[h1]Coach of the Year?[/h1]
Tim Chisholm
3/17/2008 9:29:10 AM
There is a large contingent of NBA observers that feel the Coach of the Year award should not be handed-out based on a sizable turnaround from the season before. The logic goes that generally such a turnaround can be accounted for as much by roster turnover, general heath and a little luck as it can by coaching acumen. It is reasoned that it is far harder to take an already good team and make it great than it is to make a bad team okay. That upper-echelon of teams legitimately vying for a Championship is far harder to reach than the first round of the Playoffs.
This season,
Sam Mitchell is proving why this line of thinking exists.
Take nothing away from last season's accomplishment; he took a disparate group of players and made them play cohesively enough to reach their first Playoff berth in five years. However, he did so in a weak Conference and a weaker Division and may have owed more to the acquisitions of Bryan Colangelo than initially thought.
Keep in mind, the warning signs were there: the 2-8 start, 2-6 finish, the 2-4 Playoff ouster. However, in a year marked by such an unexpected turnaround, it can be easy, and perhaps even appropriate, to focus on all the positives that are accruing rather than the small, nagging negatives.
But the negatives were simmering under the surface, nonetheless. The team lost a lot of their offensive cohesion when
Jorge Garbajosa went down on March 26th. They looked flummoxed defensively against
Jason Kidd's arsenal in round one of the Playoffs and they looked equally unable to adapt to the swarming defenses that engulfed
Chris Bosh all series.
Basically, they looked fine so long as there was nothing around to upset the very delicate balance that Mitchell and the Raptors had created for themselves.
Fast-forward to today, and those nagging issues are sprouting into full-blown identifiers for the Toronto Raptors basketball club. When the commentators who work for the organization are slagging the team on the air, as they did in the broadcast against Denver, that should be a sufficient indication that something has gone seriously awry.
But that was always the concern when it came to rehiring
Sam Mitchell last summer. He had only one solid season of coaching under his belt and it happened to come in a contract year. I had many people email me to ask if I really believed that he was going to be the coach that took them to the next level as a team. The general assumption at that time was that the Playoffs revealed more about Mitchell than the regular season had and perhaps it would be best to let a team outbid the Raptors for his services. My response was always the same: I don't know if he can take the team to the next level, but he's earned the chance to try.
I stand by that assessment, and I will amend it to say that I also believe that he deserves a chance to dig himself out of the hole that he has placed himself in this season.
Because make no mistake, this is
Sam Mitchell's hole.
When a team faces-off against the Golden State Warriors and looks shocked to see a running-gunning-cutting-passing team, that falls on the preparation of the coach. When the same looks of shock-and-awe meet a similar team two nights later, that falls on the adjustments made by the coach. When a team loses one player, as good as he is, and completely falls apart on both ends of the floor, that falls on the system the coach has implemented.
After all, isn't this the same year that has seen Boston survive stretches without
Kevin Garnett, or seen the Rockets win nine straight without Yao Ming? Granted they may have more talent on their roster to fall back on, but when you replace Garnett with
Brian Scalabrine or Yao with
Dikembe Mutombo and barely see a drop-off, that is the sign of a coach instituting a system that maximizes the talents of the available roster.
I don't know if there is a man or woman alive who could claim that what the Raptors have demonstrated on this west coast trip is the maximizing of an available roster.
And as Jack Armstrong so astutely pointed out during last night's broadcast, if this team expects
Chris Bosh to come back and solve all of their problems, they're kidding themselves.
All year this has been the team that heats a guy up only to stop feeding him. This has been the team that gets
Jamario Moon countless long jumpers and
Jason Kapono none. This has been the team that has seen a significant drop-off in the play of
T.J. Ford and
Andrea Bargnani from a year ago. This has been the team that plays into the hands on an injury-ravaged Indiana Pacers team by going small rather than pound them with size they can't match. This has been the team that has seen a notable drop in all areas of their game and it's happening at just about the worst time of the season.
Mitchell can (and does) blame the players all he wants, but his Raptors have become a purely reactive team because he coaches them that way. This is not a team that walks into a game knowing who they are and how they're going to beat their opponent, they're a team that looks to interrupt what their opponent does and hope that they fall apart like the Raptors do in similar circumstances. They never impose their will on their opponents, but rather try and counter every move their opponent makes against them, tacitly admitting that they can't conceive of a plan to beat them in advance and giving all the psychological power that implies to the opponent.
Consider last Tuesday when the Raptors walked into Staples Center and basically said 'let the Lakers shoot three-point shots if you can cut off the paint and contain Kobe'. Well, no team contains Kobe, and his 34-7-7 against the Raptors are a testament to that, but watching the Lakers make 15 of 32 three's, and knowing that was the plan going into the game for the Raptors. that illustrates the perils of reactive coaching. Focus on how you're going to attack the opposition and upset their defensive plans, as the Lakers did by taking those 32 three's and hitting 47% of them.. that's proactive coaching.
The bottom line is this puts an unenviable amount of pressure on Raptors' management going into a summer when they have very little maneuverability. While Bryan Colangelo shares some of the blame for coming up short with regards to acquiring any defense or rebounding in the offseason, he surely could have and should have expected a better output than what he has seen this year from the roster he constructed. He has basically watched his team play their best ball of the season in November and December and subsequently tailspin into the abyss they're in now.
He must now decide if he can afford to patch the situation gingerly and preserve the copious cap space he'll have in the summer of 2009 or not. He must decide whether there are superior coaching alternatives available to him or not (unlike last summer when Marc Iavaroni and Rick Adelman were known to be available). He must decide if he can afford to keep two $7-$8 million- per-year point guards on one roster or not. Basically, he has to decide whether or not to rebuild the whole thing only 24 months after doing it the first time. It's a huge problem to solve because either option could set the ball club back years in development.
Right now, the Raptors are in dire need of support. They need a far better offensive system. They need a completely new defensive system. They need an infusion of players who can perform the tasks (defense and rebounding) that this current crop cannot. It's support that must ultimately come from Colangelo, either by endorsing the system he has now, or by supplying the aid the team needs this summer.
Colangelo and Mitchell have learned the hard way this year how much easier it is to swing back into Playoff relevance - especially in the East - than it is to take that next step and become a serious contender. It takes awareness, innovation, discipline and a little luck. Mitchell's got seventeen regular season games and at least four Playoff games to establish at least some of those traits if he's going to get the growing legion of Raptor fans from calling for his head, but it's going to take all of those things, in spades, to get the Raptors organization to feel secure in keeping him in the driver's seat long-term.
