McMillan-trained players are softies. He turns each into a complex of inhibitions, terrified to make a turnover, always looking to Roy to take over. Cho needs to trade players who started here for players who have already been taught by 1 or 2 NBA coaches, who allowed them to just play.
We will soon depend as much upon Matthews as Roy to win games. He's less talented, but more tough. Now that Pritchard's gone, we can lose the goal of being the youngest team in the league, and trade to get experience. By "experience" I mean at least 1 year learning under an NBA coach other than McMillan. That's equivalent to about 5 baby years of being here.
listen, i like martells game as a backup but as far as who is smarter between him and wes..... its not close. we might have had 2 of the dumbest NBA players in Travis and Martell. Throw in Zach to that mix and its scary as far as tea IQ goes.
Ah, a praise for Matthews thread turns to rip on coach. Cool. Got it. I'm excited about Matthews. I think he has a higher upside than most of us realize and I think his contribution is noticed immediately - in over 80 games. Can I just state, Oden on the other hand....20 games...max.
What's sad about your number is that I was hoping for 3 times that number, and that is only 60 games.
I was kind of shocked how he came out at the Fan fest. The dude is fearless... exactly what the team needed.
It was nice seeing him live, he did a really good job of being in the right place at the right time and seemed to get the concept of spacing on both offense and defense ... but then again he played 4 years at Marquette and a year under Jerry Sloan so it's almost a given. As for the comparison to Martell, I think Marty was plenty smart -- as evidenced by the fact that he became a pretty good defender by the time he was done here -- but his real problem in my opinion is that he's a rhythm shooter who relies on a lot of FGAs to get into that rhythm and he was also prone to get the yips when the pressure was on; I don't know if Matthews is immune to that, but that's not his reported MO.
I'm not surprised by Matthews. Our scouts surveyed the whole league and picked this one guy as the best one to fit McMillan's system, of all free agents available this summer. That's why they paid him so much, because they expect him to earn it as a star for this particular team (not necessarily a star for other teams). Pritchard believed you build through the draft. He was wrong. Especially once you're not getting high picks anymore. Even high picks succeed only 50% of the time (see Bayless). Camby, Miller, Matthews...get us more experience and McMillan will have an easier time. A lot of successful coaches aren't good teachers, and he's one of them.
Well put. I couldn't believe how inane the "Blazers don't have a plan" threads were after we picked up Matthews. I don't quite agree with this. I generally ascribe to the conventional wisdom that KP had the right idea of "stockpiling talent", but he fell to in love with the players he drafted and thus was unable to trade them.
Wes is not 6'5! He's about as tall as Bayless. When he was standing right next to Rudy, he was way shorter. And I'd say he looks about 210.
