To be clear I don't think he'll be fired nor should he be,
But I've often wondered why the Celtics offense hasn't been better throughout the years. He's a great play caller out of timeouts, and the roster has always had a good deal of fire power. Never could understand why we're always near the middle of the pack offensively.
Pace. They have always been amongst the most efficient offenses since the Big Three Era started but their pace is always one of the slowest in the league so therefore, overall PPG, their offense is middle of the pack.
I don't know what reasonable person would use PPG as a measure of offense. We've been consistently a top team in terms of raw shooting percentage -- including this season (6th in the league). The problem is we can no longer stop anyone (21st in the league in opponent FG%, compare to 2nd in the 2008-2009 season, for example).
You can monkey around with stats to prove almost anything. Sometimes you just gotta look at the bottom line.
But I mean, what exactly are people proving? Nobody is proving that the C's have a good team this year.
Boston's lost 17 games this year. In 10 of those losses, they scored less than 90 points. Even if they were playing excellent defense, there's a pretty good chance they still would have lost most of those games. So if Boston were playing great D, that would only make the difference between being 14-17 and being...what? 16-15? 17-14? 18-13? Better, but still faaaaaar below what just about everyone expected of them this season.
Mike
Boston is currently allowing 102.1 points per 100 possessions.
Last season they allowed 95.5, the season before 97.8, the season before that 101.1, before that 99.4, before that 99.4 points per 100 possessions, and KG's first season they allowed a phenomenal 82.2 points per 100 possessions.
If we had had any of those other seasons defensively in place of this one, we'd likely be near the 20-10 mark, just from the points differential.
EDIT: Actually, not true. In a strict 1-for-1 comparison, 09-10 would be a close to .500 year, but the entire league was up that season in terms of scoring.