Is it too soon to talk about defensive rating?

Yeah Lets hope Billups can get them to the playoffs at all.

 

For two years in a row, you might not have to worry about it.

 

The problem with this arguement is that he got some teams that never should've made it to the playoffs. I'm not sure how you think what has happened this season and last is an improvement.

 

Agreed. While I thought Billups was a downgrade, I've always wanted him to succeed, and understood that his major lack of experience is not his fault; he was put in a tough position with an imperfect roster. I truly wanted him to come in, make us a top 10 defense and get few wins in the WCF.

When he gets fired down the road, I'm certain many will think I'm an apologist of his as well.

 

I never thought that anyone would be better than Stotts, I just thought that Stotts had run his course with the organization, he was by a season and a half the longest tenured coach in the history of the league to have never won a game in the conference finals with his team. I think you only give a guy so many shots at reaching greatness and there are a lot of guys around the NBA coaching world that can keep a team in a holding pattern of first round playoff exits, when they have a guy like Dame and some other competent pieces.

I don't think Terry was the problem, it was Olshey and his dogged determination to prove to everyone that Dame and CJ were great together. That being said he had been the team's coach for so long it was time to find a replacement.

 

My engineer brain thinks this approach is very inefficient. If there is a set of problems with a product I am working on, we identify the biggest problem we can fix and concentrate on fixing it before we waste time on other issues, because maybe these other problems would not be an issue if the main problem is fixed.

Replacing a part because it has been around for a long time and allowed a flawed product to achieve more than it should have seems like a counter-productive method. It does not mean that part would not be replaced later, but replacing the working part because the other parts are not working and it was time is akin to looking for the lost wallet under the street light because it is easy to see there instead of searching for it in the likely places it was dropped.

 

I really don't care so much about the engineering aspect of it. Just the fact that Stotts had been here for so long, the player seemed to have been coaching themselves in many ways for the last couple of seasons and it's just a terrible message to send to your fans that you are willing to keep a coach on longer than any other team has with such little success. A post above stated that Stotts had the second worst playoff record in league history. Personnel is not engineering and it is often results oriented despite multiple changing variables.

I think Olshey should have been fired first but those of you who think we should have kept Stotts confuse me.

 

actually, the problem with your argument of the problem with the other argument seems to be the assumption that Stotts was the only coach that led pretenders into the playoffs

Mike Schuler, PJ Carlesimo, and Mike Dunleavy combined to coach the Blazers for 9 full seasons. And Portland made the playoffs in all 9 seasons

Dunleavy had a .500 record in the playoffs in Portland compared to Stotts at .355. And IMO, Dunleavy was a mediocre coach

another unsupported assertion I'll make: if Olshey hadn't been the GM for 10 years, Stotts wouldn't have coached the Blazers for 9

 

Sounds like you're going off the assumption that the team, say, coached by Mike Dunleavy in 99-00 was equally as talented (in comparison to the league at that time) as the team that Stotts coached to the WCF in 18-19. While there is no way to prove this to be true or not, I would die on the hill that the 99-00 roster was far more talented. So if Dunleavy had a vastly superior roster, it would only be appropriate he had a better playoff record.

I do agree with your assertion that had Olshey been let go after 5-6 years, Stotts would've been less likely to make it 9 years. I'm not sure that proves Stotts was the reason the Blazers defense was bad though.

Again, my original statance a couple years ago was that the roster, not the drop scheme PnR coverage was the main reason the defense was so bad, and that if we got a new coach, we were unlikely to see a significant improvement with a similar roster. We only had about 2 months of apples to apples comparison from the 20-21 season to the 21-22 season. Though I think it's fair to say that even the 22-23 roster is similar (if not better) in defensive talent to the 20-21 roster, yet the team still is bottom 5 in the league right now in defensive rating. To me, that's not a significant improvement.

 

Dunleavy had a lot of talent on his last Blazer team

but he took this team to the playoffs too:



pretty comparable to some of the better Stotts teams

and of course, the was PJ and Schuler going 5 for 5 in playoff seeding

I was never a big "fire Stotts!" guy, I was a fire Olshey guy, but the last 2 or 3 years of the Stotts tenure in Portland I thought were 2 or 3 years too long

 

Hope it happens, but I’m already booking work for other clients.

 

That Dunleavy team got outsted pretty easily in the 1st round, right?

If PJ or Schuler got to the WCF with any of their rosters, I would also be banging the drum that they over-archieved. There are very few WCF rosters in the last 30 years that were worse than the 18-19 Blazers.

 

The same as it ever was... Worst in the league among teams trying to win. Who could've seen this coming?

 

It will trend upwards the rest of the season. It's going to be hard to move that percentage up for the entire season.
My bet is they are in the upper half for the last 24 games if Nurk can stay healthy and they can get solid defensive minutes from the new guys. This kind of depends how longs Simons is out as well?

 

This is ridiculous. Someone care to add up the number of games our plus defenders have missed this season and provide some context?

How anyone expects our defense to improve when our best defenders have missed many games this season is mind boggling.

 

It's not just that. Of course GP2 being out 3/4 of the games and not being his own self had an impact, same with Justise missing 1/2 of the games.

Hart however missed a very small number of available games.

But, It is also roster construction and misuse of the roster.

Even if these 2 and Nurkic were available, the Blazers would still be undersized - and their defensive rebound rate % is in the lower third of the league, your defense will go down if you give opposing teams additional options to extend possessions after misses, and the amount of time Dame and Ant play together means that the Blazers are vulnerable to switches from multiple positions. Add the fact that the bench is very young, young players, even if they have the athletic ability and will are prone to mistakes, we have seen it over and over with Shae, Jabari and Trendon playing even tho all 3 I am sure will be fine defenders as they mature, both Shae and Trendon have already shown willingness to work on this aspect of their game and Shae, especially, has the tools to be an elite defender.

Finally, Nurkic missed 50% of the games, but unfortunately, in the other 50% of the games we played him in switching defense or 2-3 zone instead of in drop-coverage that plays to his advantage.

 

Wait a minute there! Now you're saying it might not be such a reach to look at how strong the rest ot the league is when comparing coaches?

 

Team defense and cohesion gets seriously compromised when the best defenders miss significant minutes.
We have not had the opportunity to build cohesion, thus our defense is inconsistent.
Regardless of size ( and i do agree we are smaller, though slightly bigger after the deadline) im 100% confident our defense would be better if we had remained healthy and maintained a consistent rotation.

oh yeah fuck gp2

 

You would think it would improve from 27th, given at least 6 teams will be actively trying to lose. Would be hard for us to drop below 27th, I would think.

Thybulle should help, Nurk should help. Sharpe's increased minutes will hurt. Top 15 the rest of the season seems optimistic to me, but I could be wrong.

 

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but I'll take your word for it! Comparing "talent" in totally different eras is difficult to do with raw data. Not as difficult when rosters only a couple years apart.

For the record (again). I don't hate Billups, I didn't buy the "anyone would be a big improvement on defense over Stotts" stance, I thought Dunleavy was a good coach. Like Stotts defensive coaching abilities, I felt the reason Dunleavy had success from 98-00 was because his roster got to be really good.