This thread is dumb and everyone posting in it should feel dumber for doing so.
i would respond, but while typing this post i became too dumb to do so.
I know the feeling.
The question raised there -- Should a coach have to adapt the players to the offense or the offense to the players?
It is an interesting question but you have to revise the question just a little to better reflect the current Celtics situation. The question is should a coach adapt the system to one specific player, in this case Rondo. The "system" appears to work well for most or all of the other players.
Once we adjust the system to suit Rondo, then we will probably need to go out and get specific players who can better complement Rondo. Is Rondo really the player we want to force the coach to coach to and GM to team build to? A talented player with tremendous court vision but who appears to like to dribble too much, doesn't really shoot very well, and whose defense is legitimately subjected to questions?
Rondo is a real paradox as a player. It detracts from the team if Rondo "pounds the ball too much" but seems to detract from the team more if he is on the court and not pounding the ball (due to the other defense sagging off him). Rondo can appear to be doing great (piling up assists) but then the team wins less, strictly based on numbers. Doc tried several things but always came back to just letting Rondo be Rondo, I believe as a lesser of two evils sort of thing.
It is a paradox that I am not sure anyone (including me, this blog community, and the Celtics organization) can fully explain or knows quite how to solve. You are starting to see comments like "I really like Rondo but I am starting to have doubts".
I believe that the Celtics will be best served by trading Rondo. I acknowledge that he has a rare talent and that any trade will likely not result in a traditional one-for-one equal talent return but I feel it is time to let someone else try to solve the Rondo Paradox. We are not the team to do that anymore.
I'd take that question in another direction: should a team's system be tailored to, and reflect, the talents, tendencies, and playstyle of its best available player? Or should the system be implemented with idealized players in mind?
Someone brought up Mike D'Antoni earlier, and he's a good jumping off point for this -- those mid '00 Suns teams were tremendous, but he was unable to find success with it using anyone other than an in-his-prime Steve Nash (the contrapositive to that would be the admirable job he did in New York with Amar'e in 2011, prior to the Anthony trade, but that doesn't really hold up in any meaningful way). You could call this the Doc Rivers effect if you wanted to relate it to Boston, in that Doc crafted a system around his best player, KG, and still made space for Ray and Paul while he was doing it. As they began to decline, the cracks in the plaster began to appear, and as a result, it's pretty obvious to anyone that Doc's brand of basketball works best on a veteran team playing at a high level.
You could say that the D'Antoni offense only works with MVP-level Nash if you're being cynical, but teams have more or less pilfered his constant pick and roll to score as a first option so much so that it just seems commonplace now, and the major offensive principles still exist in part. Same goes for the Triangle, which is another example you could bring out as a success, or the Princeton, the former being significantly more successful than the latter when run fullbore in the NBA. There's the same argument to be made there about whether or not Jordan/Kobe/Gasol made the Triangle great, or if they were great players that were incredibly suited to the Triangle.
Needless to say, I don't think that the Celtics offensive system is anywhere close to
any of those models, although it borrows a bit from each of them, and seems to be promoting 'outhustling' as a way to win games. That's fine. George Karl made a career out of that, especially in Denver, but Karl was flexible enough to adjust his system, such as it was, to his best players, as well as the temperature of the league at the time: The Sonics didn't play all that similarly to the Nuggets from a decade later, but they both play George Karl Basketball. Does it make more sense for Stevens to go that route, and instill basic principles into his teams that supersede the available talent on the floor? You could just blindly say yes to that on principle, but the easy argument away from it is that, well, George Karl never won a championship. Neither did Rick Adelman, and he's a similar case. Larry Brown, who might be the ultimate you-play-my-way coach, did.
I don't think it's fair to talk about Stevens and Rondo in the specific, though, since Stevens is so new and his teams have been bereft of very much championship talent.
As an aside, any discussion about whether or not Rondo is the best player on the Celtics is a nonstarter. He is. End of story. Also, sorry for the novel.
Topic: So No Rondo, No Triple Double and We Win (Read 35422 times)