Heart & Soul

No, Nellie was not nervous about TK & the rumors, but if you’ve got a team filled with guys who haven’t been in the league 3 years, who haven’t become accustomed to the business side of the NBA, and they’ll get a little discouraged. Have you ever gone through a downsizing? Through somebody in your workplace fighting with your boss and you have to listen to it every day and sometimes choose sides? It wears you down emotionally. Sometimes you don’t feel like going to work in the morning, thus, Nellie doesn’t know if Brandan or Anthony are going to show up as their normal selves. You think the young guys are going to watch Al and Nellie fight and not think "Well, I might not be here tomorrow…" You think that doesn’t effect them? This didn’t impact Nellie, it impacted the team, specifically the youngsters and put a cloud of "I might not be here" over the entire team.

I’m not saying the atmosphere was hunky-dory. I’m saying Al was around for two weeks and then left. And there’s a big problem with your downsizing analogy: when your company downsizes, that’s a bad sign for your job. When your NBA team gets rid of a guy, that’s a good sign for your job. Wright and Randolph may have been buddies with Al, but on a professional level, they were probably both quite happy to see him go. Those guys want to play.

We can’t know what was discussed internally, but none of the possible trades that leaked to the press involved any other players except for Marcus Williams. There is simply no reason to believe that the locker room was torn apart by rumors of trades. There are constant rumors about Blazers being traded, and that team’s as young as we are… they play through it just fine.

Darn right the onus is on you. You’re the one making this claim that he could have coached this team to more wins without providing a shred of evidence.

Well, neither of us is going to have evidence… neither of us can prove anything. But I have, much like in the other thread, gone into concrete detail about why I think what I think. I will go through each game of the first couple months later on today. (I watched just about all of them, and they’re going to be no picnic to relive).

Show me where. I’m not sold on the idea that we’re a deep team.

From the “10 games…” thread you started: “We’ve got 6-7 solid guards (Jax, Maggs, Craw, Monta, Kelenna, and CJ/Beli… did I just call Belinelli "solid”? Yikes…) and we’ve got 2-3 solid bigs (Biedrins, Turiaf, Wright)."

You contended that we had 8-10 solid players… that sounded to me like you think the team is deep. Apologies if that’s not what you meant.

Once you get past Maggette & Jax, you start exaggerating. Crawford is not particularly great. He plays awful defense and he scores because he shoots a lot. He’s not awful overall, but he’s been on terrible teams his entire career… there’s a reason for that.

Believe me, I won’t spend a second defending Crawford. I think we’d be better off without him. I only included him to make the point that we’re not short on scoring.

We’ve been over the idea that Brandan & Turiaf count as solid starters.

I didn’t call them solid starters… I called them “big men who could give you quality time”. You don’t think you can get a combined 45 minutes of solid basketball out of Turiaf and Wright on a given night?

We are a big short, without question. But only one. We have some guys who can play. You yourself called Turiaf and possibly Wright “solid” before Wrightgate blew up.

And our bench is full of youngpotentialupside… it is not "deep". By my count, without Monta, we’ve got 3 solid starters, 1 marginal starter, 3 solid guys off the bench, and the rest is filler. That’s a recipe for terrible performance. Add all the injuries, and it gets even worse.

If you regard our starting lineup from the non-Monta days as Jamal, Azubuike, Jack, Maggette and Biedrins, you’re left with Turiaf, Wright, Morrow, CJ, Marco and Randolph. Whatever their ceilings, the first three have played well, I think you’d agree. CJ has been terrible defensively, but pretty damn impressive offensively… he’s our ninth-best guy. I’m not a big Marco believer, but he can play some. Randolph is playing well now, but wasn’t for the first third of the season — I can’t fault Nellie for not playing Randolph.

Still and all, we had nine guys playing solid basketball sans Monta (or eight and Crawford, who was either not yet on the team or, well, Jamal Crawford). I’m not talking about potential… I’m talking about production. We had nine guys who were doing some good things.

The thing they weren’t doing? Playing defense. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Injuries… Maggette missed nineteen games, and that hurt (though it wasn’t surprising). Other than that, though, there weren’t too many injuries. Jack missed six games. Turiaf, Crawford and Azubuike each missed two. Watson missed one. Everybody else was healthy, including Biedrins, our best player (Wright and Marco got hurt after the time period we’re talking about). The only big thing here was Maggette. And few teams in the league are better equipped to deal with an injured Corey Maggette… between Jackson, Azubuike, Morrow and others, we have a bunch of guys that can play small forward.

Injuries were a problem, but Nellie’s responses to the injuries were a problem, too. Nellie rode an injured Jack into the ground for no apparent reason, and tried to solve Maggette’s hamstring woes by putting him at… power forward. Those were bad decisions that cost us games. Other decisions could’ve been made in both cases… both decisions came when we had a number of other options who were playing well.

