it amazes me how quickly many are jumping all over rudy...this is a man who won a championship playing chucky brown, pete chilcut and charles jones significant minutes in the playoffs....talk about maximizing talents...he has won more with less talent and has a career .562 winning percentage he brought the city championships and has given pratically his whole life to the team......now when he has a young talented team you want to kick him out the door...gee thanks rudy...but no thanks.. young is young any way you slice it...whether you buy the excuse or not its a fact.....yeah everyone is disappointed...but one disappointing season does not make him a bad coach...if so alot of coaches some consider "good" coaches wouldnt even be in the league....
True, but the point people are tryin to make is that we should run the press occasionally, to throw the other team off or to inject energy into our team durin a lull. Nobody is sayin it should be a mainstay of a defensive scheme.
Exactly...what one sees as a positive, I see see as a shortcoming. Imagine if Flip Saunders had spent hours and hours of time researching and studying film and decided the press wasn't the way to go instead of being innovative as he has been. Different series, most likely.
I'm not really buying into all this research that the coachingstaff does before games. I mean Yao rolling across the lane is the same as the executing a simple pick and roll. If the guards come down and set a good solid pick instead of a pick just because the play calls for it, it would work. Granted, Yao will never be mistaken for karl Malone, but really how hard or how good can Cato reallly defend this play. My thing is that this team does not do the finer things to get the team playing good and part of that is on the coaches shoulders. I mean if Francis can't even run a simple school yard pnr, whats the point of him running the team or being the franchise other than for the highlights? The simplest play in basketball history and the guards the Rockets have run it the worse. They don't let the man set up, nor do they get close enough to either force a switch or get a clean open look. Yet we play against AJ Bremer, who was a shooting guard in college or even a nbdl player like jr harrington and they set the pick man up and shoot our eyes out from 15 ft all day. Something has to give. This team is very,very poorly coached and the execution is horrendous most times when the team most needs it. Yes Steve had some success runningthe curl around at the 3 pt line, but how many times have this team come out of a timeout and got a piss poor shot? How many 24 sec violations does this team have on avg ? Those are clear signs of mental breakdowns which this team has many of. Just like the play with Harpring in Houston. It would be nice to catch the other team off guard at times. Just like when Glenn Robinson was lighting up the Rockets and then the team went to a zone and really stunted the Hawks offense. Stuff like that should be done more often to take teams out of their confort zone. Just like when Yao was busting up Dallas, they went to a zone and really stopped our offensive flow. What happened next was confusion and no movement, thus leading to another ass whipping at the hands of the Mavs. Sometimes, really most times it sems like this team and coaching staff has no clue. Its like our guards had never seen a zone in their life. Once the game is over , after another loss, the first words out of th mouths of the players are, we're still young or we didn't make shots. Its just gets so tiresome to hear.
What Flip did was see how confortable the Lakers were in game one and decided he had to make them uncomfortable in their offense so he decided to press a little. What he knew was that if broken effectively the Lakers would have a mini fast break, but if he could make shaq come up the floor to help break the press, it would put the lakers in a hurry to start a offense. Had minny stayed status quo, they would probably be on the brink of elimination this yr.
I agree with you that it's fine and good to mix things up. I was, and I think Rudy was speaking toward using the Press as the defensive mainstay. I don't think Rudy is perfect, and I wouldn't mind seeing things mixed up some as far as defenisive looks. But to say that Rudy isn't capable of coaching that is to overlook history. During '94 adjustments made by the Rockets during the Knicks series made a huge difference. Against the Jazz during the '95 series Rudy made great adjustments to the defensive schemes. Why it isn't working now, I don't know. Rudy deserves some of the blame, but to say that he's incapable doesn't seem accurate. Just on this issue I think Rudy has done more work than most coaches in the league would, and has put forth the effort.
It amazes me how people are still thinking in the past. This is the present time and progress is not moving forward.
You see my friend, past tense is history. We are only concerned about the present and how we can progress towards the future.
Has Rudy ever presented any insight on his unconventional method for defending the PnR? Every year, mediocre guards go off on the Rockets. Has he adjusted?
Our players need to practice practice practice...everything. Fundamentals... Like dribbling. Layups. Boxing out. SHOOTING! The whole team needs to improve its shooting. Free throw shooting too...
