If it means a 50 win season, can you deal with 32 losses without moaning about how horrible or “mediocre” or “inconsistent” we are? This means 20 more losses. That’s a lot of “trade CJ” and “Stotts sucks.” Can you deal with that? As for the playoffs, right now we are averaging 4 wins for every 3 losses. That’s all we need to do to win title.
And keep the assistant coaches. Collins is nothing special. Simons is. Both are so flimsy, they'll miss many games in their careers from injuries.
If you're going to get rid of the coach unless you hire one of the current assistants as a HC I think it's best to bring in a new group at least for the most part. You don't want the new HC to have all the players going to and listening to an assistant because that's who they're familiar with. Has Simons been injury prone? I don't remember hearing about anything. He is a skinny guy though, he might fill out?
It's not the fact of a loss that's a problem; it's the manner. When we lose because our defense abandons us in the second half, when the bench basically doesn't show up, when we jump out to a big lead only to see it evaporate in an instant...these things portend larger issues. Sometimes we lose because shots just weren't falling. Sometimes we lose because we're just playing a better team. Sometimes we lose because we can't overcome a key player having a bad night. Sometimes we lose because an opposing star goes nuts. None of those types of losses point to deeper issues. The losses we've been seeing, however, are much more of the predictive variety.
I would submit that 4 wins out of 7 in the regular season has not translated well into the Playoffs. Just sayin'....
Thirteen points from the bench last night just isn't going to cut it for a team that hopes to make the playoffs, let alone make any noise there other than a resounding thud of another sweep. Unfortunately, except for the night that Layman went nuts against the missing in action "defense" of the Suns, woeful bench production has become the norm for this team. During the first dozen games or so, the bench was a big part of the team's success. Since then, opponent scouting has negated any feel good story we may have had about the bench. Stotts has gone back to keeping Dame or CJ on the court with the bench unit, but it isn't working particularly well most nights and it just wears our best two players down. Hey, Neil, are you noticing this problem?
Portland won 49 games last season and they were still generally mediocre and inconsistent; they just had incredible luck with their own injuries vs their opponents' injuries so then, 1 more win than last year sheds the realities of mediocrity & inconsistency? yeah, I can deal with a lot of "trade CJ" talk. I'd probably participate. But maybe that's not quite what you meant.... lol, yeah right... championship!!...Portland has been at that same 4/3 rate during the regular season (actually, a bit less) over the last 3.3 seasons. In that same time, they are 5-14 in the playoffs and three of those wins came against a crippled Clippers team. the playoffs are better gauge of mediocrity and inconsistency and Portland has failed....big time. So no, 50 wins won't shut people up about the issues with the team, nor should it. This is the 4th season of this version of Blazers...are we really seeing anything different about this team then we have seen the previous 3 years? I guess in a back-asswards way you can say Portland has achieved consistency
