It looks like jom2003 has positioned himself on a precarious branch. I feel some sympathy for some of his arguments, but in playing the Ukrainian card, I fear he's sawed off his branch.
What I don't get is the apparent predominant unqualified support for Hardy. With due respect, what's the evidence he's such a great coach, as so many people here and in the media keep saying? That the Jazz in recent years hovered around .500 before the FO intervened to trade away competent players? Ok, so he can coach a team stocked with established NBA players to a .500 record, give or take. This may be evidence that he's a good/great coach, but from where I sit, it's pretty underwhelming. I'm willing to concede that he may be a good coach, but the absolute certainty that so many people express about his being one is undeserved.
I also see that he's now resorting to yelling at his players as one of his coaching tools, not as a sign of a tough coach brilliantly motivating his players, but as a worrisome sign that his other teaching/motivational methods (presumably those that made him the great coach others claimed him to be) aren't working. So, he's resorting to what coaches seem to do best, and which fits the public's archetype of the tough, successful, motivational coach: Yelling at and berating his players. It's true, coaches do this all the time. But are we really that confident it works?
NBA players are professionals and, for the most part, adults. Whereas they may have been willing to submit to yelling and verbal humiliation during their high school and college years, when the balance of power is decidedly against them, they're unlikely to be so willing to put up with it at this level. Eventually, I'd argue that they're more likely to tune it out than to use it as a motivation to achieve grander deeds.
Thus, I'm more inclined to be worried than encouraged by this turn of events and to interpret it as Hardy's response to the growing pressure created by the team's continuing dismal performance, particularly defensively, notwithstanding a few solid games thrown into the mix.
A question I keep asking myself is at what point will Hardy be held accountable, whether for wins and losses or on-court performance? So far, it appears that he's sailed on a sea of goodwill. Eventually, this goodwill will evaporate, and he'll have to prove it. How long will the FO give him to turn things around? We want to think that the FO will be fair, given that they handed him this dunghill of a roster with a clear imperative to lose, but humans are often neither fair nor reasonable. To me, it's pretty inconceivable that he's not worried about this. He's human, after all.
My perspective is perhaps shaped by a major frustration with sports culture: the near-reflexive belief that a good coach must yell at, berate, or publicly humiliate their players to be successful. This mindset is so entrenched that it’s treated as a prerequisite for authority rather than a stylistic choice. As a result, generations of coaches have felt compelled to perform this behavior simply because it’s the only model they’ve seen rewarded. And because quieter, more constructive coaching styles rarely get the same cultural attention, they’re often overlooked—even though they are likely more common than we imagine, in many cases, far more effective.
