already humbled on other teams so he will ride the pine with no issues and the others know they aren't talented enough to complain. So relax Rockets fans, the team is solid. Its time to enjoy the ride, instead of predicting the end of the world. Come early, be loud, stay late, Go Rockets!
I think coach makes a huge difference. On a few teams with very smart players, coaching make less of a difference, but for teams like our, coaching is a huge factor. The player makes the plays. Great coaching put players in the best possible positions to make those plays. Bad coaching put players in random positions at best but more likely poor positions to make those plays. Like in every fields, you have team of various talent. How much talents you extracts from that team depends heavily on the head of the organization / group / team.
JVG p***y footed around T-Mac as well. You think Adelman cared if K-Mart played defense? Rudy let Francis and Mobley iso ball all game. Phil Jackson let Kobe jack up ill-advised shots at the end of games. Scott Brooks has no offense besides give it to KD or RW and let them work and plays Perkins even though he sucks. Shall I go on? Complaints everywhere including coaches that people praise as gods of coaching around here compared to McHale but hated when they were here. The grass is always greener, right?
That all sounds nice in theory, but I refer you to actual research vs your subjective observations. http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2008/11/change_you_cant_believe_in.html
He had already tried to get SF3 traded for Chauncey Billups. Then SF3 landed us TMac. JVG couldn't keep flipping parts. TMac and Harden have similar tendencies. Passing, scoring. Low motors. Adelman and defense don't belong in the same sentence. I'll be excoriated for this one but Rudy looked like a good coach when he had responsible, disciplined (for the most part) players. He kinda let them do their thing. I remember the SF3 years. I sat there near courtside and watched players wander off the bench (Walt Williams, Moochie Norris) toward the locker room during a game, wondering, Mutual diarrhea? Or (sniff, sniiiiiiiff) something else? Clearly coaches are often at the mercy of their stars. (Notice how many of them are shooting guards? TMac, SF3 [a shooting PG, I guess], Harden, Kobe....) And I've seen OKC fans light him up for all this.
It's interesting that he's referring to the coach as a manager type person because that's also some what my point of view. Working in team and groups, I know that the success of the team is not just of the individual talents (as I said, the team talent pool is like a baseline of what it can be capable of), but of the leader of the group. That simply make common sense. You have poor leader, your team is not going to perform up to what it's capable of. I don't know how much the coach can impact a team, but for a young team like our, I think it's huge. The link you provided, IMO, is just one person opinion. I don't see any details on what he's using to formulate his conclusion and the article point out that it's very hard to measure such things anyway (and also point to other folks that does analysis and claim for example that Phil Jackson contribute to +12 win). It's not conclusive, at least not "research" quality conclusive.
Probably should have provided direct link rather than someone's summary. http://www.suu.edu/faculty/berri/IJSF4-2CoachingPaper.pdf Conclusion Basic economics tells us that an appropriate reward system should be based on an employee’s marginal revenue product. In industry, it should reflect a manager’s impact on the company’s profits; in professional sports, it should reflect a manager’s contribution to the team’s wins. Unfortunately, it is generally difficult to separate the performance of the manager from the quality of workers or athletes whom he supervises. For this reason, coaches in professional sports are evaluated in terms of the wins and losses of the teams under their direction. Such an evaluation, though, ignores the fact coaches work with different endowments of playing talent. This paper measures the impact coaches have on the performance of their players. Our point estimates show that some NBA coaches add substantially to the performance of their players and to the number of games their teams win. Two of these coaches, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, are acknowledged as being among the most successful coaches in NBA history, winning a combined 13 NBA championships. Berri, Leeds, Leeds, Mondello Other coaches we identified had significantly less success. In fact, of the other coaches having a positive impact on newly acquired players, only Larry Brown has won an NBA title. Furthermore, Gene Shue, Isiah Thomas, Kevin Loughery, and Chris Ford all posted losing records. Our most surprising finding was that most of the coaches in our data set did not have a statistically significant impact on player performance relative to a generic coach. Even the most successful coaches by our metric—Jackson, Popovich, and Fitzsimmons— were statistically discernable only from the very worst-rated coaches.We therefore find little evidence that most coaches in the NBA are more than the “principal clerks” that Adam Smith claimed managers were more than 200 years ago.
