Hopper
Banned
Like, who knew, eh, Ben?
Kyle Korver picks for Jazz in mock draft
- Thread starter calijazz
- Start date
Like, who knew, eh, Ben?
Hopper
Banned
Any coach worth his salt, and who had any clue about how to "develop" players, would effectively have 3 NBA championship quality teams every single year.
1. His startin 5, the true champs
2. Players 6-10, who would beat any pretenders to the throne, just not the true champs, and
3. Players 11-15, who could easily stomp the Lakers, or any other team--if they ever played, anyway.
1. His startin 5, the true champs
2. Players 6-10, who would beat any pretenders to the throne, just not the true champs, and
3. Players 11-15, who could easily stomp the Lakers, or any other team--if they ever played, anyway.
Im not going to read all this crap, but Doufus sucks, its easy to see. He might get one more contract after Utah, but thats it. Doufus would get man-handled by Brian Scalibrine in a 1 v 1.
QFMFT.
I applaud you sir for having the guts to stand up to your fellow Jazz fans and proclaim what most of sensible folk no. Doufos is absolute garbage with a great family background.
InGameStrategy
Well-Known Member
Ben10 it's pretty cool that you're a high school basketball coach. You probably make a big impact in a bunch of kids' lives.
With all due respect, however, your perspective doesn't translate to the NBA. The NBA is for real. It's a business. They have technology (game film, analytics, metrics) that are typically not measured at the high-school level. The players are bigger, stronger, faster. And it's for real. The data--and simply watching the game--show that Sloan's rotations did "well" garnering a 5 seed. But maybe the difference is the view of what this team could do.
A flaw in your argument is that the existing Jazz players didn't work well together--unless you define that working well together is losing leads toward the end of the game. It was the regular 5 or 7 or whatever in the rotation that weren't working. THE FRONTCOURT DEFENSE WAS TERRIBLE, to the point of being a net liability. Sloan neither addressed the poor defense with the existing rotation (which might be closer to your philosophy) nor with the players with upside. My strategy would do both.
Also, your argument goes awry when you look at last season, when rookie Wes Matthews playing ahead of Kyle Korver, who was "better at playing together." At least Sloan had enough sense to start Matthews over KK because KK was an inferior defender. Korver is best as a backup specialist with liberal minutes, especially when less-than-athletic or less-than-experienced wings are on the floor for the other team. But under your definition, Korver should've played ahead of Matthews.
I already addressed the issue of dealing with Fes's poor FT shooting: play him earlier in the game, more between quarter 1 and the last few minutes of the game. Unfortunately whoever replaces him (Okur or Millsap) translates to a liability on defense against many teams. Or you play Koufos (ideally after he has gotten more PT to develop). Also, you don't address the notion of giving these players more PT, which might translate to better FT shooting and decisionmaking anyway. Again, Sloan often put Matthews and CJ out there over Korver (and sometimes even over AK) at the end of games, so he was violating your own rule of going with the ones who had worked together for longer.
Even after years of getting beaten by the Lakers (and other teams who pwned the Jazz in the middle), Sloan still stuck with your strategy, and many times that strategy failed. It wasn't a secret that Utah lacked skilled size; KOC openly said it in the summer of 2009. The better strategy would've been to give time to Fes in the regular season; many times he was helping to win anyway. In both the regular season and the playoffs, he had the best on-court/off-court +/- of any player on the team. Fesenko proved in the playoffs that he had/has room to develop, and it's a tragedy that he didn't get that time during the regular season so that he could have helped the team to REALLY get a 2 seed and REALLY win some playoff games--instead of having the potential to do so, and merely being a mildly positive contributor or holding serve at the 5 spot (which was still probably better than the alternative (Okur or Millsap). Is giving Fesenko 30 minutes in the last game of the Laker series a tacit acknowledgement that he had improved and that he was contributing more significantly? I say yes; he was part of a first-string combination that improved the deficit from 17 to 7 points in the third quarter until he was subbed out. This isn't an isolated event; the Jazz were ahead in the first quarter of Game 4 when he subbed out with 5 minutes left, and the Jazz ended the quarter with a deficit, and parallel patterns happened in previous games also.
