Paladin55 wrote:

Uptown wrote:

Solace wrote:Also, to add to what I was saying. There are some on this board that CANNOT accept any coach that is not defensive minded and, therefore, result to childish insults and ridiculous arguments to justify their own insecurity. The truth about D'Antoni is that he's offensively FOCUSED. That does not mean that he doesn't give an ish about defense. He has not often had teams that were "terrible" defensively. Usually his teams are decent, defensively, and occasionally, they've even been good. We're awful on defense now and we were not earlier in the season. It's tough to 100% blame the coach for that, if you're a reasonable, logical person.

Baskeball is played on 2 sides of the court. To be too focused on one side is foolish. With that said, this offensively focused coach's offense has sputtered in the 4th Q the last 6 games or so. Whats the excuse now?

Time for you to look at the players on the court and see why things have become the way they are now.

You say now as if we broke a defensive juggernuat with the trade. Since MDA has been the coach, heres a look at our defensive stats:

2008-2009

108 pts allowed/ 48% fgs for opponents

2009-2010
106 pts allowed/ 49% for opponents

2010-2011

106 pts allowed/ 47% for opponents

Hey, I guess we are getting better defensively.

nykshaknbake wrote:So who is capable of running the great Mda offense then? Felton and Billups are good PGs. Is it a prerequisite to have a top3 pg with 2 other all stars to passé to? If so it's a stone soup like scam.

nixluva wrote:Up til now we've never seen this team function under Mike at his absolute best. We had Duhon running the point and various other players that didn't have the experience or skills. We've had Felton, who was pretty good for a stretch of time, but this system has a way of exposing flaws in a PG as much as they enhance them. Now we have Billups and TD and neither is really doing the role any justice. We all know that you need a PG who is a natural Pure PG and just about every PG we've had was a combo guard better suited to being a scoring PG than a distributor like we need. In the end IMO if you give this coach a PG and a C that can give us what we really need at the position this team is gonna be a title contending team. I'd love to see that team put together.

No you don't need a top 3 PG, but it would put the system on steroids if you did add one. What you want is an actual passing PG that can shoot and drive. You want the PG to have good BB IQ.

I'd remind you that this team was 2nd in the league with Felton as the PG. He wasn't perfect, but he wasn't terrible either. His play had fallen off, but he wasn't that bad in this system. So I would say that he has to at the LEAST be on a Felton level or above to be successful here. You want a quick PG with a handle that can easily get into the teeth of a defense, but has great court vision to be able to hit the open man.

Duhon could run PnR, but couldn't shoot, drive or hit the open man on the perimeter. Felton was pretty well rounded, but wasn't really a great passer and didn't have great court vision. He could push the ball and at times made strong drives. He wasn't a great PnR PG. The last 2 starting PG's we have had weren't brought here as the final solution. Both Duhon and Felton were only given 2 yr contracts, so you know that they weren't seen as the perfect PG for this team. It seems that with every game Billups is playing his way into an early buy out.