Thank GOD, it is not his choice.. Come on Les, get a coach with some creativity in here. JVG MUST GO ! DD
huh? Not exactly. Don't tell me you already forget what happened in the last 9 seconds of the season. Two Rox players failed to foul Deron Williams, which eliminated any chance of comeback and ended the season in a tragic way. I am 99.9% sure that it was JVG ordered the trap instead of the foul. There is really no excuse for that. That alone should get him fired.
And don't forget Yao was abused by Boozer from game two all the way to the end. The frontcourt matchup is the tone of this series. What is the adjustment from JVG? None, Nada, not a single one, absolutely nothing!
yeah, creativity...lets start drop kicking from half court. and...and..and lets run yao at the point...thats creative. lets be reasonable here and try to be more specific. throwing out generic bash terms like "creativity" is not helpful.
How about putting Tmac on the low block when Fisher is guarding him and moving Yao to the elbow area for the open jumper when Tmac is doubled? How about having cutters come from the top of the key rather than only the Luther cut on the entry pass to Yao. How about playing a FRICKING zone every now and then to save Yao and protect the team from his slowness of foot. How about playing some other high energy players when the starters are SUCKING ASS. JVG is the reason this team underachieved, IMO, it is ALL on him.... He b****ed all season long about Yao and his inability to cover the PnR in his system....you know what a good coach does? He recognizes that Yao will probably NEVER be able to do that on a consistent basis and compensates for his shortcomings. He whined all year about players not giving it their full effort yet failed to hold them accountable by benching their butts when they deserved it and it came back to bite him in the butt in the playoffs in GAME FRICKEN 7. JVG is holding this team back, he is a good regular season coach, but the failure to make adjustments in a playoff series is mind boggling..... The playoffs are a chess match and JVG only brought checkers. DD
tmac was on the block and he settled for turnaround fadeaways. battier isnt a great cutter and the entire utah defense was clogging the lane. did you forget how they were playing? zone? i dont think that would help against a taem that operates well around the basket and has a quality pg...not to mention a sloan coached team like? billy? maybe novak out there flailing aroud would have helped. .... its been you opinion the whole year. you opinion could very well be skewed b/c you dont want to face the fact that this team just isnt good enough with its players. sucks to say, but the longer this series went on the more i realized it. . its hard to compensate when a pick and roll is designed to isolate players. maybe you can figure out the PnR...since no one else has since it was started. and dont give me zone. this is the nba and if you cant play good man defense then you are screwed. But it is yao who cannot do it...why not blame him? i find that interesting ...only singling out jvg for yaos faults he called it, i wouldnt say he whinned. All year he said that the lack of effort, tenacity and not being able to close out games will haunt this team, and it happened. again. these "adjustment" you speak of dont mean squat if you ignore all the other aspects of the game and the fact that your adjustments will be countered by other adjustments. at some point you play with what you have...and unfortunately the rockets didnt have enough playoffs are about talent and great players. You think that hakeem in the block was some amazingly complex game? hell no. give him the ball. make a move to score or pass to the open guy. FUNDAMENTAL. plus, you wont win many games of chess when you have a king ,queen and pawns, while the other team has king, queen, knights, rook and bishop. sorry to burst the bubble, but the rockets have a lack of talent. sit back and relax and it will become more clear. hayes/howard - class acts and i love these guys but against a team like utah...completely outmatched. Plus, these 2 guys have a hard time getting PT on any other team.. rafer- i love the guy but he doesnt start on any other team in the playoffs and only a handful arond the league. battier - love him, but is a one trick pony. he is a great defender and other than being a spot up shooter on offense he is worthless. thats 3 guys on starters who are BELOW average on the offensive side of the ball...and you want creativity with 3 sub par offensive players? be realistic.
Tmac was RARELY on the block, he should have been down there EVERY possesion that Fisher was on him. Funny, Battier was a cutter last year before he got to Houston, and I am not just talking about this series..... Guess we shall see how GS fairs using it then huh? I was thinking of Snyder. .... I have said that all year they were not a championship team, and still believe that, which is why I wanted JVG to DEVELOP some of the younger guys to find out if they would help get to that level. But, I still believe that JVG is a micromangement nut, who ultimatly will cause his team to fail because of his lack of adjustments. Yao is what he is, nothing is going to change that, he will never be a fast player, it is up to the coach to utilize each players skill sets to the best of his abilitiy, JVG, IMO, sticks to his system, regardless of whether some players can actually play said system. Yes, and all year long, as he WHINED/CALLED IT he failed to make ANY changes to help out with the problem. And don't you think that the failure to close out games could be somewhat attributed to fatigue? Who said you make wholesale changes, you make MINOR adjustments.....and yes they can be countered but you are making it VERY easy on Sloan by not even making any fricken adjustments. Why not trap the PG on the PnR, at least occasionally? You know give them different looks so they don't get comfortable. They are also about adjustments, and when what you are trying to do breaks down, trying something else. JVG had enough pieces to win the Utah series, in fact he SHOULD have won the Utah series. Clearly he did not have enough to win the championship but failing to get the team over the hump when TWICE leading another team 2-0 is inexcusable, he must go. No, I want JVG to make adjustments for what he has on the floor, is that too much to ask? NEW COACH !!!!!!!
Jeff Van Gundy's brand of basketball is out-of-dated for today's NBA. His tenure with the Rockets has proven to be a failure. I don't see any reason why we would want to bring him back. If I were Les now, I would politely call JVG and tell him that his contract will not be renewed.
Agree with 99% of what you said, but you may be over-estimating Snyder. Seems to me he's one of those dudes who are very athletic, but don't know how to play ball.
You still don't see there should be no game 7? A good coach of Rox should beat Jazz in 5 games. No crunch time. Like GS did to Mavs.
Yao Ming: We lost on our offense. Our offense was too uni-dimensional. In most of our offense, our team relied on me or Tracy to play one-on-one and to attract double-team before we pass the ball. But in fact, we frequently could not connect with other team mates; this was particularly true when we dropped in our physical strength and efficiency. Carlos Boozer was the highest scorer on Utah Jazz. But he was actually not their focal point of offense. He is used as a decoy, always received passes in the elbow position, with his team mates cutting into the paint to seek scoring opportunities. At such time, I just could not be able to attend to one thing without losing track of another thing in the defense, (and therefore lost my target). We just did not have integrity in offense like the Utah Jazz. TITAN: Compared with Utah Jazz, what has gone wrong with your bench? Yao Ming: At the beginning of the season, everybody said we have a deep bench. But the further we played into the season, our bench had become thinner and thinner. Vassalis Spanoulis and Steve Novak were not given chance to play because they were rookies. Bonzi Wells was abandoned and I am certainly not at all surprised, because he and the head coach were having personality clashes. But later in the series, Kirk Snyder was also dropped, and this I just could not comprehend. Each NBA team needs to have an energy player, who just plays with energy and hustle once sent on court. We need such an energy player, playing against Utah Jazz. Moreover, (I think) this also conforms to the style of our head coach. Kirk Snyder is also very familiar with the (play style of) Utah Jazz. I just could not understand why he (Jeff Van Gundy) did not use Snyder. In this playoff series, if we have an energy player like Mike James, we definitely will have won the series. Well, in lieu of Mike James, if Kirk Snyder had played, we might have come up with better results. Looks like Yao has lost confidence in Coach too. He sounds just like one of us now! LOL
