Even for Joe, two straight games of poor end-game decision-making is impressive.
Not sure what was worse - the awful end-game plays in regulation or the lack of adjustment with KP getting killed all fourth and OT on the mismatches.
Lots of blame to go around, but another masterpiece from Joe.
Joe specifically said afterwards that they were experimenting with 1-5 switches. Probably because that's what killed us in the 22 Finals? Obviously he went away from it after Murray burned KP three times in a row.
Deciding to experiment in OT in a game in which you've played your starters 40+ minutes is weird, no?
Definitely unconventional, but there's relatively little downside to experimentation when they destroyed everyone this regular season. They locked up the #1 seed. The results don't matter anymore. The regular season results are in- he was an awesome coach this year.
I do agree that we need to watch the playoffs this year to see how good of a coach he is. He's at least average, and has a chance to be better than that given more playoff success.
I was impressed with their comeback against Philly last year, but was bummed out that they lost to Miami.
I don't think it's so much experimenting for the sake of experimenting as Joe wanting his team to experience certain things that will happen in the playoffs. Like a guard getting switched on to KP, that's definitely going to happen, so I feel like he wants KP to keep experiencing that so they can work out when to call for help, or how quickly to call for help, or if they have a two big lineup have someone on the baseline in the Timelord free safety role. They probably wanted to see how KP would handle it and if he could. The problem is we're watching the game as fans, some of us a few sheets to the wind, and we're in the moment, and we want to win, and we see KP getting roasted over and over again and costing us the win and why the eff isn't Joe doing anything about it? Fire him! If you're already negatively disposed towards Joe then it's just another nail in his coffin, if not you're still wondering why he's sitting on his hands not doing anything.
When I've been watching these last few games, I've tried to keep that in mind whenever I see things that don't seem to make sense - not that Joe and the team don't want to win, I'm sure every single one of them wanted to win, and it's always better to be successful at the things you're testing than not...but I think he is more interested in seeing how the players respond to certain situations and scenarios. I'm sure we will see more of it - like not calling timeouts to give them the chance to keep experiencing another team putting up a run against them, or switching every screen even if it means mismatches happen. Force the players out of their comfort zone. Right now their comfort zone is blowing teams out, shooting 50% from 3 and leading by 20+.
In a way he probably wasn't that dissatisfied with the 2 point loss the other day where the Hawks came back, because he probably saw it as a teaching opportunity on what can happen when you let go of the rope, like they did against Cleveland. Do it twice, and you get the same result twice. Again, sucks for us as viewers following on the game thread. Same as last night, where it was a tight game throughout, 40 lead changes, and we lost in OT. We've not been challenged like that that often this season as we've blown teams out and I feel like that's a big weakness of the team - other teams may be battle hardened more than us because they've had to fight hard for every win while we've blown teams out.
So in a way Joe's fortunate because he has these so-called meaningless games to be able to do this stuff - but the risk is that no game is truly meaningless, the result might be but momentum and process are important. The last thing they want is to get themselves out of rhythm and not be able to get back in and end up limping into the playoffs.
Then again I could be totally wrong, there is no 4D chess being played, no master plan underpinning it all, and Joe is just incompetent