Mike Muscula Discussion

which predated our current system.

i'm half looking forward to watching people crap on the next coach because players don't perform or improve. i don't think it's the coach. i think it's the organization.

 

The organization created an offense that dipped everyone's shooting percentages? ... OK

Watch this video first:

 

too lazy to look right now, but i could have sworn the lakers shot the worst % on wide open catch and shoot opportunities at some point this year.

that ain't coaching.

 

Lakers were 21st in frequency of wide open shots and dead last in fg%. They were middle of the pack in frequency of open 3PA and again, dead last in fg%.

 

This

 

Nobody wanted to play with Lebron

 

I thought that made our players look lame, almost suggesting that couldn’t execute more than 1-2 options on a play before falling apart. Is that the players or coaching? Seems like both

 

Always coaching 10/10 times. They need to give them options to run.

If you're telling me that James and Rondo, two of the highest BBIQ players in the league, can't run a second or third option in an offense when told to by a coach, that is ludicrous. This is the same guy (James) who can describe an entire quarters worth of plays from both teams off the top of his head.

Also, every single player on our roster on their prior team (college or NBA) has done it. I can pull film to show you, too.

 

Definitely is. Good defenses didn't mind sagging off our worst 3 point shooters to help on the PnR. Thus, leaving them open to brick all night long - exactly what the defense wanted. That's why, you don't run an offense that depends on 4 out spacing and a high PnR every time.

Also, too much standing around on offense makes your shooters go cold. This is what happened to the Rockets in Game 7 of the WCF. It's a basic triangle principle that Kerr, Jackson, and Winter have all described in depth, and one that Walton of all people should be very familiar with.

There's more depth to this than the stats show.

 

Jeannie has some tough decisions to make.

This is definitely going to be harder than just posting pictures of baby Laker outfits on Instagram. I hope she’s up for it.

 

houston's an odd choice here. their whole system is predicated on non-movement, and it serves them just fine most of the time. it's gross, but it works.

and again, intelligent off-ball movement is a skill. one not possessed by most of our roster. and it's pretty hard to teach. this is part of why houston can pretty much plug any undersized player into their scheme and just chug along. you don't have to know where to go based on contingencies--you stand in the corner or at the 45. and don't move because harden's throwing to spots--not people--unless it's a dump-off.

finally, sagging off your worst 3pt shooters was made easy by our front office. they're essentially all in a tie for "leave them open".

 

and i don't see the point here, either.

our players struggled with more complicated sets, so he went to simpler ones (video narrator: "they couldn't do this in the flow"). his after timeout plays indicate he's capable of developing secondary actions...so he just...chose not to for the rest of the game? do other teams have 35 contingency options? i'd wager no. if initial actions are blown up in a 24 second possession, you're often stuck with a pick and roll or iso. doing more takes better players.

the basic summary (some in direct quotes) from this supposedly damning piece of video evidence was that the schemes were initially fine, but the players couldn't execute and adapt.

i agree. better players can do that. if you want to succeed with non-shooting dunces, you have to keep it simple.

 

Doesn't that kind of dictate

And to add to what bfc said, Milwaukee had the best record in the regular season this year.

LA was dead last in shooting wide open 3s (35%), but the Bucks were 3rd to last (36.3%). Also teams like OKC and Portland (who damn near made and attempted as many open 3s as we did) got into the playoffs. So no...it's not as simple as we needed better shooters.

I was a Luke apologist and I still think he had a tough year this year (8 new player overhaul) along with having to coach with an injury decimitated roster, but that still doesn't excuse why he elected to play certain players limited minutes. For all the stink that fans made about Jules, BLo and Zu (some of it valid btw), look at how much playing time those guys got under Luke and his coaching staff....and then please tell me how that's on the FO. Even with injuries, playing time/rotations were bizarre.

A limitation in coaching strategy is absolutely attributed to our lost season.

Still, the number one contributor to our demise were the injuries. I don't see how anybody could state that injuries were an excuse. You can't expect to develop team chemistry if your core guys/rotation don't get much time and exposure in playing with each other.

 

milwaukee had giannis antetekounpo. and as i've said (and someone finally wrote about this in the national press recently, too)--it's not just making the three, it's the threat of making the three. brook lopez's mere presence made it so that teams had to pull guys away from the basket, allowing giannis to feast. if middleton, brogdon, and lopez weren't all shooters that commanded respect, his life would have been harder.

okc is noted as a bad offense despite having two superstar scorers. why? nobody else can reliably shoot, so defenses get to make russ and george's lives harder.

portland's an anomaly because their two starting guards can hit contested threes at a decent enough clips to bend the defense, much like gs.

there are lots of ways to build an offense, to be sure, and you don't just have to collect shooters. but if you don't have any AND most of your guys don't understand how to move off the ball...it's going to be tough sledding.

we brought in rondo, beasley, and stephenson after lebron. none plays well off the ball, none is a shooter worthy of respect. it's why rondo's 3pfg% is a useless stat. with how much he kills the spacing, he needs to convert 60% of those to undo the collateral damage of his presence.

no coach was going to win big with those guys. are there better coaches, sure. but this was such a tiny part of our problem. so weird to me that people obsess over it in the face of our much larger issues.

