Slept on it and given it some thought, time for a lengthy post about my views on the current situation.
First of all, Mitch is saying all the right things in his interviews, but that doesn't really mean much. I could say the same things and I don't have even 1% of the competence required for an NBA head coaching job.
Those issues he's detecting need to be dealt with, repeating them over and over again for the media is useless.
Said it during the game, but I really hated his lineup change gimmick, it has nothing to do with how Pop used to do it.
Pop did it to wake the veterans up when they took their foot off the gas, but they could afford it here and there after winning so much.
What we have right now is a team of young guys out to prove themselves and they should be willing to run head first through every obstacle because they haven't proven shit.
Instead we're on a 2-4 run with 1 win happening only because Champ had a career night and the other one being a 10 point win against the worst team in the league.
We had no losses against sub-.500 teams this season, only to lose 3 out of 4 during this stretch.
After an embarrassing performance against undermanned Blazers that didn't even have a point guard other than two-way player, we looked even worse against G-league Grizzlies.
If you haven't done your job as a coach over the two days of rest, then your'e certainly not going to create a spark by trotting out a nonsensical lineup out of desperation.
As I said during the game, if a couple of players are struggling it's on them, but if everyone is struggling then it's on the coaching staff.
Do we even have shooting coaches? It can't possibly be that everyone forgot to shoot at the same time, they're doing something wrong, very wrong.
Our gameplan on offense still hasn't changed, Castle has a free reign and he's been awful as of late.
You let Fox play through bad stretches because you know he's got what it takes and will be back on track soon enough.
You don't let a sophmore keep bringing the team down because what we've been seeing isn't a bad stretch, but him getting figured out.
They're playing him as if he's Giannis, it's just that he's 6'6 and obviously can't get it done since his bag of tricks at the rim has been figured out.
Fox was horrible last night, but it was still 10 shots for Castle and 6 for Fox at the half.
We can't expect him to be hot whenever whe need him if he keeps getting frozen out of games.
I liked that we tried to play Barnes out of his slump early on, but after it was obvious he's going to stay cold, it was a lost cause.
Keldon has been on a great shooting streak for his standards, but last night he was obviously trying to compensate for everyone else being cold and went away from his usual game.
Took 13 shots, 8 were from 3pt. We lost his usual contribution in the paint because of that.
Another thing that's beyond frustrating and is obviously by design are all the low percentage passes into crowded paint. Usually bounce passes.
Had 3 of those against the Grizzlies. Castle being the worst offender, but not the only one. Champ had a bounce pass to Sochan who was under the basket and it wasn't even close.
I'll say that's the product of "everyone can do everything" basketball, when in reality most of our guys are fundamentally flawed and all of them have things they shouldn't be allowed to do.
Champ can barely dribble the ball as a perimeter player, how can he even think that he's able to pull off such passes?
For me, that's all on coaching. This is a young team with players that don't really know how to win, they need to be micromanaged for a year or two before letting them make their own decisions and make the right plays that way.
You can say trial and error is great, but I disagree. I think the trial and error process, especially popular with the tanking teams since it serves as a mean to lose games isn't good because most players get lost in it.
What has trial and error done for Devin and Keldon? Absolutely nothing, we were all ready to let them go for nothing after all the "do your thing" years.
Now that they've been put in the roles that fit their best attributes, they look good.
Same thing with Castle. He's the point of attack defender, a physical driver that takes a lot of contact, but we also have him pound the ball for way too long and it doesn't amount to much if we don't get in our sets right away because he's a non-shooter and is fairly easy to defend when he doesn't have the first step advantage on his paint attacks.
Spurs touches:
A table featuring touches information for each player in the league based on selected filters.
www.nba.com
Thunder touches:
A table featuring touches information for each player in the league based on selected filters.
www.nba.com
Castle is averaging more touches per game than SGA in less minutes played. While being the POA defender.
There isn't a single other player in the league that has the most touches on their team and also spend most of the game as the POA defender.
It would be fine if we were still tanking, but those days are over and it's just a disservice to Castle since he's obviously frustrated with his inability to help the team now that he's been figured out.
Then we have Harper. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he isn't involved in enough possessions as a point guard.
He either brings the ball over, passes it to the next guy that's the executioner of a set with a few more passes to go or he gets the ball late, making him the executioner.
He had 12 assists against the Jazz and in 5 games since he's at 8 assists and 7 turnovers in 103 minutes played. It's not like he's turning it over a lot like Castle or anything, he just doesn't have the point guard role.
