I don't love Stotts, he could do a lot of things better but this is just bullshit if you ask me. Comparing the playoffs to the regular season is pure craziness. Look at what "good coaches" records are in the playoffs. There are very few with a record over .500. Winning a third of your games in the playoffs isn't bad. It's not the regular season. I also think Stotts needs to adjust better in the playoffs and there have been one or maybe two playoff series where I was really pissed at him, definitely the NOLA sweep but other than that his teams got beat by the better teams. That run last season was a good run, I don't really care how it ended, just that it ended at the conference finals (I do wish it ended with a championship but that team didn't have a chance). I also think pointing out what a coaches record is in series that he lost is pointless. The way you are quantifying this it's like you better either miss the playoffs, sweep opponents, lose in 7 games or win championships without going to game sevens otherwise you're fucked. If a coach got to the finals every year for three years going to game seven in every series except getting swept out of the finals all three years and then the next year won the championship going seven games in every series including the finals... that would be a pretty fucking awesome run and that coaches winning percentage in the playoffs would be .505. That translates to a 41-41 record for an 82 game season... pretty underwhelming until you realize that coach just won four straight conference championships and one NBA championship. Another example is a coach that goes to the playoffs seven straight seasons but loses in the first round in seven games all seven post-seasons. Was that coach more successful than Stotts who has also gone to the playoffs for seven straight seasons and has won 4 series, making it to the conference finals once? The answer is obviously no that other coach wasn't more successful than Stotts but that coach has a win percentage in the playoffs of .429 compared to Stotts' playoff win percentage of .357 in the same time span. Do you see how your statistics are kind of shitty? Don't get me wrong, I would have fired Olshey and Stotts a while ago but that doesn't mean that the numbers you are using paint an accurate picture.
no, I don't think my perspective is "
shitty" and I've explained why several times. I'll distill it down one more time:
I don't believe regular season record is the best gauge of what the actual status or level a team is. Rather, it's the playoff performance against the true contenders. And if you're a team like Portland trying to climb to the level of those true contenders, that's the most revealing gauge of progress. It's not occasionally beating another flawed, injured, or young team. What you do against good teams with good defenses
that's why I'm saying that 4-28 record in close out series is so damning. One sweep or one 1-4 loss, or even both of those results could be circumstantial or just a match-up problem. But they could have endured that and still showed progress the other 5 times they faced elite teams. Showed they had improved their ability to compete on that level. But they haven't. They faced the Warriors 3 times in the playoffs and the only win they logged was in the first series they faced the Warriors, and that win came at home, when Curry was out. Progress would have generated at least a couple more wins in the two subsequent series, but instead it was sweeps
more than that, in terms of showing progress, is looking at how Portland has lost those 7 times. And the formula has been the same, over an over: '
stop-Dame=crush-the-Blazers'. Couldn't be a simpler formula, and for 7 straight years, the Blazers have had no answer....no progress. It's even worse than that 4-28 record over 7 years; over the last 4 seasons, it's 1-16....yuck
in the 8 years of the Olshey/Stotts era, Portland has averaged 45 wins in the regular season. They've made it out of the first round 3 times, but one of those times was against a crippled Clippers team. And yes, it's worth noting that considering how much chatter there is around here about how well Portland could have done if they'd only been "
healthy". That's an average of 45 regular season wins and 2.7 playoff wins; and bowing out of the playoffs the same way, over and over. Is 45 + 2.7 satisfactory?
is there really any reason for optimism with that? Any reason to believe next year will be different? Or is it seemingly guaranteed Portland will reboot the same core players with some minor rotational changes and end up with the same result at the end of next season?