If you're happy with winning 50 games when the team has the potential to do better, then I guess you are happy with underperformance. Ask fired head coaches Mike Brown or Avery Johnson if underperformance on a highly successful team is sufficient. Hopefully you don't settle for that with your own players.
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ISG. Many good points and I give you props for them. I disagree with how you translated what I said with the Korver/Matthews part. I completely agree with you that Korver is a back up specialist and that Matthews through his work ethic and in practice performance was and should have been the starter. Matthews brings a more complete game and IMO is a better player all around than Korver. I can't see how Korver worked better with one team then Matthews did.
You also miss understand what I am saying when I compare the kid on my team with Fez. I worked hard with that kid, gave him playing time, and watched him hard in practice and game situations. The problem was that he didn't put for the effort to earn my trust in him when it came to clutch situations in games.
The difference between Fez and Matthews was plain for anyone to see. Matthews worked his Azz off and earned his coaches trust all though the process of making the team. Fez has had Sloan saying how he has been lazy and "jackpoting around" how many times in the 3 years he has been with the team?
Now understand that I would love to have Fes step up and be the player we need in the middle. And I completely agree that we have to have someone other than what we had with Okur and Boozer. But with what we had I feel that Sloan did the right things with who he played because thats who he had that he felt could get the job done.
One last thing. How may times did Fez have to leave the games you mentioned because of fouls? He was almost always in foul trouble because of his late rotations in the Defense.
You also miss understand what I am saying when I compare the kid on my team with Fez. I worked hard with that kid, gave him playing time, and watched him hard in practice and game situations. The problem was that he didn't put for the effort to earn my trust in him when it came to clutch situations in games.
The difference between Fez and Matthews was plain for anyone to see. Matthews worked his Azz off and earned his coaches trust all though the process of making the team. Fez has had Sloan saying how he has been lazy and "jackpoting around" how many times in the 3 years he has been with the team?
Now understand that I would love to have Fes step up and be the player we need in the middle. And I completely agree that we have to have someone other than what we had with Okur and Boozer. But with what we had I feel that Sloan did the right things with who he played because thats who he had that he felt could get the job done.
One last thing. How may times did Fez have to leave the games you mentioned because of fouls? He was almost always in foul trouble because of his late rotations in the Defense.
InGameStrategy
Well-Known Member
The thing with Fes is that even though he's a goof-off, he's still the best that the Jazz have in many situations. Ostertag proved that for years; he was better in most cases than the more disciplined Collins. That's the trap that I think that Sloan has fallen into: the #1 test should be the TEAM performance when a player is on the court. Not individual stats, not practice effort or performance. TEAM. Because TEAM wins are what decide what team gets the second seed--and what team
It's sad that Fesenko isn't a student of the game and a well-disciplined machine. If so, he could probably be a top 10 center by now. But even in his raw form, he's better than the alternatives. The rotations prove it--and the way that Boozer + Millsap and Boozer + Okur have gotten pwned time after time prove it, too. Not that Fes is able to stop every play, either. But the interior D is just better when he's in there, and he started to learn how to pass and cut for easy scores.
You're still ignoring the key criterion: on-the-court team performance. For most of the time, the team was as good or better with Fesenko on the court, and that was no more clear than against the Lakers, which have some of the best height in the league. On top of that, Bynum is developing but defendable , and Gasol is super-skilled but soft. Yet Sloan put Millsap and Boozer out there, time after time, year after year. This same type of thing was repeated during the regular season when Okur was getting pwned against a very beatable Memphis team on January 8, just to provide an example. Okur had 16 points but a whopping -14 +/- in just 25 minutes--something that's not easy to do :|. By contrast, Fes had a +6 in 8 minutes--and the difference in defensive presence was visible. This is the kind of deceptive thinking that Sloan falls into. I wouldn't expect a coach who supposedly preaches defense to be mesmerized by matador-defending high scorers.
