Coaching. If Tater Totts wanted Meyers working around the hoop he would be. But Totts clearly wants Meyers 23' away from the hoop.
I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this. If Tater Totts can't change his overly simplistic offense to (a) play to his players' strengths, and (b) get some higher percentage shots, then he doesn't deserve to be the head coach of an NBA team. Yes, Olshey has put together a flawed roster. But Tater needs to be able to adapt to his roster, rather than trying to make his players play roles they're not well suited for. That's all he's ever done since the day he got here.
It's not the offense, it's the lineups. Stotts lets them play, the players make the decisions. The question mark I have with Stotts is putting the right players on the court in the right situations. The talk about Meyers and Vonleh got me thinking, they maybe our PF rotation but then you have Aminu. You have Crabbe and Turner at SF but also Harkless. We're too deep in several positions and aren't deep enough at the guard positions where we use Crabbe or Turner out of position. I think a consolidation trade would go a long way towards maximizing our abilities
Preach. WTF is wrong with the Blazers coaching staff? They have wasted three years of Meyers' career by not grooming him to play around the basket. This is starting to piss me off.
Might want to look into Leonards comments about transitioning away from the basket before railing the coaching staff. In short, he's playing exactly the way he wants to be.
It shouldn't be his choice. That's what coaches are for. Also, there is no reason Meyers working on his three point shot after practice would have detracted from his job of playing center. He can practice whatever he wants, after practice. And adding the three point shot to his skill set was most definitely a good thing. It's the coaches who are responsible for making it the ONLY thing. And that's a bad thing.
I don't blame Stotts for encouraging Leonard's outside game. A big who has range pulls an opposing big out of the paint and out onto the perimeter where most bigs are pretty uncomfortable, defensively. Leonard, so far, has simply not proven capable of quick release threes against modest challenges or the ability to put the ball on the floor to blow past close-outs. They could give up on the exercise, but considering he showed he had long-range shooting ability, it was definitely the right decision to try to turn him into a gunner rather than a low-post player, in my opinion. And his defensive inadequacy has nothing to do with whether he plays in the post or on the perimeter offensively.
A coaches job is to put his players in the best position to succeed. Can't force a guy to become something he's not. What about Leonards temperament makes anyone believe he could've turned into a low post banger I mean come on.
I don't know about low-post banger but he was much better at scoring down low when he came into the league. It has declined every season since to where he is in the top 2% in the league in terms of taking perimeter shots. It wasn't always that way. Because Stotts system.
Just my opinion, but I thought his rookie and sophomore seasons showed he could be developed to play around the basket and key area, on offense and defense. But since that was completely abandoned in favor of setting screens above the three point line, then camping out there, we'll never know for sure.
Wrong-o! Meyers is fine playing defense in the post - he sucks on the perimeter. But throughout his career Totts has put him in as a stretch-4, guarding more perimeter-oriented players. He had him guarding Paul Pierce for fuck's sake! I don't care how much Pierce has slowed with age, any numbskull should know that he still has the ability to work Meyers.
Meyers was never afraid of contact like some bitchmade Texan that use to be on the team. He use to love throwing his body around recklessly, tangling up with other guys, and throwing them to the floor. It wasn't exactly good defense, or even basketball, but it showed that he relished hitting guys. But that Meyers has all but disappeared.
He's not a good low post defender, he's just less bad. It's not even that he's worse on the perimeter--he has the athleticism to slide his feet. His problem is making decisions in space--i.e. pick-and-roll defense. So, yes, he's involved in fewer of them when playing center, but teams will still use their centers in pick-and-rolls and then Meyers is just as much trouble. That said, this is all still irrelevant. Just because you play on the perimeter offensively doesn't mean you have to guard a perimeter player on defense. The main problem for Leonard defensively is that he's a terrible pick-and-roll defender and, in general, terrible at all facets of team defense in an increasingly movement-oriented, pick-and-roll league. You can try your best to hide him against an immobile center who can't play in the pick-and-roll, but those types of centers are becoming rarer and rarer.
Again, a lot of this is the damn coach's scheme and assignments. Meyers didn't choose to defend Pierce - that's who Tater Totts assigned him to guard! And while Meyers may not be a good P/R defender, he could be A LOT LESS BAD if Tater Totts didn't call for a switch every damn time a pick was set (thankfully we've seen a little progress here!). Finally, picking Meyers out as being "terrible at all facets of team defense" is disingenuous when our entire team/scheme hasn't shown any ability to play team defense - there is no 5-men-playing-as-one on defense or offense with this team.
And we've seen the results of the Blazers not switching everything--people bitching in the game threads about how guys like Lillard and McCollum die on every screen, leaving wide open shooters. You keep refusing to accept that Stotts has his hands tied--switch everything and you get ugly mismatches. Don't switch everything and you have players being defeated by screens because they don't have the awareness to see them coming and get around them, leading to wide open shots. It's easy to criticize what the existing scheme is giving up and insist that there's some magic scheme that will make this group of terrible defenders look good, but the reality is that with a group of terrible defenders, every scheme is just a question of what negative outcome you want to give up. Yes--mostly because there aren't five players on this team capable of that. One of those bad defenders is Leonard. I'm not remotely suggesting he's the only one (that should be pretty obvious from all my posts about the Blazers' defense) but Leonard is the guy we're discussing right now.
There are other options besides switching or not switching. The best option, IMO, is to jump and recover. I doubt Meyers would be terribly good at this given his slow foot speed (although I recall Frye being quite decent at it). Aminu and Harkless both certainly have the lateral quickness to execute this. I'm sure Plumlee would be at least average at it. I'm sure Vonleh would be great at it. But it's about positioning, awareness, and 5 guys acting as a cohesive defensive unit, rather than 5 individuals. It doesn't take excellent individual defenders, it just takes practice and discipline.
