A buffoon? Really? And I am a quite intelligent guy, but I bet McHale has an IQ > 130. Which is at least 30 points greater than the average NBA player. You have to admit that he is a regal figure, at 6-10, in his dark suits, but he does walk around like Lurch because he had to have a bunch of bones fused after playing a finals match with a broken foot. Injury free? First season Martin and Lowry go down for the last half. His second year, a squad that was picked to win 27 games before the Harden trade.This year? Two starters out (indefinitely it seems like to me) and the only loss was with three starters out. You truly need to focus in on the important things in basketball. Has your life been hectic? Family trouble? You seem much less sharp than you were last year at this time.
OK McHale haters, take a stand. Will the Rockets make it past the first round of the playoffs this year or not? If you answer "yes," kindly shut up until the postseason. If you answer "no," please resume b****ing.
I have not been able to gauge how good the Rockets are this year. With this schedule it is going to take 20+ games to get a handle on it. But if I had to guess, 58+ wins good.
Don't worry I have a proposition to make when the playoff seeds are settled. It would be something like 20 blind apoligist to make it worth my while. Losers exit this forum or pay the piper.
Done! And I do have the money to make a bet. A big bet. I will fly down to H-Town with cash in my pocket. Good luck.
What adjustment? I'm still waiting on Fonzie to give me the adjustments that were made. jtr hiked his skirt and ran away. Still waiting.
McGrady never made it out of the first round in his entire career, I wouldn't blame that on JVG. This is a much better team, a much healthier team than JVG ever had.
It sure as hell should. It does not make him a better coach though. Do you think it would have taken JVG two years to get Harden to play defense? Unlikely.
In that series, he sure as hell played like Hakeem or at least a Dirk Nowitzki ( a HOFer who his game is most similar to) Portland and especially LMA played that series like it was their last, and were firing on all cylinders. How Rox fans continue to give them zero credit for that series is beyond me. If they had kept the peddle to the metal(which they obviously didn't) I thought they seriously could have won the title. So yes I am perfectly capable making a HOF comparison for LMA during that series and a lot of last season too. The guy was incredible.
Did you just say that playoff victories do not make a better coach? And regular season wins do not make a good coach either? Good coaching has no direct relation to wins at any time? Well, while we're in the realm of imaginary worlds, pretending that JVG was coaching the 2013-2014 Rockets . . . Do you imagine JVG would have reeled in Dwight Howard? JVG, brother of SVG, whom Dwight tried to get away from. JVG, who never was a Hall-of-Fame big man, who never played in the NBA at all, actually. Do you think JVG would have had the 4th-ranked offense last season? No, but his defense would have been good, right? In other words, everything would have been totally different and pretty much unimaginable. Do you think Scott Brooks sucks as much as McHale? I'm asking because if you compare Harden's defensive numbers on the Thunder and the Rockets, you'll see: OKC 2010-->OKC 2011-->OKC 2012-->HOU 2013-->HOU 2014-->HOU 2015 Per 36 minutes DRB: 4.1-->3.5-->4.1-->3.8-->3.7-->5.4 STL: 1.7-->1.5-->1.1-->1.7-->1.5-->1.7 BLK: 0.4-->0.4-->0.3-->0.5-->0.4-->1.0 Per 100 Possessions Defensive Rating: 104-->108-->105-->106-->107-->95 Defensive Win Shares: 2.5-->2.1-->1.8-->3.0-->2.7-->0.8 Defensive Box Plus/Minus (positive is good): 0.4-->-0.5-->-1.0-->0.0-->-0.5-->2.1 Looks like Harden stayed pretty consistent from year one, except for this year. And this year doesn't count, because it doesn't fit your opinion, right? And if this year does count, bad stuff shall be due to McHale, and good stuff shall be due to not-McHale, right? And Scott Brooks should not have been expected to improve Harden over three years, but McHale should have done it in less than three years (we're ignoring Harden's numbers this year to help your argument), because you imagine that JVG would have done it in less than three years even though Scott Brooks did not. Sure, the coach of years 4-6 in a player's career is the guy who should teach him defense, not the coach of years 1-3. . . . So . . . you agree that the Rockets will get past the first round of the playoffs?
lol LMA is incredible. Can you imagine him next to Howard? It took bringing Asik in to get a handle on LMA but of course as we had seen earlier that season when they had tried the twin towers approach that it may have created a great inside defense that but offensively the lanes became clogged. Mchale had no bench or PF to compete with Portland. We are better than them this year because we got Ariza and some bruisers we can pull out and beat the crap out of whoever we set them against.
There was a very serious study done about five years ago and presented at the MIT Sloan statistical conference. It looked at about twenty years of NBA performance data and concluded that the difference in wins between the best coach in the NBA and the worst coach in the NBA was just about five wins a year. That is it. Five wins in an eighty two game season. Fans have few tools to evaluate a coaches performance. We do not sit in meetings, we cannot talk to the players, we cannot go to practices, etc. Head coaches have more NBA knowledge in their little finger than everyone on this forum put together. The only gauges I use are do the players seem happy, are they on the same page offensively and defensively (few fans understand NBA defense and cannot describe what tag-tag-tag defense is or what shooting a screen means - heck, most cannot comprehend the R&R offense) and do they play hard. It has become pretty obvious that losing to Portland in the playoffs, while it may have been hard on the fans, was a very good thing for the Rockets. The defense is starting to look like those JVG teams, but with a great offense. That takes massive commitment and effort on the players part.
First off, I'm going to go ahead and guess that this "study" didn't take into account team talent. Second, if we don't have the tools to evaluate who is a good coach and who is not then how were they able to say who was the best and worst coach for the study?????
Really? Who's better, Harden or two-time scoring champ T-Mac 2005 (age 25)? Dwight or Yao 2005 (age 24)? They were healthy. T-Mac started 78 games and Yao started 80. Up 2-0 in the playoffs. Your great playoff coach JVG managed to go 1-4 after that. I'm going out on a limb and saying his defensive adjustments failed.
ok. i'm going to start drinking the kool-aid. IF okc somehow misses the playoffs, this really could be our year. (although I think we will have a tough time beating chi/cle in the finals). that is also if we somehow manage to skip playing the clippers
It absolutely took team talent into consideration. It controlled for that variable and several others. The paper was 70 or so pages long, and looked very well considered, researched and analyzed. And I have a degree in mathematics. Those are PhD mathematicians not fans sitting on the couch watching NBA basketball. They take half a million lines of data, parse them, categorize the variables, run multiple different models etc.
I specifically answered both of your questions. The title of the conference - the MIT-Sloan Sports Analytics - should have tipped you off. That is Morey's conference. Five analytical papers are submitted for every one selected. And the board that decides which papers to select is populated by MIT Math professors. And Morey.
