Speights is an older and much more polished player than Randolph… he’s not a guy who needs to be coaxed along. Randolph is, and Nellie knows it. And Nellie’s musings about Randolph’s flaws certainly aren’t thrust upon him by Kawakami. That’s just Nellie holding forth as usual.

As to your larger point…

We are a collection of overrated scorers, drafted rooks and sophs, undrafted/D-leaguers, and Andris Biedrins.

I agree. But that’s still a team that could be 15-22 right now with decent coaching. Toronto’s a straw man - they’re unusually talented for a below.500 team, and their struggles are related to their extremely tough schedule. Our schedule, even as road-heavy as it’s been, has been substantially easier.

With Monta on the shelf, we’re not a very talented team. But are we really less talented than the Pacers? The Knicks? The friggin’ Bobcats? We’re more than three games worse than any of those teams, and none of them have even our middling talent.

I mean, this isn’t rocket science. We’re not dealing with an infinite number of hypotheticals here.

How many games have we won that we should’ve lost? We had no business beating the Celtics… other weaker teams have been doing that lately as well, but that one certainly counts. We caught Portland before they put it together… let’s toss Nellie a bone and say that one counts also. Two games.

How many games have we lost that we should’ve won? I’d say at least seven. We’ve lost to the Thunder, the Timberwolves, the Wizards, the Grizzlies twice, a short-handed Pacers team, an embarrassingly short-handed Knicks team… we’ve lost to some terrible teams.

Now, are all of our losses of weak teams Nellie’s fault? Of course not. We shot 3-for-20 from three in the first Memphis game… when you do that, you’re gonna lose, and there’s not much the coach can do about it. But for every game like that, there’s a game like the first Heat game, where Nellie completely coached us out of a win. Or the Dwight-less Orlando game, where Nellie used such a pitifully small lineup that Marcin Gortat smacked us around. Or those twenty games in a row where the team seemed both uninterested in and incapable of any semblance of defense.

Our roster is poor. It is simply not poor enough to excuse a 10-27 record through this point. I’m a Nellie fan too, but let’s not kid ourselves.

It seems like all the refs are against us or something and the NBA doesnt want us to succeed. Makes absolutely no sense!

And on that comment about Belinelli hitting his ceiling, what the hell are you talking about?! He’s only started to get regular minutes for about 2 months and hes only 22 years old! Even younger than Rudy Fernandez! He is farrrrrrrr from hitting his ceiling, just give him a season or two to develop his skills, cause we all see that theyre there, they just need to be tapped out so that he can be the best player that he can be

Sure Kobe gets superstar treatment and the WCF against the Kings was a joke, but last night they really weren’t getting that many calls. Kobe and Pau were hit a lot on plays but the refs let them play. At least last night, this didn’t seem like the case.