Henry Abbott talks tanking and good and bad management

[jlprk]

Henry Abbott knows nothing. A shaved-headed clown.

The Thunder are good because 1) they lucked into Durant, and 2) owner Bennett is a hard guy. He demands hard effort. He fired Lenny Wilkens, a soft head like Pritchard, and replaced him with the very young and controllable Presti, age 32 I think.

The paper is owned by Bennett, so he had no fear about public repercussions to his tanking their first year there. Here, Allen has to load all the bad news into one day (trading 2 starters, firing the coach, waiving Oden) to minimize the Oregonian's anger.

Bennett is a merciless dictator over his GM and public opinion, so he gets results. Portland is more decentralized and gridlocked among centers of power.

 

[jlprk]

Forgot to mention the underrated Scott Brooks, who transfers Bennett's pressure down to the players. The whole organization trickles down pressure from the dictator owner. Allen doesn't dare act like that in this namby-pamby environment orchestrated by the touchy-feely missionary Quick and the moralist preacher Canzano.

 

[jlprk]

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/39318/tanking-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg

That article is a summary of what's in this one. There's more detail if you click the links within this one, especially the 4 links in the list.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/39645/talking-thunder-and-virtues-of-tanking

 

[barfo]

I think I see why Cho got fired now. Sounds like the Thunder plan is his hammer, and every team he works with is the nail.

While in hindsight (Roy, Oden, etc etc) it probably would have been better to hit it with the Cho hammer last year, I can see how Paul might have thought Cho was a little too fixated on one and only one solution. He thought he was hiring a generalist and instead he got a specialist.

barfo

 

[jlprk]

Last week I had Cho look at my carburetor and now I'm on a 3-year payment plan to replace my Yugo with a new limo fleet.