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take a bit of time at the end of a Monday in which I'm kicking ass and counting names over here at my office, put off the final loose ends I have to tie up and give y'all some of this work via the Get-A-Blog-Bomb post you both seem to begging me for in this thread.
Back to thy game which hast been peeped.....you and Shawn I notice seem to put more emphasis (read: blame) on a coach than said coach actually warrants if you're discussing a team that oh I don't know.....has a player or two you seem to support?
Shawn's spent three seasons (starting out with Lin still being on the team and we've seen the air come out of his career balloon badly since) campaigning for the firing of McHale when the reality is the Rockets basically maxed out in these playoffs while their superstar had moments of brilliance and bizarre bad-meaning-badness.
Even won a game and a series his team had no business winning, with said star sitting on the bench in the most pivotal quarter of that whole seven-game series.
You on the other hand, attempted to put the Mavs underachieving in the post-Rondo-trade segment of the season on Rick Carlisle (who likely will eventually be in the Hall of Fame) over your boy (who almost surely at this point will not) while he shot 38% from the free throw line, created a myriad of distractions, sulked while not dominating the basketball despite the fact that he had no ability to hit an outside shot or inclination to take it to the basket......then quit on that team in the midst of the playoffs in the most blatant display possible since Dennis Rodman was on the Spurs in his socks during a playoff game or when Scottie refused to get off the bench for the final play of a Knicks/Bulls Game 5 because Feel drew up a play for Kukoc, the best shooter on the team.
Now you'll gladly jump at the chance to sign on with Shawn's post here since it gives Brow a scapegoat moving forward into next season (his fourth) as he still lines up to be "the next best" in the game once Bron finally falls off but has yet to lead a team to a single playoff victory.
And the reality is that doesn't matter, because he probably ends up leaving anyway but Gentry will have to be a reason he sticks around if he does.
Shawn was probably also a teennager on the West Coast watching DMiles & QRich do head-tap moves, listening to Walton & Lawler, iconoclastically riding for the Clippers to be a relevant team with seemingly an embarrassment of young riches but like Minnesota over the past decade the Clippers fucked up some of those drafts and a lot of those young building blocks ended up just being blockhead disappointments as I outlined in terms neither of y'all can actually discount with real evidence.
So let's talk about Gentry, who again, isn't my guy but is still essentially the offensive coordinator of the best offensive team in basketball currently favored by a 3 to 1 margin to beat the greatest player of this generation's team in the upcoming Finals.
Alvin Gentry coached ZERO full seasons with the Detroit Pistons.
He was an interim coach tossed into a lost season because the Pistons decided to revolt against Doug Collins in the middle of the season.
His only season where he started and ended as Piston coach was the '98/99 strike year, they make the playoffs and Grant Hill plays in the only game of his pre-injury NBA career, a Game 5 of a best-of-five in which GHill goes 10-for-27 from the floor and Stack disappears, the Pistons are kept in the game only by a where-the-fuck-did-this-come-from best-career playoff game from Bison Dele....who would never play another NBA game, retiring at 30 then disappearing on a sailboat in the South Pacific a couple years later.
The Pistons come back that following season after Dele retired with a starting five that besides Stack/Hill includes Lindsay Hunter, Post-ATL-Achilles-Rupture-Laettner and Terry Mills.
Their bench is Jerome Williams and Michael Curry with a small does of Mikki Moore and John Crotty.
Gentry, who never officially was even taken off interim status and never got to coach them for a full NBA season, is the head coach.
They start off losing their first few games, Stackhouse was gunning like shit, Stack also punches Laettner on the team plane, the media is finally starting to turn on Grant Hill for not having won a playoff series while the Pistons are hovering around .500 after the All-Star Break.
They then decide to fire Gentry, still creep into the playoffs and get swept by Miami with whoever the interim coach replacing Gentry is coaching.
Grant Hill amidst all the criticism then ruins his career trying to tough it out on an ankle that leads to the ruination of his career but neither he nor the Orlando Magic knew that.
Gentry, taking the only job he can get, working for Donald Sterling with zero personnel input and Elgin Baylor entrenched in GM.
That Clipper team had won 15 games the season before Gentry got there but HELP IS ON THE WAY in the form of THREE FIRST ROUNDERS and TWO LOTTO PICKS!
Problem is, the 2000 NBA Draft is probably the worst draft of all-time save maybe the '86 Draft Len Bias OD'd celebrating joining.
They draft Darius Miles at 3 and Keyon Dooling at 10 and Quentin Richardson at 18.
With that big hall of scary-good young talent, they more-than-double their win total in Gentry's inaugural year going from 15 to 31.
The next year the young Clippers are starting to knock on the door it seems, heading into the final month of the season they are 37-36.
The Los Angeles Clippers are poised to finish over .500 for the first time in franchise history!!!
They might even make the playoffs!!!!
Nah, in Clipper fashion, they lose 7 out of their last 9 while the W total stays stuck on 39.
An eight-win gain from the year before but dissapointing in the face of a 16-W jump in Year One and the fact that they wilted in the final two weeks.
Somehow Gentry heads into the next season, after improving his team's record by a total of 24 games over the course of his first two seasons, in WIN-NOW-OR-ELSE mode because Elgin makes an offseason trade for Andre Miller and is now convinced he's got the makings of a young dynasty and if it doesn't work it must be the coach's fault even though he'd already been GM of this cheap franchise owned by a crazy cracker for 17 years with zero winning seasons.
Miller's halfcourt-style game developed under Rick Majerus and then allowed to stagnate putting up empty-counting-stats losing in Cleveland in the NBA, ends up becoming just the opposite of a match with the young/athetic/transition-driven Clippers of the year before.