 

We had very little movement in our offense. It serves them fine because they have a roster with 4 guys who are a threat from 3. We do not have the same roster, so we should not play the same way.

Off ball movement isn't hard to teach. 28 other teams in the league can do it. And all of our guys have been a part of such offenses on previous teams.

Regarding sagging, that's why you don't have Rondo try to space at the top of the key, or be the primary ballhandler in a pick and roll. It's very simple coaching principles.

 

Struggling with sets is a very strong indicator of poor coaching. James and Rondo are two of the highest IQ players in the league. And every single player on our roster has proven they can do it on other teams. I can pull proof of it from film to show you, too. Even high school teams can run an offense with more than one action. But it's up to the coaches to show players what to do when things stop working.

Yes, most teams have contingency options unless the clock is winding down. As a team that has previously ran the Princeton offense and the Triangle offense, both of which have virtually unlimited contingency options, you should be familiar with this idea.

Shooting and having the ability to execute an offense are two completely different things. Rajon Rondo is a very good example of this. So is Westbrook. Can Anthony Davis not run plays because he can't reliably shoot from 3?

The schemes weren't fine. They were poorly coached, and the adjustment Luke made to bring all our players up higher ruined things even more.

Saying our roster wasn't good enough to correctly run an offense is a HUGE cop out of an answer, and ignores the underlying issues of our coaching staff. I guarantee you we could have had much better players and we would have still seen a very inefficient offense. You can read my breakdown of the game versus the Bucks pointing this out in something like 8 consecutive half court plays in a row.

There is a big difference between a well-coached team and a poorly coached one. The Lakers often looked lost out on the floor, and that's not the players fault, especially when you have LeBron James.

 

It's not about our win total, it's specifically about the quality of the offense we run. Even if Luke tried to install a good offense and we ran it poorly, I honestly wouldn't have cared. But most of the time we were standing around, running very basic plays, and it cost us. We wouldn't have been a top 4 seed, but we shouldn't have slipped so far in the standings either, even with the injuries.

I don't like the Bucks as an example because they actually have great 4 out spacing that allows Giannis to attack. But they designed that offense because they have guys who can space the floor like that, just like Houston.

The Lakers didn't have absolutely 0 shooting. Guys like Bullock, James, KCP, Hart, and Kuzma were good enough to where you couldn't just ignore them all game. Here's a very simple set we could have run had the coaching staff thought through things more.

This is a play the Cavs ran many times season, called a high post split. You start with James catching the ball at the elbow, and the guard who makes the pass screens for the player in the corner. The guard screening needs to be able to shoot somewhat ok, but that could have been anyone. The other two players are spaced too far apart to where the help can't come off the cut even if they sagged, and you can actually see JR Smith's defender doing that. It would have been easy to rip this out of the Cavs playbook, but Luke is incompetent.



Here's another play the Cavs ran, called a single side tag. This one is complicated, but basically, you can see that the guard passes to James, sets a screen for the other guard who clears out. Then Nance (a non-shooter) comes up to set the PnR for James on the strong side. This leaves only one defender to help off the weakside, meaning either a lob for Nance, open layup for James, or a wide open 3 for the weakside. Thus the name, single side tag.



Complaining about shooting, or our roster talent, specifically when the supposed culprits like Stephenson and Beasley played 15, and 10 mpg respectively, is being willfully ignorant of a myriad of offensive execution issues we had this season.

 

Yeah I’m going to stick with placing the onus on players to hit WIDE OPEN shots. Middle of the pack in frequency of such shots but dead last in makes, but that’s on the coach? That’s a biased narrative I won’t subscribe to and I don’t even really like Luke. There are players who make entire careers off being standstill catch and shoot players. There are successful teams whose entire offense is predicated off that. I’m going to put the onus on players to hit those shots, or a Front Office that can find someone who will.

Luke might not be cut out for this job, but the implied defense of players sucking or the FO not fitting the correct personnel is tiring. And after a year of all of us complaining, I have yet to see a realistic suggestion for who would have or could be a better coach for this roster.

I don’t care if Luke gets fired, but he improved the defense, improved the win total every year, and players seem to like him. Show me a better, proven candidate that we can realistically hire.