Ex-Coach Luke Walton Discussion

Stop. These are 19-21 year old kids with the majority of the responsibility of running the team for the most part.

This is the reason players don't peak until around 27 with 7+ years in the league. It takes time for it all to sink in and to really understand how to win at the NBA level. They have pride they just don't know what they're doing on an NBA level yet.

 

What are you even trying to argue here? That young teams don't lose like this team looses?

A quick glance at the Sixers record... they're 23 and 39 this year. Why would you even want to hold them up as something to aspire to, but it also jumps out that the Sixers lost by 51, 38 in the year before, and 53, 35 the year before that. This year they're doing better, not getting blown out, but they're also not starting from scratch after the Kobe tour and they did have a star break out in Embid until he got injured.

Golden state only won 23 games in Steph Curry's 3rd year, and Clay Thompson's rookie year even with vets like Richard Jefferson, David Lee and Monta Ellis to lead them.

Thunder only won 23 games in Durrant's 2nd year, and Russel Westbrook's rookie year.

Those teams didn't loose by 40? They also didn't have 6-7 key players that were 3rd year at most.

We've also beaten some of the best teams in the league this year, but sure, we can ignore that young players, even if they do turn out to be super stars, and especially young teams tend to lose at first and just point to some abstract notion that this team doesn't have any "pride".

 

I agree with this. Across the board our young guys exhibit poor behaviors when faced with any sort of adversity. Against Boston, they caved after one quarter and started playing selfishly or lazily. That's been a consistent issue all season long.

I don't blame Luke necessarily, he's in an impossible situation, but you'd hope he could influence the kids to improve some of those behaviors. The reality is the kids have to be responsible for their own effort, this is a business not a high school, but it's still frustrating for us to watch.

 

You are saying the same thing fans of every other team that had a ton of young players and are losing say. "Oh, other teams lose, but our team losing is different because of X"... until the players figure it out.

That process of figuring it out looks the same whether you're building the Warriors, or the Pacers of a few years ago. You lose. You lose badly. You don't know what you really have until the players develop, and that's not one or two years in.

"Our team has no pride because we lose in such big blowouts", "Our team has no heart because we lost more games by 20+ pts", "We need to trade Steph because he doesn't have the heart of a champion" and other such hyperbole. Anyone can pick and choose what bad stat shows their team sucks more than the other teams that built up from draft picks, but It's all just emotional panic.

The reality is that this is the process. It sucks, but let's not make this into some unusual circumstance where our team sucks more than all the other team's that have been through this process.

 

My thing is that every team has their particular problem before they figure it all out. I don't think the way it's manifesting for this team is unusual or significantly worse problem. Would we rather our kids be less talented, but give consistent effort?

The kids are responsible for how we're losing. Their age isn't an excuse, it's a well documented reason for a team to suck until they get some more experience and can figure it out.

 

If they were talented and gave consistent effort, we wouldn't be losing. That's my point. This is what young teams/players do. This isn't somehow unusual.

 

So what? They had pride and then lost it?

No, the symptoms of being a young team just manifest differently for different teams and players. Every young developing team has their own problems and the only thing that they all have in common is that the problems they're trying to figure out lead to losses.