Odom gets hurt before the start of the season, then spends the first half of it trying to come back in drips-and-drabs between puff-and-pass.
The team struggles and Gentry isn't even permitted to finish the year before getting fired despite having improved exponentially in the first two years of his time and missing (arguably) his team's best player while trying to work the quietly surly Miller into the fold?
So which of those years did he underachieve so far?
How many complete NBA seasons had he been given to start-and-finish as an NBA coach?
Two, Bomb, you say?
Well, maybe three Bomb, if you count the Pistons strike year.....OK.
And what were the results of those three seasons.....the Pistons best result of the Grant Hill era and two seasons with the young-and-dumb Clips with an average of 12 victory improvement over the prior season?
"Okay, then"(c)Pimp C
It must be the Phoenix job, which Gentry again gets as an interim coach.....where he really shows himself to be the sad sack you and Shawn want him to be.
That doesn't seem right though because I remember being shocked as shit when he made it to the Western Conference Finals led by Old Nash with Old Grant Hill as his second-best player in those playoffs.
But anyway, let's look and refresh our memories.....
Takes over there for the deposed Terry Porter in early 2009 because the Suns went from being seven-seconds-or-less to being unable to score or figure out how to use Shaq with the rest of the squad.
Hmmm, Amare goes down for the season two games after Gentry takes over.
Tough break but I guess finishing the end of the lost season without Amare at a 60% winning clip was okay.
Next season they lose Shaq for nothing in the offseason and win 54 games then surprisingly take the defending champion Lakers to the brink in the Western Conference Finals.
Series is even tied at 2-2 with the Suns dangerously close to stealing home court in Game 5 to set up going back to Phoenix (where the Lakers had lost to them in five or six straight playoff games) with a trip to the Finals on their racket.
But ah, it's the Lakers and as much as I hate to admit it give their star plus his cast some credit, they often did find a way to pull shit out of their ass when needed in their best Feel-coached seasons.
Phoenix makes a strong push and ties the game 101-101 with 3.5 seconds left off a Nash pull-up vs Gasol and a JRich three.
Staples is stunned.
Phoenix has all the momentum.
They've got 3.5 seconds with the ball, which it being the Lakers is undoubtedly gonna be Kobe tossing up some ridiculous bullshit.
Like clockwork, Kobe fights thru a screen to get back to inbounder then gets the ball with his back to the basket between the three-point line and the sideline, Grant Hill and Nash both with their hands up, turns around, throws up a horrific hero ball which does not reach the basket and seems to be about to land right in JRich's hands until Artest (who just fucked up with a quick shot 45 seconds earlier but wisely knowing there's no chance a foul is getting called going for this rebound) bully-bump/hip-checks his way into getting beyond him and into the ball's line of trajectory to catch it and toss it back in just as the buzzers sounding in a play so close it required referee replay to win the game.
It would be the first of eventually two times Artest (who was increasingly erratic by this point in his career) saves Kobe's bacon in this final chip run.
If he doesn't do it there, Phoenix very likely at least makes the Finals and possibly even beats the Celtics to win the 2010 title in Gentry's fourth full season of coaching.
So for those still with us, that's: Best GHill Pistons Result, 15 Games Better Clippers, 9 Games Better Clippers, 54-W Suns team (1st in Offensive Efficiency) losing a squeaker WCF Game 5 at the buzzer which could have prevented Kobe from getting five.
That offseason following Kerr leaves knowing the Suns just lost their last chance of the Nash era as Amare exits to the Knicks via free agency.
Richardson goes down for the season before the All-Star Break.
Nash and Grant Hill still carry them as best they can but they're 38 and 36 years old by this point.
The team finishes 40-42, the first time out of five tries that a Gentry-coached team regresses from one season to the next.
Dissapointing, sure.
No great disgrace though considering.
The next season is the strike-season, which does wonders for a team whose only two stars are almost 40.
They finish .500 and miss the playoffs.
Nash and Grant both go to L.A. in the offseason and without the Phoenix Suns training staff assistance don't play a full season of NBA games combined between the two of them ever again before retiring.
Gentry is fired 40 games into the 'rebuild' of the Suns that season, an amazing SIXTH time that Alvin Gentry either started a season as an interim coach at a season already begun or losing his job before the season was over (we left out a cup of coffee he had as Miami's coach in the mid-90s at the end of a year in the mid-90's before being bumped out of consideration by a Pat Riley fax).
So we have Alvin Gentry, a guy Shawn cyses as having THREE winning seasons in TWELVE years really having only got to coach SIX seasons start to finish (Only FOUR non-strike seasons as well as only FOUR without an interim tag, TWO after taking over a 15-win Clipper team, TWO after taking the Suns to a surprise WCF dogfight).
So the final tally for Alvin Gentry's seven full seasons (four as non-interim, zero with any personnel-power or other any other organizational hammer for him to wield) coaching in the NBA:
1) the Pistons to their best Hill finish
2) Improved the Clippers by 16 wins in his first year
3) the Clippers by 9 wins in his follow-up season
4) went to the Western Conference Finals which was lost on a Ron Artest hip-check-foul-rebound-replay-worthy-buzzer-beater to the back-to-back Champions
5) drops from 54 to 40 wins the following season after losing 2 of that team's 4 best players retained the oldest two of the four.
6) finishing .500 in Grant Hill/Steve Nash's final season in Phoenix as still the two best players on the team then watching both essentially never play any basketball of consequence again before each retiring.
Am I missing anything else?
Damn, upon further reflection, this was an even stronger case than I actually thought.
Don't underestimate Bomb or Alvin Gentry again, fellas.
Apology Accepted, "let's move on"(c)Doc
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