PCmor7
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I know we're only down 2-1, but I'm going to go off the deep end in the hopes that the basketball gods in their effort to make me look stupid will prove everything I write in this post wrong and make me look like an idiot, thereby helping the Blazers.
Presuming the Lakers finish this series in 5 or 6 games, which seems a foregone conclusion to me, I am ready to see Stotts gone, Olshey too, and probably a wholesale overhaul of the roster. I know that will be hard to do in an abbreviated offseason, but this team is closer to not making the playoffs than contending.
Start with Stotts. Yeah, he's popular with the players. That's because he lets them do whatever they want. They don't have to play defense. They don't have to value possessions. I can live with making some mistakes and not coaching every pass, but Stotts takes it to the absurd extreme.
I don't get this "offensive genius" label. It's been built on having phenomenal offensive players who'd have done well with or without Stotts. Great offensive coaches don't get beaten by the same tactic year after year like the double-team on Dame at halfcourt. Great offensive coaches find ways to get scoring from other players, playing to their strengths. Great offensive coaches develop scoring ability, whether it be making open shots when your star is double-teamed, moving the basketball quickly to get mismatches, or moving without the basketball.
None of these things are hallmarks of Stotts' coaching.
Ant should be at the very least a dangerous scorer. He's regressed to the point of being useless. He might not even be tradeable now. Hezonja could be an effective role player but he has no role; he plays like a star without star ability, doing a little bit of everything and none of it well. And he doesn't realize it; his lack of self-awareness for a veteran is the thing that probably will have him back in Europe for life next year, because he does crazy things at the worst times.
Other team on a run and you need to break the momentum? Oh, let's give it to Mario to fire up one of those 3s he seldom makes.
Stotts' style doesn't develop young players, and you can see the result of that now. When people get hurt, they get thrown into the fire and are so overwhelmed they can't do anything. But that's what happens when you never put other teams away when you get a chance. The Blazers are in every game, and so is whoever they play. No lead is safe, because we'll take bad shots and play bad defense and see 15-point leads evaporate in 3 minutes and our young guys don't get a chance to get any meaningful burn.
Does Stotts motivate players? I wouldn't know it from watching Hassan play. He's in a contract year, and his role was altered because of Nurk's return after the hiatus. Sometimes he looks like the guy who dominated before. Mostly, he looks like a guy ready to move on to his next team. If you can't motivate him, who can you motivate?
Obviously, Stotts' defensive approach is an absolute joke. It's rudimentary, one step ahead of summer rec ball. We switch Ant from Caruso to Anthony Davis on a screen 17 feet from the basket. Insane. We foul constantly, even our vets. Despite knowing our lack of depth right now, we have guys like Gary Trent trying to block Davis as he dunks the ball. Insane.
At the very least, Stotts needs a defensive coach, but would he utilize that assistant? I have no reason to believe so.
Of course, Stotts only can play the talent he has, and Olshey really didn't do his coach a lot of favors. I won't complain about the money tied up in Dame and CJ; you can't argue with Dame's contract and I think CJ is more important to the Blazers than most people do, and I think his contract would have been reasonable if the cap kept going up (although who knows how that gets affected by the shutdown).
However, not having a backup guard to step in for Curry and not having a backup big with Nurk out just makes Neal look like an average GM at best, and probably not even that. Hezonja isn't even a body you can rely on for 10 minutes per game. Biggie? Why the heck is he back? He's an undersized 5 with feet of lead. I don't know what to think of our drafting, because Stotts is so scared to work in young players, but Collins was underwhelming and now appears fragile, Ant doesn't look like he understands the game, which was the concern having not played basketball after HS, and Nas ... no one knows what we have in him but he doesn't seem like a 2 and he seems too small to play the 3 and lacks a handle to play either spot. Trent looks like we got lucky, but I think he's somewhere between the guy we saw the first 5 games of the bubble and what we have now. He's a guy. Like about a hundred other guys in the NBA. I do love his scrappiness on D, though.
This roster ... ugh. I don't know where you start. There's a glut of players with similar ability at the 3 and 4 positions, but no one really separates themselves from anyone else. We need depth in the backcourt (we really need at least a Seth Curry-type backup PG and we also could use a guard who can defend a bit), but we also need a solid backup big. Neither of those is going to be filled with a draft pick, so I think we're going to probably have to pass on a young player with upside to fill a reserve role for a couple of seasons, and that's going to put this team in bad shape in about 5 years when Dame and CJ and Nurk are winding down and we have been filling the roster with stopgaps. It'll be like when Darius Miles was our best player.
The way I look at this roster, there really are no unmovable guys aside from Dame. CJ is borderline; it depends what you could get for him. But I see a lot of guys in this league who we don't think are anything special who we could put in a lineup next to Dame and they'd look like good players and we'd become attached to them but really they are just guys. I think Nurk might be like that. I love him, but he played so timidly and so almost afraid tonight and I don't see guys like that usually being on teams that win championships.
We have like 50 million wing players who are essentially equal. And we don't have a system that takes advantage of their strengths.
I'm really depressed at where I see this team trending right now. There aren't easy answers for what makes it better in the short term, and the longterm looks really bleak to me. The thought's even crossed my mind that if we lose this series in 5 that it might be time to blow it up, and that means even considering trading Lillard if we get an outrageous offer as sacrilegious as that sounds, because for the beating he takes and the minutes he plays and our inability to put people around him or develop a scheme to get him space eventually that body is going to break down and we're going to be dealing with him missing 15-20 games per year because we just had the wrong approach. He's too good and too unselfish and honestly I'd rather see him have a few good years where he had a chance to win a title rather than being Stotts' and Olshey's sacrificial lamb to keep the Blazers battling for the 8th seed in the West for the next 3 seasons.
