My approval of Stotts, at this time, is directly correlated with Lillard. I think without Lillard's performance we would not be where we are. While the positives of Stotts outweigh the negatives, the impact Lillard has had on the court has an impact on my overall perception of Stotts' performance.
I think that's a good point. A lot of our views on the coaches stems from the wins, and how the players due. If our team got stuck with crappy players, the coach can only do so much.
Overall I'm pretty happy with how Stotts has done. I would like to see him get the team to buy into playing harder (and smarter) on defense, though. Go Blazers
Don't get me wrong. I don't think I'd be dissatisfied with Stotts if Lillard were struggling and we were a .350 team. That's what I expected from this team this year. Not that we're winning in the sense of a contending team.... but winning cures all, as they say. And, since at this moment, we're exceeding expectations, above-.500, and we have a glimmer of hope for the future, it's hard to be dissatisfied. Stotts seems like a quality person and a quality coach, so it's pretty hard to give anything but approval to Stotts at the moment.
Batum and Wes are both playing better under Stotts. Aldridge regressed some, and it's hard to say how much of that is Stotts asking him to play Dirk-Ball and how much is the offseason surgery. LMA seems to be doing better lately. Hard to see how Lillard would be any better under McMillan. It's interesting, because Nate was always adjusting his lineup to compensate for the latest injury. Batum, Oden, Roy, Camby, Crash, Randolph--it just seemed like so much of his career in Portland was adapting on the fly when the planned starting lineup inevitably fell apart due to health problems. He was a good duct-tape coach, cobbling guys together to get the job done between injuries. Stotts, in contrast, hasn't had to change lineups nearly as much. Only our worst starter (Matthews) has missed many games, and even that hasn't been too bad because Claver proved to do a lot of the defensive stuff Matthews did. And that starting lineup has been about as effective as any Nate ever coached. If you want to criticize Stotts for anything, it's probably that he hasn't done much to develop his bench. To my eyes he hasn't had much to work with. But I do feel like if Nate were coaching the team he could have got more out of that bench somehow, just like he got the most out of guys like Webster, Outlaw, Blake, Telfair, Rudy, Khryapa and Sergio. All those guys basically suck, but they all owe whatever money they made on future teams to what Nate was able to get out of them. Jarrett Jack has evolved into a much better player than he was in Portland, but it took 3 seasons away from the Blazers to do it. Nate's ability to extract the most out of very limited talent was his greatest gift. Of course, his inability to maximize much greater talents that didn't fit his plan (Randolph, Miller, Aldridge, Oden, Camby, Crash, Batum) was a pretty big weakness, though. In the NBA, and in life, success comes much more from maximizing your strengths than it does in improving your weaknesses. So I'm happier with Stotts' ability to mold a very nice starting unit than I was with Nate's ability to get the most out of dregs. But ideally you don't have to choose and have a coach who can do both equally well.
With this roster? Yeah, I think he's done a remarkable job getting them to be this competitive. Other than that observation, I don't think there's much to learn from his first two months on the job. The real test will be what he's able to do when there's some actual expectations in a year or two.
Imagine where we'd be without Hickson. Stotts is the lucky beneficiary of a free player whose PER is higher than Aldridge's. A scrappy PF is what McMillan plaintively howled for. It saddens me to think how close McMillan came to getting the one player his system so desperately needed.