As for the games we were mostly shorthanded, of which there are a lot of, you can’t blame all the losses on being shorthanded, but it can certainly be expected that we’d have lost at least a few games because people were tired on the tail end of a back-to-back or against good competition.

Absolutely. We played a lot of back-to-back games, we played a lot of road games. We were bound to lose a bunch. I’ll go through the games a bit later (was hoping not to get bogged down on this post, but here we are).

Joking aside, are you really suggesting that Nellie doesn’t know how to coach teams to defend the pick & roll? Or are you suggesting that he just doesn’t try, or didn’t feel like trying in that particular game. You’re going to give the players a free pass on that one? It’s not the players’ fault that Lee was scoring on them like that?

The players played horribly… everything about that game was horrible.

But this was a game where Chris Duhon and David Lee successfully worked a pick-and-roll on us over twenty times. Are you really suggesting that that’s not a coaching failure? If another team gave up 22 assists to Chris Duhon, wouldn’t you think their defensive coaching could use a little work?

Humm… oddly that was game where we were missing Jackson and had CJ Watson, GSoM defensive scapegoat, playing point for much of the game. That couldn’t have anything to do with it. It had to be Nellie’s fault for not ever learning how to defend the pick & roll.

The guys we had available: Andris Biedrins, Corey Maggette, Jamal Crawford, Kelenna Azubuike, Ronny Turiaf, Brandan Wright, Anthony Morrow, C.J. Watson, Marco Belinelli, Anthony Randolph. Only Jack was hurt.

The Knicks were missing Nate Robinson. They beat us playing only seven guys: David Lee, Al Harrington, Quentin Richardson, Chris Duhon, Wilson Chandler, Tim Thomas and Anthony Roberson.

C’mon, man. That Knick lineup is embarrassing. We were on the end of a road back-to-back, but it doesn’t matter — we had much more talent on hand. The second-best guy they had out there was Al. We just refused to play a damn lick of defense or figure out one of the most basic plays in basketball. And if it was any other coach, wouldn’t you hold them responsible for that?

Look, we’ve had changing lineups and lots of guys who play bad defense. That’s a recipe for failure because you never know what to expect from your teammates on the court, you start coming over for help defense getting out of position, and then your guy takes a wide open shot.

Totally agree. But the changing lineups as much to do with Nellie than with injuries — more on that in a sec. Also, the question must be asked: why are guys like Azubuike and Watson bad at defense? These are hardworking young guys, guys who were regarded as good defenders in college. Doesn’t it seem possible that they could play solid defense if taught how to do so? It does to me. (It seems extra possible now that they’re improving under Smart… credit Nellie for that if you like, though I’m not sure if I can.)

Interesting factoid: Everybody on our team, with the exception for Marcus Williams & Jameero Davidson, has started 4 games or more… everybody.

Yep, pretty crazy. Gives me ‘94-’95 flashbacks. But if you look at it, a lot of it is Nellie mixing up the lineups himself. DeMarcus Nelson started at the point to begin the year… a silly idea, I think, though it didn’t cost us anything. Anyway, C.J. and others were available. Rob Kurz had one emergency fill-in when both Turiaf and Wright had the flu, but his other three starts had nothing to do with injury… guys like Turiaf and Wright and Azubuike and Morrow were available. Just Nellie being Nellie. Of Ronny Turiaf’s five starts, all but one have come in the last couple weeks, due to the Biedrins injury. Nothing wrong with starting Turiaf right now… if anything, he should’ve started more games than this.

I don’t really begrudge Nellie’s mixing up the starting lineups. It’s not nearly as important as who you give the bulk of the minutes to, and there’s something to be said for trying fresh approaches… I even like some of the moves he’s made, like starting Morrow. That said, the stat that everyone on the team has started at least four times is not solely a reflection of injury. It’s also a reflection of Nellie’s desire to try different things. That’s his right, but he is responsible for those efforts.

Maybe it’s somewhat Nellie’s fault for not keeping some consistency in the starting line up. I’ll give you that. And sure, maybe this year hasn’t been Nellie’s best performance, but he’s by no means completely botched this season.

As I said, I don’t think Nellie has “botched” this season. If anyone botched it, it’s Monta. But I don’t think Nellie has coached well. I’m a fan of the guy, but there have been real problems with our play, and context doesn’t explain all of them. Hopefully it’s all academic, as we’re showing more fire and savvy now. His coaching of late has been pretty good, and I’d love for it to stay that way.

Maybe we can agree on something like this: the Warriors entered the season in a bad situation, thanks to the Monta injury and Al’s unhappiness. It was looking like it was going to be a bad season. Frustrated by many of the existing problems, Don Nelson lost focus for awhile and did some stubborn coaching that cost us some games, making the problems even worse. Happily, everyone seems to be snapping out of their funk — Nelson is coaching better, and the team is playing better. Sound about right?