Fes hasn't scored much but he has "stepped up" for the most part when he has been in the game. Yet he ended up averaging about 3 minutes per games available. That's not what I call coaches putting forth effort to find crucial minutes for developing players. In three years, Fesenko has logged as many minutes as Ostertag had in his first season. Again, the optimal strategy is giving players a minimum amount of time (gee, 8 or 10 minutes per game; I'm not greedy) and then giving them more if they are making the TEAM better. Which he was doing, on average. I think that I saw teammates and maybe coaches get mad at Fes for not being in the right position of offense sometimes. But he was probably the #5 choice anyway on O, so all he needed to do is stay out of the way. Also, Fesenko virtually tied Millsap in rate of offensive rebounds during the regular season (about 4.7 per 30 minutes for each), so it looks like he was doing something right.
During the regular season, Fesenko ended up with 5 or more fouls on only 3 or 4 occasions. So I'd say not very often, although his rate of fouling was team-leading. (So was Millsap's in his first year or two.) And a case can be made that the Jazz needed to have more aggressive defense, so those fouls were sometimes not unfounded. Better than letting the player just breeze by, like Boozer and Okur (and even Millsap) tend to do in order to preserve their playing time--because again, Sloan clearly benches players more quickly for number of fouls than for lazy D. If you get two fouls in the first quarter (and usually in the second quarter), you're good as benched. For the record, I generally approve of that policy--although it might be relaxed for players who aren't likely to play as much anyway.
Put if you let a player drive by you, and you might get a dirty look (if you're in the regular rotation), but you should be benched. Not good coaching. Note that I'm making no mention of impulsively benching players for missing shots; IMHO, coaches should be slower about benching for missed shots unless the player repeatedly shoots out of the offense, too early, at a too-low percentage, etc.
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Gyp Rosetti
Banned
Really? I know you're brighter than this.
ISG the only difference in our argument is this: You are going completely by Stats and I am going by human nature. The point I was trying to make was being a coach the best way to find out what is going to work for my team is in practice and how hard the kid is working. And therefor reward the ones that are working the hardest and want it the most with the playing time. To this point I have never coached a team that has had a losing season that way.
Now Understand that the NBA is much much much more advanced and has all of the breakdowns you have mentioned and I am sure that Sloan's assistants go over that info and inform him of the way the team plays the best on paper. But in all coach's minds they go with what they see and feel not what is best on paper. Is that right or wrong? Who's to say. Its not just Sloan that does this BTW. If you were to take every NBA team and Break down there +/- with certain guys on the floor you would find a better group than the one that is playing the most 9 out of 10 times. A different look is a good thing for short periods of time. But once the other team catch's on to is you have to go back to what works.
It is sad that Fez has been unable to step up to the plate and earn the playing time that you and I both think he needs to both develop and help the team. Because I like you feel he can be a force that would be able to help the Jazz win games. But until he proves to his coach that he can be that player he well just continue to play limited minutes. And that is as much his fault as it is his coaches I think.
Now Understand that the NBA is much much much more advanced and has all of the breakdowns you have mentioned and I am sure that Sloan's assistants go over that info and inform him of the way the team plays the best on paper. But in all coach's minds they go with what they see and feel not what is best on paper. Is that right or wrong? Who's to say. Its not just Sloan that does this BTW. If you were to take every NBA team and Break down there +/- with certain guys on the floor you would find a better group than the one that is playing the most 9 out of 10 times. A different look is a good thing for short periods of time. But once the other team catch's on to is you have to go back to what works.
It is sad that Fez has been unable to step up to the plate and earn the playing time that you and I both think he needs to both develop and help the team. Because I like you feel he can be a force that would be able to help the Jazz win games. But until he proves to his coach that he can be that player he well just continue to play limited minutes. And that is as much his fault as it is his coaches I think.