NBA Playoffs Thread

I heard on SportsCenter that Brown is going to return the team to its Showtime Roots. The Lakers want to get out and run.

But the offensive strength of that team are the three bigs, who shoot over 50% from the field, and Kobe, who is aging. They have a mid-thirties point guard and Ron Artest. I think thier collective fast break days are over.

 

Jim Buss/Jerry Buss = Al Davis.

Winning isn't enough. It has to be done a certain way that worked decades ago, with a completely different group of personnel. They'd rather lose trying to make this old team "RUN!!!!" than win 55-plus games a year running the triangle.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Happier than ever that they managed to cash in a pair of titles before this hara-kiri.

 

No. I was serious. I might be very, very wrong, but I was serious. I'm a very, very casual observer of the NBA who maybe watched a couple of games all year before the playoffs. My comments were solely based on watching the fourth quarter and overtime period of that game. On two separate inbound plays the Heat was positioned so that the ball could have been inbounded to Derek Rose uncontested five feet above the top of the key. Instead of just taking that wide open free inbound, on the first Rose sprinted down in the lane, others set screens, and screens for the screener, and Rose loopty-looped back out to catch the ball in the corner near halfcourt with a defender bearing down on him and they just barely beat the 5 second count. On the second, the setup was the same and the inbounder ended up throwing the ball away.

Otherwise, I saw Bulls offensive players standing with their feet in concrete watching Rose play one-on-one against LeBron James, or one-on-two, or one-on-three, or one-on-four. I thought that Mark Gottfried had somehow undoubtedly commandeered the clip board on the Bulls bench.

Honest, I'm not being sarcastic here. And I acknowledge that I might be completely wrong in saying that the Bulls were poorly coached. Maybe the rest of the Bulls players suck so bad that nothing they tried would have worked. I dunno. I'm certainly open to some informed responses to my admittedly casual observations. What could the coach have done differently? I don't know. Like I said, I'm just a casual fan. But how about not going around your elbow to get to your asshole on an inbound play? How about some movement to try to clear some room in the paint for Rose to drive? How about trying to throw some passes to free Rose up for a spot-up jumper rather than making him make a play off the dribble every time?

Thoughts welcomed. Replies telling me what an idiot I am not.

 

OKC has played really well to this point, which is impressive after their collapse in game four. Now we'll see if they've learned anything or if their offense becomes stagnant at the end of the game.

 

Terrible hire. If they wanted to go Brown, Larry was available.

 

Sure, Phil Jackson was a product of all the superstars he coached, but that's not a knock at all. It takes a certain brand of coach to win with a team full of superstars, and not every coach can do it. You've got to have a strong, out-sized personality, and a fairly large ego to ride herd on a group of players who might otherwise be prima donnas. If you look back at some of the coaches who won multiple titles with star-studded teams - Red Auerbach, Pat Riley and Phil Jackson, to name three - they all had those traits. And even though they didn't have quite the egos that those three had, I'd include the likes of Chuck Daly and K.C. Jones in that group of coaches who knew how to get the most out of their stars.

 

I'm totally with Rose taking the big shots. But you've got to draw up more original plays for him than him dribbling down the clock, then trying to go one-on-one with a very good defender who is 4-6 inches taller than him and forcing up a bad desperate shot.

Then again, Thibodeau was Coach of the Year and won 61 games with a team that had one outstanding player and a bunch of spare parts. So he must have been doing something right. Suspect late game strategy or not, the better team is winning this series. Not much you can do when the other team has 2 1/2 (if not 3) super stars to your one.