NBA: *** Official 2014 NBA Playoffs Thread ***
- Thread starter CycloneRulzzz
- Start date
The whole "we try harder than everyone else" ******** that works in the regular season just doesn't work in the playoffs when everyone tries hard.
Huge win for Memphis! They've really controlled this series since the first half of game one but were 0.1 tenth of a second away from being down 3-2. Barkley killing Scott Brooks for that last out of bounds play, Brooks firing will be long overdue whenever it happens.
His out of bounds plays suck but he is still a good player developer (especially youth). That being said a guy like Hoiberg would be perfect for OKC. I think if OKC loses he'll get canned.
I don't buy him being good at player development. Reggie Jackson only got a chance to play because of his Westbrook's injuries and Brooks still didn't trust him enough to give him heavy minutes from the beginning of the series. Lamb or Jones hasn't developed enough to be in the playoff rotation. There's still issues with the Westbrook-Durant dynamic that he hasn't figured out. The Thunder run the simplest offense in the league, it worked great when they had three elite offensive players on their team, it bogs down with two and when only one of Durant or Westbrook is on the floor they have to work every bit as hard as the Bulls do to get good looks.
Eh.. Maybe he is a good player developer, but his best players have been a 2nd overall (KD), 4th overall (Westbrook) and 3rd overall (Harden). Ibaka was a late first round pick, and he has developed pretty well overall defensively, but I don't know how much of that is Brooks and how much is just the athletic talent and size of Ibaka.
Not brooks fault that management has done nothing to surround Durant and Westbrook with help. OKC is pretty much a 3 man team, KD RW and SI and the rest of team is dog ****.
I gave Presti a lot more credit than Brooks for OKC's previous success so I would agree that the front office shares a lot of the blame here. The Harden trade looked questionable at the time and terrible now. But GM's tend to outlive coaches and OKC's roster is what it is right now, there are other coaches who could do a lot more with it than what Brooks is currently doing. Presti has two more years to convince Durant to sign an extension, he can't just throw basically the exact same team and coaching staff out there next year and just hope for a better result.
I don't completely agree with this. You have to give Thibs some credit for getting absolutely everything he could out of a roster that was gutted by injuries and midseason trades. Two of his best offensive players (Rose and Deng) were gone before the all star break, and Noah has been playing with a bum knee for about two months. I'd like to see what Thibs can do with a healthy roster going into the postseason for a change. Now, I will grant that maybe he reason they go into the postseason so dinged up is in some part due to how hard they go during the regular season. Still, he didn't ask to have Deng traded and Rose's injury was a fluky thing.
Oh I do give him credit, I think he's a good coach, just look at what he got out of DJ Augustine this year. It's impressive how he gets his team to buy in to playing that hard all regular season each year.
They've been better than advertised so far. Even the dog series have been pretty good. ATL-IND hasn't been especially good basketball, but at least it has the intrigue of the Pacers' Hindenburg act going for it.
