It's Robo-Nate, the "we keep missing shots" comment after losses is getting very old. How bout getting different/better shots or trying to get to the line more or better ball movement. Nah, we just keep missing shots.
Nate expanded upon his "we keep missing shots". Now he's saying that "We gotta make shots, and because we're not making shots we've lost our confidence to make shots. And since we have no confidence we're going to miss shots so we need to make more shots to get our confidence and once we get our confidence back we won't miss shots." It's just so simple, lol.
I don't think anybody is trying to do anything. I see three factors at play: 1) The team just isn't playing as hard as they used to and 2) they no longer have enough front-court depth to corral the number of offensive rebounds they once did, which is why they had such a supposedly "efficient" offense and 3) they no longer have a dominant isolation player in Roy who can bail them out with a high percentage shot when everything else breaks down. When Roy was out for a week or two, I started to see the first inklings that this team was going to run, cut and create movement and if given enough time it would probably develop into a semi competent offensive group, but with Roy back in the lineup things just grind to a halt while he has the ball and it's probably more out of habit than design. The extra nail in the coffin is that Roy can barely guard a chair at this point so whatever points he does produce, he's probably giving most of them back at the other end of the court. At the end of the day, I think the situation is going to get Nate fired in addition to his stubborn refusal to acknowledge that Roy probably shouldn't and can't be the player he once was. After Nate is long gone, at some point in the next five years a coach with enough courage is going to have to move Roy to the bench and bring him in as a sixth man if this team is ever going to progress and move on.
Do I think the players are trying to get Nate fired? No. Do i think Nate is trying to get himself fired? No Do I think this team would be a lot better without injuries? No Do I think Nate's voice has started to be drownded out by players? Yes
These injuries... do they count or discount Oden? I think personally that, even with Roy's knees, if we'd had the Healthy Oden we'd all thought we'd have, that we'd probably have three or four more wins right now. Not OMGDYNASTY!! good, but definitely significantly better. Of course, Roy shouldn't count as an injury because it's more a condition, but anyway...
There is just a lot of frustration for a short handed team. Any of the last few games would have been competitive if the bench had even showed up at all. I just am not sure what management is thinking when they replace Bayless with Johnson, and Juwan Howard with Dante Cunningham, WTF do they expect?
They (definitely) expected Oden and Joel to come back, and (possibly) Roy to play a little better than the 50 year old guy at the Y who says you look fine in them shorts.
It shows a lack of planning at the management level. The fact that Roy's injury, Oden being done and Joel being out is taking them by complete surprise is unacceptable. They knew about Roy's knees last season before his extension. Oden has the most unfortunate healthy history in the NBA. They knew Joel was rehabbing from a re-ruptured patella. Those are all situations that they should have had contingency plans for.
Who's to say this isn't the plan though? Why contort and fanagle and attempt to squeeze out a few extra wins through gall and cunning in trades and management when the situation described above is impossible to make right by those means? That situation described above has a solution... but the solution involves a lot of losing to get good lotto position. So in that respect, they're performing to plan perfectly. They're not tanking, but they are probably following The Plan.
This. It's hard to blame anyone but the Gods of Fate. You can always say, "we should have known these players would be injured", but if we were healthy, we'd be destroying teams right now. As Monty Python once said, "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition".
I agree that they could NOT have planned (or overcome) all of these injuries, but the team essentially gave away Bayless and Webster. While they added other players (Matthews, Johnson) they didn't HAVE to clear out their bench so we have people incapable of contributing at the end of it. Ed O.
