stupid!! coaches arent witchdoctors!! Pop is AMAZING but he cant heal the injured! if he could,we'd have won plenty of back to backs by now!
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pop is aces in my book.
I don't know, Pop shares some of the blame.
I mean, we lost Game 1 and Game 4 by a few points... a different sub here or there makes a difference.
That said, the Spurs did a good job against a better TEAM... and that includes Phil Jackson.
Why should you even care clip. You are irrelevant. Fisher is slower than molasses and a jump shooter who barely gets off the ground.
If you think Manu is a wimp, then you are proving your ignorance. Go watch Chris Kaman take a dump instead of wasting our time here.
You're not going to win a series when your top scorer and clutch performer averages 9 ppg in 4 losses. You're not going to win a series when your team can't buy a basket for 7-8 minute streches in a game. You're not going to win a series when you can't stop the opposing team's best player in the 4th quarter from making (sometimes impossible) shots. And you're certainly not going to win against a team that is deep 1-9 when you only have 2-3 players show up offensively for you.
That's nothing on Pop. Spurs did all they could, but they were outmatched and clearly ran out of gas at a bad time. You need lucky breaks and bounces to go your way in a championship run and Spurs didn't have that in this series.
Pop is the best coach in the NBA.
But I do question some of his substitution/rotation moves in this series, and in the NO series.
Kurt Thomas didn't play at all in Game 4 when we got killed on the glass, and barely at all before that, but last night he played a lot.......and played pretty well.
Udoka and Horry didn't even play last night after playing the whole series.
Barry played a lot the last two games, and obviously played well, but where's he been? I know he was hurt during the regular season, but seems like he was fine during the whole playoffs.
I can see rotations changing on a nightly basis during the regular season, but when you are in a playoff series against the same team every game, how can the rotation change that drastically? I like the idea of having more players that can adapt to different schemes, instead of having these "parts" to swap in and out as the game plan changes, because then you start to limit yourself. I guess we have too many "specialists".
pop's a great coach and its easy to do the armchair coach thing, especially after the series is over.
but i do feel that LA was able to shut down the paint, and a lot of that was X's and O's, because they didnt have great shotblockers nor great defenders in general. When that happened in 04, it was "acceptable" because you had shaq and malone doing whatever they wanted inside. now, gasol and odom? yes, manu, tony and (to a lesser extent) timmy never got it going inside, but i feel that pop didnt put them in a position to succeed, and i feel that phil recognized the spurs were relying on 3pt shooting more than ever and cornered them into that.
we lost games 1, 4 and 5 by so little, and never really established our inside game, i think there comes a point where its not the players but the coaching staff that have to adjust. anyways, this isnt a fire pop! post, but i do hope both the coaching staff and players learned some lessons from the series
Yeah, could've playing Barry more in game 4 and game 1 helped? Yeah.
Playing Bowen more in game 1 helped? Maybe.
When it comes down to it, I think it still ends the same. The team had nothing left. The regular season flurry, along with the matchups of New Orleans and Phoenix killed them.