D'Antoni's system forced Lin to play 40mpg+ and wore Lin's knee down. Sure Linsanity happened, but too much focus on one position.
Btw, Stan van Gundy doesn't have a job yet. Stan van Gundy, Howard, Turkoglu, J-Rich, Chris Duhon, Q-Rich. Sounds like a pretty decent team!
All such threads need to be closed immediately not that I am saying McHale is a great coach or a coach that we need right now, I am willing to give him a chance.. But, he has been here only one season and has not been given the right pieces. I would say we could revisit this topic in 3-4 years with the team we have right now, or in 1-2 years if we get Howard.
If you get Howard, Lin, Motiejunas, Lamb.......... basically, a huge athletic team with bigs who run extremely hard and good shooting............ that's a perfect team for D'Antoni. Lets be fair to D'Antoni here, the Suns weren't horrible defensively and they had HORRIBLE defensive talent (basically, Marion and younger Raja Bell were good, who else?). And how do you build a good defensive team with Melo and Amare? The Knicks bigger issue was that offense wasn't good either. Give him Howard, that's an above average defensive team with devastating offense.
But if you build with rookies, then I wouldn't want D'Antoni near my team. He's not known as a rookie-friendly coach. Either way, it's not going happen, McHale just got here.
People say D'Antoni is an offensive genius, when his offense really isn't any special. To me there are far superior offensive coaches. People put up numbers in his 'system' because it's gimmicky and he doesn't care about defensive mismatches, as long as has them on offense. Well, great. What a genius 'system' that is.
Hold onto McHale until Thibs becomes available then Morey can offer him a poison pill contract. I kid, but only half seriously. Like Lin we need to get Thibs back.
WTF? McHale took a team with its top 2 scorers injured within an inch of the playoffs. They were the 6 seed with 7 games to play. Exhaustion kept them out of the playoffs (leading to Lamb at the 12th thank god). Adelman and Morey had accumulated players who were doomed to mediocrity. Thank god they are now gone. McHale is the future: win or go home. No excuses.
what if you keep mchale as an assistant and big man coach/defensive mindset while having dantoni run the high power offense.
