Points in the Paint 12.26.08: The Day After Christmas Edition

Posted by Rob Bonnette on 12.26.2008

One more dismissal!

Hello everyone and welcome to a Holiday edition of Points in the Paint. OK, more like a sort of Holiday edition. I started this before Christmas, and it's getting posted immediately after. SO I got nothing on the Christmas Day games or anything like that. Actually, my job was made a little bit easier by the GM of the Sacramento Kings. You'll see what I'm talking about.

The Firing Line Doesn't Stop!

Will there even be any coaches left to fire? At the rate we're going, anyone under .500 will have been run by the All-Star break. Reggie Theus' dismissal makes it six coaches in less than two months. Even if no one else gets canned before the end of the year, we're still looking at twenty percent of the coaching ranks overturned in the first third of the season. At that pace, there will be eighteen dismissals by the time the playoffs start. Now of course that isn't going to happen; in fact, it looks like the most fire-able coaches have all been canned by now. Most of the losing coaches right now are first year guys (Mike D'Antoni, Larry Brown, Scott Skiles, and Vinny Del Negro) or guys who have an in with their boss that keep them safe (Don Nelson with Chris Mullin in Golden State, Mike Dunleavy with Donald Sterling in L.A.). That leaves Mark Iavaroni in Memphis and Jim O'Brien in Indiana; there hasn't been any real noise about O'Brien being in trouble, but Iavaroni isn't out of the woods. If anyone else goes it would be him, although the Grizzlies improvement from last season at least makes a case for him to stay. So it looks like no more than seven this year, unless one of the teams currently over .500 completely goes south later on. And of course, there will be the offseason where palace coups in Atlanta or Phoenix may go down.

So what ultimately happened with Theus? The same thing that happened almost everywhere else; the coach paid for the GM's sins. In this particular instance it was the deterioration of the roster as opposed to speculation on potential. Look at the top seven for the 2002 Kings team that took the Lakers to game seven in the Western Conference Finals and should have won the series (they choked): point guard Mike Bibby, shooting guard Doug Christie, small forward Peja Stojakovic, power forward Chris Webber, center Vlade Divac, and reserves Bobby Jackson and Hedo Turkoglu. That was a top seven that rivaled any other in the league, and in a few short years it was gone. Divac was up in age and retired, being replaced by Brad Miller in what was actually an almost even swap. Christie retired also, and his spot was eventually filled by Kevin Martin, who is an upgrade. Sounds good so far right? Well, here's where it goes bad. Webber, a 20-10 all star and unbelievable talent wrecked his knee and was never the same; he was ultimately traded to the Sixers for spare parts. Jackson and Turkoglu moved on to other teams as free agents. Bibby was traded to Atlanta for bench fodder like Shelden Williams. And Peja was traded for Ron Artest, which wasn't a bad deal at all until Artest left as a free agent. The Kings have yet to find a suitable replacement for Webber, relying on the likes of Shareef Adbur-Rahim, Mikki Moore, and Kenny Thomas. Bibby's slot is being filled by Beno Udrih, who is an OK player but nothing to write home about. Miller and Martin are still Kings, playing their roles well when healthy, and Peja's role is being by former Sixer John Salmons. This crew just isn't as good as the one it replaced, and when faced with Western Conference competition that has gotten better in New Orleans, Phoenix, Portland, Utah, and Houston while maintaining in L.A. (Lakers) and San Antonio the decline is even more obvious. You can't win without a team of horses, and Theus was stuck a few horses and a bunch of relative geldings. The Kings have a lot of players that look pretty good in a vacuum but not so good when measured against others. You're just not going to win a lot like that.

And how's that working for them so far?

Coaching changes are often justified by GMs claiming that the fired coach had ‘lost the team' and that the players ‘needed a spark'. Most of the time it really means that the GM made some bad personnel choices and is trying to distract everyone from that by blaming the coach for the teams' failure. ‘You see, I drafted, traded, and signed some talented players, but the coach over there couldn't teach the young ones and couldn't motivate anyone, so that's why we're 5-12 right now. But our new coach, who was one the old coach's assistants, will right the course because even though he was an accomplice to the old coach's failure and wasn't considered head coaching material by anyone else in the league, he knows exactly what we need to right now to get better.' Right…… So how are the teams with new coaches doing since they fired the miserable failures that once headed up their underachieving, but by no means, understaffed, teams? Let's take a look. Oklahoma City is 2-14 since firing PJ Carleisimo, who was 1-12 at the time. Washington is 3-12 since firing the 1-10 Eddie Jordan, Toronto 3-8 after deciding that 8-9 Sam Mitchell wasn't good enough anymore. Minnesota has yet to win a game since running Randy Wittman, going 0-8 since. Then we have Sacramento, 1-4 after the Reggie Theus era ended last week. The only winner so far is Philadelphia, going 3-2 since firing Mo Cheeks as of this writing. So I guess it was all Cheeks fault after all! Just kidding. The point is that five out of six of these teams haven't done better at all since making their dramatic moves to can their head coaches, which means that the problem is the players, not the coaches. Wasted, speculative draft picks and bad free agent signings doom more teams than bad coaching ever will. Bad coaching with good players will at least produce a middle of the pack, competitive team. On the other hand good coaching with bad players will get you a losing team and a fired coach. Funny how that works, huh?
The best teams/organizations usually do the following: 1. Support the coach. 2. Get players who fit the system he's running. 3. Get good players with good character. 4. Don't gamble too much on potential. That's pretty much it. You do all those things, then hope you land that true franchise player to carry the other guys to the promised land. It's not rocket science, folks.

Happy Holidays to All!

I thought I'd end it there. I admit that the second half of 2008 hasn't been the best here; between computer problems and a lack of rant worthy material, there just hasn't been much get after. 2009 will be better, I promise. After all we have the All-Star voting, the trade deadline, and the playoffs to look forward to. Until next time.