Don’t remember where I saw this, but one point JJ made during the interview is that AD doesn’t get enough touches in the 4th quarter, and I was glad to hear he recognized that.
Ah! Another thing I like about JJ is that he's data driven. He's always mentioning advanced stats, both individual and teams'. It's great because we got late as a franchise to that type of preparation. Ham was also not a fan because he always took 3 to 4 months to play our best lineup. Also, I said this before but now that's official, I don't think AD will ever play 4 with JJ. He's a sucker for shooting and I think we will be heavy on that. He mentions "play the numbers game" often. Curious to see Vando's role too. I think we'll be after shooters all across the board. Kennard, McDermott, Burks, Gary Harris, Mo Wagner, Oubre, Garrison Matthew, Hield are all guys we may see in a Laker shirt next season. DLo is also very likely to stay, I think he may push for it. I'm thorn about him, I don't know how you make it work with a DLo, Reaves backcourt. We'll know in 10 days
He did fine all season letting DLO and AR run the offense like 80% of the time, and the 20% or whatever .... great IMO to change it up if he sees some advantage or is red hot from 3. Against Denver neither DLO or AR was being really effective at it and we were in elimination danger last 2 games and whole series so he did what superstars like him their whole careers try to do .... just take over themselves then. I don't buy at all that if he has his druthers he wants to be running the offense himself a high %. That's how we got Westbrook.
man, you distilled most of my fears about this hire into one supportive post, lol. my nightmare is going and getting a bunch of catch and shoot guys who don't defend. that's a path to destruction, imo. jj himself should understand that. he had to know all the stuff his teams had to do to keep his a** on the floor for his shooting--and what he had to do to counteract his deficiencies and build a career. you can't have several of those guys on one team. you can maybe have one. and if i have to have one-way players, give me defenders, all day every day. you don't "have a cold night" defensively. at least not the best ones. but even the best shooters have cold nights. boo. go away. i agree that lebron has been asking for ballhandlers that aren't him. though i question whether he's been reluctant to take the ball from them. and if i need a superstar creator at pg or sg to play alongside lebron, then i need to be paying lebron less for that to work from a team-building standpoint. regarding both posts here, i do think that the personnel choices in the next few weeks will tell us some things about philosophy. i hope pika's wrong here, though, as i'm not at all optimistic about lebron/AD/shooters as the answer.
Late to this, but I’m similar to many here, neither high nor low on this. He’s an unknown, zero coaching experience, but he has a clear passion for the game and at least seems to have some solid X’s & O’s stuff going on. Could be great, could be a disaster, but the pool of candidates was one of the weakest I’ve ever seen, so there wasn’t a lot of choice, hard to be too upset on who we passed on. Borrego, Atkinson, meh. Adelman, Nori, also somewhat unknown as head coaches. So, it’s just wait and see, interested to see what we do with the roster, we have some big decisions to make, like take a big at 17 or trade the pick to get better elsewhere.
Excited. Partially for JJ’s potential, partially just to finally have closure and get to move forward with building this team Despite his lack of experience, I genuinely don’t think he can be worse than Ham. Obviously there are concerns, but at this point it’s a done deal so I don’t see why it makes sense to get upset about the JJ hire during the offseason before we even see how he performs
He's an unknown, but JJ is clearly an intelligent guy who likes and understands the game. I am curious to see what happens and I wish him all the best, of course. Let's see if we can get some experienced assistants and go from there. Maybe it's the eternal optimist in me, but I am excited and have a good feeling about this.
JJ on why he thinks he’d be a good coach before he got the job. I like that he values adaptation and changing as the league changes
Surely by definition many people who are promoted have zero experience of the role they are going into technically.
That is actually not correct for my company, for example. To be promoted, you have to perform at the next level for some time (this is evaluated AND you are given an opportunity to do so as part of your growth plan).
actually the reason people are promoted within an organization to more senior roles is usually exactly because of their experience working with and understanding the organization, and the requirements of the position in question. This is especially true for key roles on the same line as the HC of a basketball franchise. Yours is a really poor analogy to justify the JJ hire, as to us that analogy would be hiring someone that came from within like Phil Handy, not JJ. anyway, I'm done pooping on this hire. I think at this point only a coach with extraordinary clout would last longer than 2 years on this job, given that the expectations of the title, do not match with the reality that our roster is not good enough and we don't have the assets to build a winning roster. So this job in essence is a poisoned chalice and any coach is doomed to fail.
i think sports--and maybe basketball in particular--are a little different in that you really do get a good look at what your supervisor does, imo. my concern with redick is the same as my concern with most coaches, and it has little to do with experience in coaching--i think leadership is something that can manifest in different ways, but it's usually pretty obvious even before someone is in an official leadership role. i don't recall see redick play at any time and really feeling that he was a leader. that said, if you had asked me that about kerr or riley (don't really remember seeing riley play at all), maybe i'd have said the same thing. agree here. the expectations are completely out of line with the resources. we're an organization with a 40-year old star and a penchant for penny pinching. you can't expect rings in such situations.
Late to the party, but my $.02: best hire we could've made based off the available pool. Will it work? Who knows. But I'd say the same about anyone else we considered. JJ is a very smart guy, everyone who's been around him has vouched for his work ethic, meticulous approach, and he's a guy who's stated that every day it bothers him he didn't win a ring. If you have a hungry, hard working coach who's wired to grind and has modern basketball ideas then I think that's as good of a place to start as any. He has a relationship with Bron, he's already cleared things up with AD and wants to his usage to ramp up, AR's people are excited. Already off to a good start having buy in from the top 3. DLO has to be tempted to return now. If he was getting the 3s he was getting under a coach who he butted heads with, what kind of shots do you think he'll get with someone who actually understands 3 point shooting, gravity, spacing, constant movement, screening angles, etc. I had the money right. I thought it'd cost us $8m a year. I was off on the years, with us wanting to build culture and have a coach for the long haul I thought we'd go 6. We went 4 instead. I want to see who ends up on the staff. We saw the list of some of the targets. I think Brooks is the closest to a lock out of that. That's a good place to start and gives you a baseline of a bench with HC experience. I've been traveling the latter part of this week. I knew they'd drop the hire during that. That's just how it goes. So I'll dive in the articles, pods, and tweets this weekend and see what goodies I can find. A couple for starters:
Yeah, I think only shooters who don't do anything else are out of the league. McDermott or Matthews would probably be end of bench. I see Oubre fitting really nicely here. But yeah there's a risk of overcorrection. Yet, we had Hauser playing an important part in the title. We shall see... I actually liked our game plan in general. Attack the paint and get to the FT line. That's our 2 stars strengths so we should capitalize on our stars strengths. I don't want any of the 2 chucking 3s all game (LeBron got better, but I still prefer he doesn't push it)
