This is clearly Nate's fault. If he would pay his debts to Luigi "knuckles" Lomax, he would stop whacking Blazer players on the knee with a lead pipe.
To get to the original point, has anyone doubted that Nate's a good coach when it comes to "motivation", "character", "scrap", "discipline", etc? But are you saying that you agree with Nate's call that it took injuries to 6 of his top 7 players (LMA being the exclusions) to get Bayless more minutes than Blake? Even during his "'breakout", 29-point PHX performance Bayless was played 6 minutes less than Blake. Or you agree with his insistence on playing Miller 29mpg in December and having him shoot higher than 50% in only 3 of his 12 games, but average almost 11 shots per game? Due to injuries, Nate's been unable to do a lot of the things people called for his firing over. For instance, he gets a lot of credit from me for putting his best 7 players out on the floor for a majority of the minutes, and give maybe 2 guys the leftovers. Unfortunately, it took 6 injuries to his top 7 players for him to do so. But that's ok, if he really did learn from it. He gets credit from me for the guys finally starting to push the ball down the court and look for easy opportunities early in the clock. Amazingly enough, it hasn't led to Turnover City like he predicted it would. But how much of that is Bayless and Miller with the ball in their hands rather than Blake and/or Roy? Our team defense being better this last few games may potentially correlate to players playing in their natural positions much more than before. Specifically, Webster (our best defender left) being on the floor for ~30mpg at the 3 (rather than, say, Rudy or Roy) seems much more natural and effective. Honestly, I love what he's done the last few games bringing Howard up to the FT line for open jumpers, rather than just running the LMA pick-and-slide or pick-and-pop when Roy doesn't Iso. Again, how much of that is gameplanning that happened b/c of injury necessity? And will he revert to stagnation once guys start coming back?
His point was that no one agreed with the post that implied PapaG played the role of the victim. Valid point? I dunno. But I think that's what he's saying. Ed O.