Like I said, I am really down right now. I am going to bed. Good night.
Presuming the Lakers finish this series in 5 or 6 games, which seems a foregone conclusion to me, I am ready to see Stotts gone, Olshey too, and probably a wholesale overhaul of the roster. I know that will be hard to do in an abbreviated offseason, but this team is closer to not making the playoffs than contending.
Start with Stotts. Yeah, he's popular with the players. That's because he lets them do whatever they want. They don't have to play defense. They don't have to value possessions. I can live with making some mistakes and not coaching every pass, but Stotts takes it to the absurd extreme.
I don't get this "offensive genius" label. It's been built on having phenomenal offensive players who'd have done well with or without Stotts. Great offensive coaches don't get beaten by the same tactic year after year like the double-team on Dame at halfcourt. Great offensive coaches find ways to get scoring from other players, playing to their strengths. Great offensive coaches develop scoring ability, whether it be making open shots when your star is double-teamed, moving the basketball quickly to get mismatches, or moving without the basketball.
None of these things are hallmarks of Stotts' coaching.
Ant should be at the very least a dangerous scorer. He's regressed to the point of being useless. He might not even be tradeable now. Hezonja could be an effective role player but he has no role; he plays like a star without star ability, doing a little bit of everything and none of it well. And he doesn't realize it; his lack of self-awareness for a veteran is the thing that probably will have him back in Europe for life next year, because he does crazy things at the worst times.
Other team on a run and you need to break the momentum? Oh, let's give it to Mario to fire up one of those 3s he seldom makes.
Stotts' style doesn't develop young players, and you can see the result of that now. When people get hurt, they get thrown into the fire and are so overwhelmed they can't do anything. But that's what happens when you never put other teams away when you get a chance. The Blazers are in every game, and so is whoever they play. No lead is safe, because we'll take bad shots and play bad defense and see 15-point leads evaporate in 3 minutes and our young guys don't get a chance to get any meaningful burn.
Does Stotts motivate players? I wouldn't know it from watching Hassan play. He's in a contract year, and his role was altered because of Nurk's return after the hiatus. Sometimes he looks like the guy who dominated before. Mostly, he looks like a guy ready to move on to his next team. If you can't motivate him, who can you motivate?
Obviously, Stotts' defensive approach is an absolute joke. It's rudimentary, one step ahead of summer rec ball. We switch Ant from Caruso to Anthony Davis on a screen 17 feet from the basket. Insane. We foul constantly, even our vets. Despite knowing our lack of depth right now, we have guys like Gary Trent trying to block Davis as he dunks the ball. Insane.
At the very least, Stotts needs a defensive coach, but would he utilize that assistant? I have no reason to believe so.
Of course, Stotts only can play the talent he has, and Olshey really didn't do his coach a lot of favors. I won't complain about the money tied up in Dame and CJ; you can't argue with Dame's contract and I think CJ is more important to the Blazers than most people do, and I think his contract would have been reasonable if the cap kept going up (although who knows how that gets affected by the shutdown).
However, not having a backup guard to step in for Curry and not having a backup big with Nurk out just makes Neal look like an average GM at best, and probably not even that. Hezonja isn't even a body you can rely on for 10 minutes per game. Biggie? Why the heck is he back? He's an undersized 5 with feet of lead. I don't know what to think of our drafting, because Stotts is so scared to work in young players, but Collins was underwhelming and now appears fragile, Ant doesn't look like he understands the game, which was the concern having not played basketball after HS, and Nas ... no one knows what we have in him but he doesn't seem like a 2 and he seems too small to play the 3 and lacks a handle to play either spot. Trent looks like we got lucky, but I think he's somewhere between the guy we saw the first 5 games of the bubble and what we have now. He's a guy. Like about a hundred other guys in the NBA. I do love his scrappiness on D, though.
This roster ... ugh. I don't know where you start. There's a glut of players with similar ability at the 3 and 4 positions, but no one really separates themselves from anyone else. We need depth in the backcourt (we really need at least a Seth Curry-type backup PG and we also could use a guard who can defend a bit), but we also need a solid backup big. Neither of those is going to be filled with a draft pick, so I think we're going to probably have to pass on a young player with upside to fill a reserve role for a couple of seasons, and that's going to put this team in bad shape in about 5 years when Dame and CJ and Nurk are winding down and we have been filling the roster with stopgaps. It'll be like when Darius Miles was our best player.
The way I look at this roster, there really are no unmovable guys aside from Dame. CJ is borderline; it depends what you could get for him. But I see a lot of guys in this league who we don't think are anything special who we could put in a lineup next to Dame and they'd look like good players and we'd become attached to them but really they are just guys. I think Nurk might be like that. I love him, but he played so timidly and so almost afraid tonight and I don't see guys like that usually being on teams that win championships.
We have like 50 million wing players who are essentially equal. And we don't have a system that takes advantage of their strengths.
I'm really depressed at where I see this team trending right now. There aren't easy answers for what makes it better in the short term, and the longterm looks really bleak to me. The thought's even crossed my mind that if we lose this series in 5 that it might be time to blow it up, and that means even considering trading Lillard if we get an outrageous offer as sacrilegious as that sounds, because for the beating he takes and the minutes he plays and our inability to put people around him or develop a scheme to get him space eventually that body is going to break down and we're going to be dealing with him missing 15-20 games per year because we just had the wrong approach. He's too good and too unselfish and honestly I'd rather see him have a few good years where he had a chance to win a title rather than being Stotts' and Olshey's sacrificial lamb to keep the Blazers battling for the 8th seed in the West for the next 3 seasons.
Like I said, I am really down right now. I am going to bed. Good night.
