He’s loyal to the Portland soil. He spent his longest tenure here. May even still live here. Has fond memories here. He probably doesn’t want to tarnish that.
Neil was finding scapegoats to hide his own faults and dereliction. Stotts while not the best or top 10 of active Coaches was at least about middle of the road and right now I would take that.
This Stotts revisionist shit is ridiculous. Terry may have been handicapped by Neil's ineptitude. I never thought Terry was a net negative as a coach. It was just definitely time for the guy to go. The year before Terry was fired he eclipsed Jerry Sloan for the longest tenure without a finals appearance. He already had the longest tenure without a win in the conference finals. The guy was given an unprecedented run as a head coach without objective success. I never stopped liking Terry, I and many others just thought he had done what he could and it was time to move in a different direction. This fucking thread getting bumped over and over again is like what should happen with the Bucks and coach Bud or even more so the Bulls and Phil Jackson. This fan base romanticizing the tenure of a coach that went 22-40 in the playoffs and had less than a 56% win percentage in the regular season over nine fucking seasons is pathetic. The guy wasn't a bad coach, everything should be blamed on Olshey but to act like this firing was somehow egregious makes me feel like everyone saying that doesn't pay attention to the league and I know most of you do. It's fucking baffling.
It was time for Neil to go. I would have kept Terry until we found the next genius up and comer. Stotts coached those teams to overachieving nearly every season. They lost to better rosters in nearly every playoff series loss.
History shows that given the roster, he was not. 2013-2014 team was 16th in the league (mid pack) 2014-2015 team was 10th in the league (it was around 5th before Wes went down) 2017-2018 team was 8th in the league (that year the team had a mostly healthy Nurk for 79 games and a bunch of long, defensive wings to help with the Dame / CJ back-court) 2018-2019 team was 16th in the league (Nurk was injured close to the end of the year and the team also played EK a lot for his offense). After that, NeO disassembled the wing rotation and brought garbage to support a broken-down Nurk try to protect the Dame/CJ back-court. Terry was not a defensive mastermind, but he certainly was not horrible when given a competent defensive roster. We have the data to disprove that assertion. It's simply not true.
I miss his facial expressions. He wouldn’t have made this roster suck any worse than we want it to. He was a fine coach. Far more of an offensive mind. Players seemed to love him which is half the battle when it comes to pro sport coaches.
Disagreeing with your no. 100% disagree. The Stotts hate was insane for a coach who had us overachieving every season.
I don't think he coached those teams to overachieving. I really don't. I think he coached them to overachieving on offense and whatever the fuck they wanted to achieve on defense. That's only making a difference on one side of the floor, half of the game. Letting guys just do whatever on defense actually had us under perform in some seasons and some series and in other seasons and some series, when the players were serious about defense the team overachieved because Terry is a brilliant offensive mind and he never discouraged players. Even on offense though, it was time for him to go because his offense made very little evolution over his nine years here. No problem with Terry. Wanted him fired long before he actually lost the job. Have a huge problem with Olshey. Very glad that he's an assistant coach again, I think he is excellent in that role.
Still. We overachieved almost every season he was our coach. He had a top 10 defense when he was given good defensive players... I'm not sure what else you want... No coach was going to make those rosters good at defense. Terry Stotts was never the problem here in Portland. He was never even part of the problem.
I think his lack of interest on D was part of the problem but that's OK. I would have agreed with you about giving Terry a shot with another GM if Neil would have been let go when it made sense after he got nothing for LaMarcus and every season after that. The thing that didn't sit well with me that I'm sure you can agree with is that Neil fired Terry. The team should have fired Neil and then let the new GM figure out if they wanted to keep Terry or go in a new direction.
Yep, that was Jody/Kolde/Vulcan (whoever) not being good ownership. To let that GM who had screwed up so much, make a decision like firing such a popular and winning coach (seriously had overachieving seasons almost every year, and won some playoff series that people thought they would lose)... such a bad call.
