Why are there only two choices? What is the basis of this poll? There has to be reasons as to why you think either one are choices.
I certainly want Crawford as a choice. I think Nelson has to leave first because his time is gone, in my opinion. Sure, he barks on the bench every now and then but I don't see the passion for the game from him anymore. Plus I still think he has handled the team poorly, from construction with way too many guards, to running an offense with, you know, actual plays, to the complete lack of defensive focus (I'm not going to give him credit for trying to dump that responsibility off on Keith Smart), to the lack of accountability for veterans, to playing time allotment, to shooting off his mouth publicly (sometimes this is amusing, sometimes it hurts the team), to his infamous doghouse/icehouse that often seems to leave young players angry and confused and looking for a way out of town. Players will say in interviews that they like playing for Nelson and have no problem with him, but I bet if you did a private poll the results would be much different. Sure, there were a lot of injuries, it was a tough year. But I just think Nelson has lost it, he is not the future of this team in any case, and the sooner we can start fresh, the better.
Nellie has one year left. I think that's about right for his tenure here. With the right pieces, we may be able to make a PO push next year. Speaking about pieces, Nellie wasn't the one who put this roster together. That would be Rowell and partially Mully. Did Nellie have influence? Who knows, but it's a moot point since we're never going to know. I agree Nellie handled the PT for the veterans poorly, but at the same time, I think he handled Anthony Randolph, Anthony Morrow, and Marco Belinelli very well. All these guys have come into their own in one way or another. Marco can be a slight exception due to injuries (shame, really). So, I think we need to give Nellie credit for the very fact that we have very young and exciting pieces for next year.
I didn't want to but Rowell or Cohan there. I was thinking of putting Crawford there, but I thought it would mostly be between Maggs/Nellie.
I'd say Nelson, you can't trade Nelson for draft picks / cash compensation / or other players. I'd figure Mags could at least get us somebody decent if we trade him off. And let's face it, until we get a franchise star to drive this team, we need a coach who can get these guys to play as a team and play defense. If we got a franchise star or two high level stars, then we don't have to play as much team ball. Just let the star(s) do his thing and have the other 3-4 guys feed off him. But everyone has to play defense and have skillsets that compliment each other's games or it doesn't work. If we get 5 mediocre guys, we better have a Jerry Sloan, a college coach who can get nba respect to make these players play bigger than the sum of their parts. But then again our management doesn't really stand behind any coach for too long. They also don't have a vision of what this team can be if they just knew the sport well enough and had passion for it. This franchise really sucks, but I like watching the young players develop. I mean we can't really compete for crap if we keep repeating history and then reversing direction. We need great players or we need a deep, experienced team led by a coach who knows how to adjust to bigger or smaller teams and not just go smaller all the time... I can't stand old dudes who default to the only thing they know that has made them successful. They just won't try new things and think out of the box.
Don Nelson has an extension in place until 2011, and I think he will likely hand the coaching reigns to assistant coach Keith Smart before its over and take over as Nelsonus, Destroyer.. err.. GM duties with assistant Larry Riley. Okay, here's the main point I wanted to make. I think Smart would be the best coach we could get under the circumstances. I rather have a proven NBA winner, but those are few and far in-between. What's good about Smart is that he has long-time NBA experience as an assistant and knows the Warriors players. Let's remember the NBA is a *players* league. A successful head coach should be familiar with the NBA first as an assistant before I would look at hiring a college or European coach. Yeah, it's a Catch-22, but the Warriors are not in a position to make mistakes. We need to learn from the Phoenix Suns. You could argue we end up with a guy like Steve Natt at Sacramento, but Smart has earned the chance to see what he could do, but we could end up with a guy like Mike Brown. Besides knowing the team and personnel, he's been groomed by Nelson so he would be a great fit.
