I hated his rotation management. He was playing an 11 man rotation and finished with 13 total guys playing. It was a blowout win early yet Harden still managed to play 35 minutes. The only thing that I liked was that he drastically cut PPat's minutes.
Sampson had 6 hours to prepare as head coach. He didn't implement any new defensive philosophy or offensive sets. We simply played a horrible team. The ONLY thing he had control over was who was on the court and how long and he pretty much screwed that up.
I initially thought Finch would be the coach. Sampson gave the rookies a chance. If they don't play well, he will bench them like he did with Patterson.
Not only we played the worst team in NBA, but also it's on our home court with Piston's playing the 4th game on 5th night, and the second game of back to back. The game is pretty close until 4th quarter, when they simply ran out of gas. Our loss in Memphis is actually a better one.
One thing I noticed was initially he was trying to have the players play the same styles McHales emphasizing these last few games. After the half seeing that it was a close game, he allowed a bit more freedom and at least to me it looked like he was changing things up. Afterwards, it quickly became into a blow out.
I don't care what rockets fans think, but I am surprised that few if any nba teams have made an aggressive attempt to recruit jerry sloan. Perhaps word has gotten out that sloan can't manage/coddle young superstars? Perhaps sloan is ambivalent about returning to coaching himself? If so, d'antoni might be the only practical choice.
And you don't think there's a strategy around player rotation outside of getting each player some minutes? He just threw guys in there without thought?
The caretaker assistant coach will continue to play Mchale´s style for now. If Mchale quits we could see some changes. Clearly Sampson is not allowed to change anything now except perhaps to play some players more and others less. Plus, this is Morey´s team and he dictates what players should get the ball more. I suspect Harden and Lyn to be the the players pushed by the front office with Asik doing the great D-job.
Please re-read my post. There is definitely strategy in rotations, I said he didn't implement any new offensive/defensive sets/plays/philosophy. He simply didn't/doesn't have time to. The only real "coaching" he could do was in terms of rotations. He screwed that up. He played too many players (11 man rotation is ridiculous); despite playing 13 total guys, he still managed to overplay Harden in a blowout; he did seemingly just throw out guys (he put in Aldrich for a minute, then pulled him out for no apparent reason); even his lineups were weird (i.e. he played Harden at PG even though he was willing to give Douglas major minutes).
He wanted to try some players who never played before this season and this was the game to do so. This is how you do it.
