(01-15-2020, 09:31 AM)hakeemfan Wrote: The historically most efficient offense part is fool’s gold. Others have mentioned certain things on how this efficiency is measured. Plus we have seen how they fare against elite teams or even against average teams when the game is close and they don’t seem to have any go to plays at all in the half court.
Before the season, I doubted this team is good enough to make playoffs. Now they are firmly in playoff position and play beautiful basketball for most of the time. They were barely outplayed in the 40 games (1 LAC game, 1 LAL game, perhaps 1 Bos game). On the other hand they whooped ass of a lot of very good teams like Houston, LAL once, Philly twice. All in all, I am much surprised how good this team is doing. I expected them to struggle way more so I am generally satisfied with the result. Of course they have things they need to work on, but less things than I thought.
If you expected that they were a contending team before the season, than I can understand your criticism. I didn't, neither did the good run really make me think they are contenders. Although, to be honest, I started dreaming.
Claims how we, the casual observers, know better than the coach, team and best player of overperforming team are a bit far reaching for me. I have no doubt that RC, Luka and everyone else involved are not self centric idiots who don't see the mistakes they are making in endless hours of watching and analysing the games they played. It is very easy to be smart after all the facts are known - after you see what is working and what not. Completely different than make a decision and then live with the consequence. That is why myself, as a rule, never criticize in game coach decisions. They are made in stress situations with limited time and they are all risky. And whatever a coach/player does and it doesn't work, there will always be a smart ass claiming how stupid the coach was to put a player X in the game. Same person will be totally quiet when player X wins a game.
One other thing. Coaching principle is completely different comparing Europe and USA. In Europe it is very common that coach yells at his players through most of the game, react for every bad play and so on. This is probably comming from the importance of every game played (fewer games played in single competition - each can be very important).
NBA coaching style is completely different as coaches (publicly) act as 100 % gentlemen, almost never raise their voice on their players and use very limited ingame deviations from general plan. That may be related to much longer season where individual regular season games are more used as a training/teaching tool and only trends matter as assesment of the result. Creating stressfull situations even more stressful might wear out players before they reach the playoffs.
Not to mention the overreactions of media on every raised voice or gesture in stresfull situations, that are very normal human reactions and usually have no consequnces once the stressful situation is over.