You people who keep insisting on thinking that giving Patrick O'Bryant minutes is going to make him a better player just do not get it. Have any of you ever coached any type of team on any level that was competitively based? Have you coached a team where the main goal was winning and not teaching the kids to have fun and making sure everyone gets to play a minimum of minutes or innings?
Because if you have then you should know that coaches make players better in practice and that the players earn the right to get to play by getting better in practice. You just don't give players time on the floor to see what they can do. If they can't get the job done against their own team mates who they are extremely familiar with, know all their moves and tendencies, know the plays they are running and how to best defend them and who they get to guard more than any other players in the league, what makes you think that player is going to get the job done against players they are unfamiliar with, who's moves they haven't seen a thousand times, who's plays they don't already know. The concept is ridiculous.
Doc, Coach T, and Coach Ray know what POB can do and do not need to gift wrap valuable minutes in a game where every minute needs to be a productively positive minute in order to suddenly unlock some skill that POB has been hiding from them. If he's not doing it in practice, and apparently from KG's one on one tutorial with POB today he obviously isn't getting it done in practice, then he's only going to hurt this team when he gets on the floor.
This is not Little League or Pop Warner or Youth League BB. It is the NBA and coaches get paid to win and get fired for losing. Doc isn't going to put his trust in a player to produce wins for him if that player just isn't performing, learning and executing in practice. The notion is just plain silly.
POB, Giddens, Walker and Pruitt will play when they have earned the right to play by earning Doc's trust in the quality and consistency of their game. Until then don't expect those players to get minutes simply because the players in front of them aren't wildly successful. Because chances are those players you are calling for might have made the bench players in front of them look like All Stars in comparison had they been put into the same exact circumstances.