Sure, he should've had some more assists because the shooters have been cold, but he's 51 FGA and 8 assists in 103 minutes can't be a coincidence because everyone who watches games knows he's not selfish and didn't have many situations where he shot rather than passing the ball.
I'm not saying Harper should start over Castle, but it really does feel like their roles are reversed.
Castle is a secondary ballhandler and a rim attacker that can playmake when needed and Harper is a true point guard. Instead we're doing the opposite.
Then there's the Wemby situation.
And Wemby isn't the problem.
In fact, our current run would've been way worse without him and I'm not sure most people have realized it.
We went from being 9-3 without Wemby to barely holding onto dear life in the games he plays and is trying his best to carry the team that's completely out of sorts.
We're 1-3 with him since the OKC win and he's averaged 30/10 on 57/39/90 in just 25mpg. While obviously holding the defense together.
Every single one of those losses would've been an ugly blowout without him, especially the Grizzlies game.
That's just the offense, which isn't even the worst part.
Defense? The less said, the better.
I posted the deep drop coverage we're obviously committed to many times, 1v2 high PNR defense with thoughts and prayers to the onball defender and nothing else.
Every competent screener gets many wide open looks for their ballhandler and we don't care about it.
Doesn't even have to be the big stepping up, but playing the gaps and helping from the wings could be an option, but we don't do it.
We're basically hoping that whoever has the ball won't make shots off the dribble. And we keep getting burned. Even by two-way players like we did against the Blazers.
The other infuriating scheme is having Wemby match up with the worst perimeter shooter and help off them, basically permanently leaving the corner wide open.
And then we get burned because unlike our team, everyone can shoot when left completely wide open.
I got compeltely triggered by this play last night to the point where I didn't even care about the game anymore.
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What is this fucking shit? Like are we seriously pretending an NBA team is defending like this by design? What the fuck are we doing?
And I can find this exact same play and it's variations happen at least 10 times every single game. Just the extent of fuckery and awful defense is different, varying from poor to whatever this is.
It's season 3 and our negative IQ role players still think they'll be the detriment at the rim and that Wemby needs help at the rim.
Does Keldon really fucking think he can contribute anything by doing what he did there?
And not only that, but the Grizzlies basically have 3 wide open players on the perimeter, so even if the corner shooter was bad and left open by design, he can just swing the ball around.
Whether this kind of idiotic help is on the players or on the coaching staff is for you to decide, but these little things completely trigger me to the point of not being invested into the game anymore.
If there was a defend the paint or 3pt slider, ours would be at 100-0 in favor of defending the paint, which is just idiotic since Wemby can do it by himself better than any other player in history.
And what's the worst thing of all, the math doesn't even work on this.
Would you rather give up 10 paint attempts contested by just Wemby who's one step too late and his presence is enough of a detriment for players not to attempt shots even when he's late or 10 wide open to lightly contested corner 3s?
Because that's what we've been doing.
We're by far the best paint defense team with Wemby on the floor, we don't need to push that any further.
We can easily give up some of the paint defense in favor of having way better 3pt defense.
Because if we have paint defense issues it's way easier to switch it up and focus on it more than to start defending a team that gets hot from 3pt. Even against the worst teams, it's a death sentence.
As we've seen last night and as we've seen in the Hornets-Thunder game with the Hornets shooting 51% from 3pt.
Pop retired, but his defensive principles are more alive than ever.
Some will say Grizzlies scored just 106, I'll say that giving up 106 to a team led by Spencer and Landale is worse than giving up 120 against a good team.
And yes, 106 should be solid enough of a defense to outscore a G-league team, but apparently not.
The final point would be just a question that I don't know an answer to, at least not yet.
Which type of coach is Mitch developing into? A system coach that's willing to lose games and even playoff series without giving up on any of his ideas just because he thinks they'll eventually work or a common sense coach that will adjust something that obviously doesn't work? Are we willing to sacrifice this season and be a first round exit just to force-develop Castle into a point guard, when he's obviously not one? Are we going to die on the wide open corner 3 and drop coverage hill?
I personally never liked the "players aren't putting enough effort into it" takes unless it's blatantly obvious. We have a team full of young guys that need direction and not whatever we've been doing as of late.
You can't tell me Castle isn't trying hard, he gets beaten up in the paint every game. And he's still doing it even though it's not working because Mitch told him to keep pounding the rock.
And it will probably work tonight because the Lakers are terrible defensively, which doesn't mean much.
There you have it, that's my way too long rant about the current struggles, I'm sure there are at least a few things I got wrong, I'd like youg guys to point those out, hopefully we can have a solid discussion out of it.
