Official Raptors Season Thread [41-41]

T.J's shooting>Jose's matador defense



Agreed. You do realize that Calderon has the worst % in the league at defense. It means an opposing player he is guarding averages 5.5% higher than he usuallydoes when jose is guarding him. He is 420th. That is worst in the league. Even bargs is like 220 which is no where as bad. Also he was -21 in 25 minutes vsgolden state. Ya hes good on offense but he KILLS us defensively. Also TJ is the only one that can get kapono the ball by breaking down the D
 
Thank god the Raps have been exposed as frauds on this trip. Trust me, these losses piling up will do us good in the long run. BC needs to make some seriouschanges to this team, and I've stood by this opinion even last season when we were exceeding expectations. Our team has more weaknesses than strengths.

Wizards are only 0.5 GB with Arenas coming back very soon. Hopefully dont fall to the #7 seed because Detroit would literally embarrass us.
 
this !@#$ is pitiful
smh.gif
...
 
One of Colangelo's most costliest mistakes was not firing Smitch when he took over as GM. Mitchell winning COTY set our team back 2-3 years
frown.gif
 
I dont know what is going on. It is so, SO hard to watch. This team really needs Bosh in that lineup, regardless of the situation.
I dont know about Sam. Im going to give him the benefit of the doubt right now. But earlier in the season, I wanted his head on a silver platter. If thingsdont change soon, I'm going to want that same thing.

At least we are looking to dip down to play Orlando. And the Washington/Cleveland series is going to be nothing short of amazing.

Lets hope we get out of this funk in a hurry.
 
Why Sam Mitchell sucks...
http://www.tsn.ca/nba/news_story/?ID=232119&hubname
[h1][/h1]
[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.

[table][tr][td]
[/td] [/tr][tr][td] [/td] [/tr][tr][td] [/td] [/tr][/table]
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.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, in all honesty, as much as I do like Sam, I have never seen him as the coach to get us to the next level as well.

Carlisle.... interesting.
 
We could've had Rick Adelman as well.

Sad thing is, Smitch will only be in year 2 of a 4 year/$16 mill. contract next season. I cant see MLSE firing him anytime soon with that much money left to bepaid.
 
Well, sorry raps fans. I went MIA for about 2 weeks there, with damn school assignments, midterms, essays, etc. Thank God thats very close to over.

I havent had a chance to watch many Raptor games, but from what I see in the Box Scores, they are not pretty. From what I see, we dont play and D, and are nowstruggling on O as well.
Drop down to 6th in the East may be better for us, but to play a hot Orlando team going into the playoffs will not be fun either.

Good Luck to us...
 
I've always tried to stay by Smitch but he's really costing us games with horrible substitutions and plays off timeouts during the 4th quarter. Firinghim right now would do us no good either. Unless he gets us to the conference finals, I really can't see BC keeping him. Another problem we have is TJ.It's clear now that he's frustrated and he's not enjoying being the backup point guard. As much as I love the guy, he too needs to be moved to abetter situation. I see a big shake up this off-season but we can't focus on that right now. We have no choice to work with what we have. The only thingI'm glad about is Bosh being back. Hopefully we don't slip too far down because a matchup with Orlando may be our only chance to advance a round in theplayoffs...and I'm not travelling to T-Dot early this summer only to see us bumped out of the playoffs early.
 
So yeah, we should really start winning games again. It's not in our best interest to mess with Detroit in the playoffs.
 
what's extremely upsetting to me is andrea. you would expect improvement from year 1 to 2, but not only has there not been improvement, there has been asignificant dropoff. ill put 80% of the blame on sam mitchell. it just seems to me that he refuses to play to andrea's strengths and whenever he has a badouting, mitchell just completely loses confidence in him.

as for the 2 point guards, it seems to me that getting rid of ford is the right way to go. im tired of seeing him turn the ball over and over. im tired of thelack of a defensive game plan against anyone except miami. im tired of seeing jamario jack up shots he has no business of taking. im tired of seeing kaponowaste away on the bench after giving him that huge deal. im tired of seeing this team fail miserably on the west coast.

lets just hope we can hang on to the 6 spot and take our chances with a healthy lineup against orlando
 
Nice to see that nobody likes anybody on this team
laugh.gif


Anthony Parker FTW.

laugh.gif


TJ Ford situation - Rap Sizzle, your totally right. No arguement
Sam Mitchell - I have supported him for a long time. Its about that time where im starting to turn on that idea
Andrea - I keep saying give it time... but you see guys like LaMarcus for Portland just killin it, and then you see Andrea jackin up and making more bricks,enough to build a whole new ACC.

Its a rough stretch.
 
Is true, Raptors fan. Seeing the previous game against the Nuggets, I can't help but agree that the Raps don't run any plays except the pick &roll. They always end up having to shoot jump shots and hope it goes in. Running iso. for Bosh is a good idea, but too bad Bosh is not a post player, and so,he too will settle for the jump shot as well.

Raptors are a soft team, kinda like the Portland Trailblazers, where they shoot many jumpers to win games. I'm not sure if that is beneficial in the longrun.

Anyways, hope the Raps will turn it around and avoid facing Detroit in the 1st round.
 
^ at least someone else see's it
laugh.gif


Yeah, if we face Detroit, we might as well prepare to pack our bags after game four. We have never played well against Detroit; they are our kryptonite.
I still think that Orlando is the best matchup for us, which means we have to stick in the six spot.

