With Jackson gone, Ellis & Nellie should as well

I wouldn’t expect anything else to happen for a little bit, and while I’d be happy to see Nellie go, that probably makes sense… it’s worth seeing how these new pieces fit together before blowing something else up.

In fact, you can at least construct an argument that Nellie’s coaching will improve as a result of this trade. For one thing, he gets a more viable smallball four. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like smallball (with this roster, anyway), and I don’t much like Vladimir Radmanovic. If he plays more than 15-20 minutes a game for us, something’s wrong. Having said that, Nellie’s fascination with smallball doesn’t seem likely to disappear anytime soon. And if we are going to go small, Radmanovic is an interesting option… he’s an excellent three-point shooter, tall enough to get some boards (he’s roughly equal to Maggette as a rebounder) and doesn’t demand the ball much, so he mainly helps space things out for Monta and others. Nellie’s been trying to shove non-Al-Harrington-like players into an Al-Harrington-shaped hole for over a year ago. Vladimir Radmanovic is an Al-Harrington-like player.

More importantly, Nellie can’t use Jack as a crutch anymore. Other than small lineups and general defensive apathy, Nellie’s second tenure here has been marked by one strategy: figure out who you think your two or three best players are, and give them all the minutes and freedom they can possibly handle. In ‘07-’08, he gave Baron Davis, Monta and Jack huge minutes, and while Baron and Jack did run out of gas at year’s end, Baron and Monta (and Biedrins) were good enough to make it a successful season. Really Biedrins was much better than Jack that year, and Nellie overplayed Jack and underplayed Biedrins, even given Biedrin’s foul rate. But overall, it worked, despite very little active strategizing on Nellie’s part. If your best players are good, and you identify them more or less correctly, they can take you a long way.

Last year, Nellie lost two of the three guys he’d depended on, and he got a little nutty. He cast Jack as Baron Davis and Jamal Crawford as Monta Ellis, giving monster minutes to both and complete offensive control to Jack. The results were ugly, and for a simple reason: our best players weren’t that good, and Nellie had also not identified them well. Jack accounted of himself fairly well overall, but he was miscast as a Baron-style central offensive cog, and Crawford isn’t very good. With Biedrins, Turiaf, Wright and Randolph, our talent base had actually shifted a good bit toward the frontcourt, but Nellie never realized that. He just kept underplaying his bigs and overplaying his guards, hoping in vain they’d be as good as his previous guards. And as with Baron the previous year, he just seemed antsy whenever Jack was off the floor, even for a minute.

This year, Monta is back… he’s clearly a better player than Jack. Azubuike, already about as good as Jack in ‘08-’09, looked to have taken another step up… he was playing much better than Jack when he went down. Maggette started this year healthy and has been outplaying Jack by a huge margin. And Jack had asked to be traded! Still and all, Nellie gave him starter’s minutes, and in New York, when the rumors were at their peak and Nellie was desperate for a win? He played Stephen Jackson for over 47 minutes.

Nellie was addicted to Stephen Jackson. Jack became Nellie’s security blanket; if Jack was out there, Nellie felt free to hope that Jack would provide enough defense and make enough plays that something would just work out. And Jack’s not what Baron Davis was… he’s just not that level of player, nor close to it. When Baron left, it was on Nellie to really start coaching again, to take an active and clear-eyed look at his roster and figure out what worked and what needed to be taught. He didn’t do it. He told himself he didn’t need to, because he had Stephen Jackson.

Now that excuse, ludicrous as it was, is gone. Nellie can’t just give Jack 42 minutes and hope he nails enough jumpers and picks off enough passes and motivates enough teammates to carry the day. Now Nellie actually has to coach this team. And it could go one of two ways. Nellie could be reinvigorated by the new-look roster and actually put some effort into coaching again; if he does, then good, we have a good coach. Or Nellie could be even more disinterested in coaching a bunch of kids without his security blanket around; in that event, he’ll probably quit. One way or the other, we should know more about Nellie in the next couple weeks. I’m thinking (maybe just hoping) that lazy in-a-rut Nellie is not long for this world.