Man, He's gonna be a better player? Like on the And 1 tour? You gotta be able to at least make half an effort to rotate on defense!
As opposed to which one Gerald's Celtic teammates during his Celtic career?
You sorta have to have a coaching staff who gives a rat's rear end about defense. Gerald didn't have that his first 2 pro years. Gerald wasn't nearly the embarassment that Rivers and his staff was during Gerald's stay in Boston.
"The Celtics will never win a Championship with Rivers as their coach" was the quote I believe. You can coach and teach players what to do all day long, but you can't physically make them do it. Blaming Gerald's inadequacies on D on the C's coaching staff is laughable, but haven't we been through all this? There should be a moratorium on Doc hating at least until training camp opens and the pursuit of #18 begins. Any criticism now rings very hollow.
It's very brain-dead and hollow criticism, I know. For three years I watched a professional coach run a junk gimmick defense, which by design, has all 5 defensive players on the floor scrambling out of position, as his main defense with both an experienced NBA team and a clueless team of youngsters.....And somehow Rivers expected to succeed at it at some point? The only players who had any degree of success under Rivers were players who had some coaching before they got there...Or Perk and Jefferson, who had Clifford Ray. Gerald had who? Rivers? Tony Brown? Teaching him what? How to lose?
Had they (A)Not disgraced themselves by mailing in the 2006-2007 season and (B) Given any of the young players under 6-10 any kind of direction, the team wouldn't have had to have been literally gutted to accomplish what they did.
It would have been real interesting to see how Gerald and the youngsters would have performed under Coach Thibodeau. At least they would have had some direction and maybe even a real NBA defense to learn.
We won't see Gerald's brother or any other project come on board. Gerald and his brother deserve better than Rivers as a coach. That experiment failed miserably. You have to have a teacher to coach projects. Not somebody who preaches one thing to the press and practices another on the court....And comes up with some retarded theme word when he finally has 14 players on his roster who already know the game....At least he was smart enough to get out of the way and let Thibodeau coach the defense. Rivers deserves credit for that.