But I agree, we need to get some players who want to play basketball involving contact IE: A big ready to body someone. Its tough to see most of our bigstaking 20 foot jumpers all the time. Im not going to single anyone out with that, but its just tough to see.

Another problem we have is the fact that almost everybody on the team is on the idea of TEAM play. Everybody except for one un-named individual. He either hasto get it through his head, or get the hell out. We dont need bad eggs on the team.

Obviously, Bosh out for a long period of time hurt us. But at the same time, if we have this "best bench in the league", we should be able to play ata high level, regardless with or without Bosh. I know, our superstar is out. But without Bosh, we can still play well. But our guys didnt prove that whatsoeverover the past few weeks.

I havent been able to watch much because of University, but from what I have seen, we are playing weak on both ends of the floor.

In regards to D, I honestly think the biggest problem is the fact that we have no dominant big that will pull everything down off the boards, and be a seriousshot blocker against any player. Obviously, those players are few and far between, but it seems every team has a player like this. Aside from Bosh, who is aserious threat on D that is a big man? Rasho? Sure, he is big, and at times can neutralize those big players like Z or Shaq, but what about those athlecticguys like Sam Dalembert? Bargs on them man to man? Ill say this. I like Bargs D, when he is on the perimiter. He moves his feet alot faster than people think.But, on the block, its hard to watch. Andrea gets overpowered, and doesnt have the rebounding skills (not yet at least) as other dominant bigs. Without Bosh inthere, we have no presence on D. What does this mean? Teams come in, body us down low, regardless if the shot is coming from the paint or outside, andcompletely dominate us in the paint. And I think we all know that success in the league depends on if you have a dominant big. There really hasnt been a teamthat has won the chip without a dominant big since the Bulls (where they had Rodman, someone who pulled down 15 boards a game).
In regards to O, the same problem occurs. If we have no dominant big on the block, who can score down low, we are forced to take jumpers all game long. This iscomparable to what Duke now has in the NCAA; they live and die by the jumper. And what happened recently? Duke got upset by West Virginia, a team that doesnteven have a dominant big guy, but had a good enough big to beat them on the boards. The same thing will happen with us. Again, without Bosh, I do not trust ourinside game one bit. Humph? Sure, he is strong. But coordination wise, there is still need for improvement. Rasho? For his height, I think he takes too manyjumpers. He can hit them, but it hurts us on the physicality aspect. Primoz? Still on the bench last I saw... Andrea, takes longer jumpers every game. I dontmind players shooting if they can hit. But when it means that we have a lack of physicality down on the block, it puts us at a huge disadvantage. Its tough tosee someone like Jamario be the player that takes the ball down low, where we got bigs taking jumpers.

Im not putting anybody at blame here. Im just stating that with a lack of physicality down low, we are at a huge, HUGE disadvantage.

BC has to bring a dominant big in IMMEDIATELY. If not, we are still going to be that sub .500 team who goes out of the playoffs first round.
 
Damn ballinboykz, you're still in essay mode cuz you just dropped a dissertation right there
laugh.gif


Colangelo should've got a dominant big last summer instead of Kapono, despite winning 47 games our interior D was awful.

To put it bluntly, the team over-achieved big time last season. When I said at the beginning of the season that this team would hover around .500 all seasonand finish with wins in the low-40s people said to be more optimistic and have hope. Our team has way too many holes, and the Raps are still a few more yearsaway from actually being a competitive team in the East.

And I just turned on the Raps game right now for a few seconds (no way I'm wasting my time watch the Pistons methodically execute them again) to see TJFord being rewarded for his sub-par play over the past month. What a slap in the face to Calderon, this guy plays his heart out for 4 months only to bebenched again in favor of the coach's pet who had been moping around the locker room for the better half of his return. What ever happened toMitchell's motto "If you play well, you'll get more minutes?"
 
Raptors got the win that they needed and against a top team.

Hopefully they keep up they way they played D tonight. Offensively, it wasnt that good in the 1st half, but got it going in the 2nd.

CHEAAA
pimp.gif
 
Yeah thats huge from Jose. T.J. kilt it today too still. We put em away when both of em were on the floor.
 
Originally Posted by checkoutmygrill

calderon is a true team player, he wont complain about coming off the bench
Click to expand...
He suggested it. He put himself coming off the bench.

If Jose is not re-signed, I will quit being a Raptor fan. This man is the true team player.

And Carlos, you were definately wrong about being methodically exicuted.
laugh.gif

And yes, I am still in essay mode. The homework just doesnt stop...
laugh.gif


CHEA!

*Definately spelt that wrong the first time around, forgot how to say chea...*

CHEA!
 
I really think that Bargnani could be a dominant low post offensive force akin to a Rasheed Wallace type player, but sam mitchells offense encourages him tojack up threes all day because the it onlty allows for Chris to post up. The few times i have seen Bargnani post up he has showed flashes of brilliance butmore time in this offense will only cause further regression.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

The ultimate sneaker enthusiast community.

NikeTalk was created as a way of giving back to both the sneaker enthusiast community and to the greater global community of which we are all a part.

NikeTalk is NOT affiliated with Nike Inc. in any way, shape, or form. All opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of Nike, Inc.

© 1999-2024 NikeTalk.com

Share this page

Back
Top Bottom