https://twitter.com/marc_damico/status/1575187174516875264?s=46&t=GLLtBgz43kVkG3G1KLzVBg
Beautiful. The vibe man did not mastermind a finals run - our success was powered by the strength of the team.
Man.... you have to let go of your clearly wrong opinion that Ime is a bad basketball coach. He did an amazing job last year. Your disappearance from the blog throwing shade at him is proof enough of that.
Now, Ime the human, he might not be the greatest guy, but dude can coach.
JB and the team, a young team, learned from past mistakes. JB may be saying that they are playing more aware now, but let's see how that translates to actual game play.
Proof enough of having a new wave of COVID shut down the city once again perhaps. Having their entire family catch the disease might make people want to take a break from things lol.
I just don't think he did a good job at coaching us last year - our defence was fantastic, but our personnel was historically good with 6 players who were good enough to warrant All-Defensive selections + a bulky, versatile forward/big hybrid to round out our main rotation. Using Robert Williams as a helper in the corner was an interesting tweak, but this concept has been around since the beginning of the NBA. The fact that it took him half a season to come up with this age-old tactic on a team with two excellent big men is an indictment on his acumen, not a compliment.
Meanwhile our offence was static and devoid of creativity, it was powered by transition scoring from our stifling defence and red-hot shooting during our run: we shot 37.6% from three from the 8th of January to the end of the season, good for second in the league if we maintained that percentage for the entire season with Derrick White and Marcus Smart (both very average shooters at best) combining for over 10 attempts per game. We obviously do have the Jays taking a lot of threes on high efficiency, but the rest of our options aren't that great: Grant and Horford (at this point in his career) are standstill shooters who want to take wide open threes. Pritchard is a very good shooter who can take shots on the move, but wasn't good enough of a defender to play heavy minutes in Udoka's defensive schemes.
Our lack of a good guard ballhandler certainly limited our options, but we had the pieces to assemble a high-level motion offence: all of our bigs are good passers who are comfortable with flashing outside to the high post while most of our guards/wings are capable of coming off screens and cutting. Smart might be the exception, but I don't see why he can't be used as a mini-Draymond: he's a bulky guard who can set screens effectively and has somewhat of a floater/interior passing game to punish defences in the short roll. Instead we were served with some 90s/00s deadball offence that featured Marcus Smart postups and Jayson Tatum isolations with nothing to give him a step on his man if he couldn't get a mismatch whenever we needed to create things in the halfcourt during crunch time.
Good point about whether all of this translates to actual game play, but at least Mozzarella is trying to get the team to play a style of basketball that isn't 90s/00s deadball.
