Pau Gasol Says Mike D’Antoni’s System Makes it ‘Tough’ for Post Players

The Gimp is saying the obvious. Prepare for another round of flogging.

if you dont have athletic, individually strong defenders on your roster, it makes defense tough as well

its a problem

Pau Gasol shooting corner threes? LOL That’s like having D12 shoot free throws all day.

everyone wants to just blame the coach tho, don’t ruin it for everyone. people still think this team would have won with Phil Jackson, let them live their angry little lives.

he didn’t adapt in NY and he ‘sho won’t adapt in LA

$20 million per season Pau… real tough, gee, i feel for you, man, shucks, golly, oh-man, dang, how do you do it, oh, wow…

get over it or ask to be traded.

Mike D: 395/743 = 53% winning percentage
Mike B: 314/481 = 65% winning percentage.

Why did they fire Brown again? To hire an even worse coach with a terrible system for this roster? Dumb.

thank u!

The Knicks team under achieved?

- His first year with them, 08-09 they were horrible. HORRIBLE. No coach was winning with that team.

- His second year with them, 09-10 they were equally horrible. When 4 of your top 5 scorers are all 6-9″ and bad low post defender the chances of your team winning more than you lose is pretty much 0, so no surprise there either.

-His third year with them, 10-11 they were 42-40 under him. Despite only having 6 players play over 60 games for his team (and only 2 of which being starters – Landry Fields & Amar’e Stoudemire)

-His fourth year 11-12, that team was a mess. an asbolute mess. and Melo, despite everyone wanting to blame it on D’Antoni, wasn’t even engaged & in no way bought into the offense that he was BROUGHT INTO. I mean, the team had a winning record with Jeremy Lin as their best player and a losing record with Melo (until Woodson took over), that should say something about Melo. Not D’Antoni.
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i hate that we want to blame things on a coach. You people want to blame the Lakers sucking on D’Antoni, when we all watched them suck before he got there. Now, 20 games into coaching the team, without a training camp, and 0 games with his entire roster, people want his head on a platter. It’s irrational, and stupid. This isn’t football, you don’t have 16 games to figure things out.

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First of all, D’Antoni is definitely a better coach then Mike Brown. Everyone knows this. Brown basically got that record because he coached the best regular season player over the last 15 years in the weakest Eastern conference in decades, it’s really that simple. Ask people in Cleveland (who were actually around the team, they will tell you Brown basically didn’t do a damn thing aside from organize the defense, everything else was up to LeBron – i’m not be sensationalistic, this is what i’ve heard from multiple people who spent years around the organization.)
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With that being said, the Lakers shouldn’t have fired Mike Brown. That was a stupid ass decision. No coach was going to win with that team in the fashion they were trying to do it. The coach with the best chance at winning looked like D’Antoni for a few very simple reasons,
– 1) Steve Nash & Dwight Howard. Steve is obviously most comfortable in D’Antoni’s system, and Dwight really needs someone to set him up, he isn’t going to thrive in the post playing with Kobe and Pau who are probably better post options even though he’s uber efficient.
- 2) There would be no training camp. If Phil came in and tried to teach the triangle during the season, with guys like Dwight Howard, Jordan Hill, Devin Ebanks, & Darius Morris as guys who will be prominent in the rotation, you will be taking a very very confusing step back, in hopes that it can all be put together right around the playoffs at the very very very earliest. It wasn’t a safe bet with Dwight on an expiring contract. — which everyone wants to ignore.
- 3) this is the most important reason, and another that everyone wants to ignore. the team is paper thing after it’s starters, like tissue paper thin. and no coach does more without a bench then D’Antoni. This is inarguable, everyone who has watched his career as a coach knows he gets more out of his starters and less out of his deep bench then anyone. which is a gift and a curse. on this Lakers team, it looked like, (and still does once Nash comes back) he would be best suited to get the most success out of the team in a SHORT amount of time.

That’s not that good of a record. It amounts to 53%, which is substantially lower than that of his comparable contemporaries. Rick Adelman has 59%, George Karl has 59%, Phil Jackson (who they should have hired) has a 70% record. Hell, even Mike Brown has a 65% W/L record.

I said the last time we discussed this that outside of PHX (a system PERFECT for his offense given the players), D’Antoni has not had much success implementing his style. He did not do well in Denver, he did not do well in NY, and he certainly isn’t doing very well in LA. Good coaches will adjust to their personnel (just ask Phil Jackson) and utilize their strengths, not force All-Star post players to play the role of Andrea Bargnani.

on the third year: this team was doing fine and great on offense but was mostly emberassing on d even though they had some solid defenders like turiaf, fields, chandler, douglas, balkman, (even gallo is an underrated defender) or jeffries (a little mixed up due to the trade, but still). dont you think they couldve done better with a coach who preaches defense and uses these tools properly?

i mean the difference was obvious when woodson took over last season. in the same season they changed to put on a 18-6 record. i am really disappointed that you come up with that lin stretch in here.

i dont want to exagerate these few games dantoni is at the lakers helm now but i thought even b4 game 1 he was the wrong choice for them and till now he didnt do much to prove that oppinion of many nba followers wrong. its obviously not all on dantoni but when even one of his best guys complains about his system, the public oppinion might not be THAT wrong about him.

id totally agree tho that the guys on the roster also play a big role in that stretch

in regards to D’Antoni’s third year, you name Ronnie Turiaf, who sure, he’s a good defender, he’s also one of the worst offensive player’s in the league and has never been a big role player on a good team. – Balkman is in the exact same boat.
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That Knicks team had 0 isolation scorers. A coach who preaches defense would have been in hell trying to score with that team. 42-40 with Amar’e Stoudemire as your rim protector is a damn good record. Especially when him and Felton were statistically the only 2 above average NBA player’s on the whole roster.
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And after the Melo trade the team went 14-13. I mean, that’s really good considering they butchered the whole team and had not a single good defensive big (Shawne Williams was their starting PF, w/ Shelden Williams & Ronnie Turiaf as the primary backup Centers).
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i would be hard pressed to call such an unbalanced team winning 42 games in a season where big changes were occurring while a lot of the roster was new in the first place “underachieving”

its not that they only had these guys, come on. b4 the melo trade there were also wing guys like chandler and gallinari who played really well, same with flields’ suprising rookie season. even mozgov was quite useful. id consider that roster at least as solid. i wont say that dantoni did a bad job, just that a focus on defense wouldve might served them a little better as they still had stat, gallo, chandler and felton to put the ball into the basket and assets like sha. williams or fields who played their roles nicely. i give dantoni some credit for some of these guys good play, too. just hated an offensively oriented system as a knicks fan lol

Gallinari and Chandler shot 41% and 46% inside D’Antoni’s offense. And if you haven’t noticed, they were far and away at their most effective offensively that season. — and you think they would have done better in a slower more defensive oriented pace, WHY exactly? How many top defensive teams (outside of teams with LeBron) are elite without a top tear rim protector? go ahead, i’ll wait.

nah i dont think they wouldve played better offensively in a defensive oriented system. just good enough to knock some shots down to punish defenses that focused on stat.

well, you mentioned the lebron cavs. do the something around 2000 magic with darrell armstrong, the playoff-bobcats and the late 90s cavs count?
that knick team was no contender anyway, it was a “we might get to the playoffs” squad and i repeat it: that team wouldve been better when defensively oriented. would these guys really have been so much worse at putting the ball into the basket with another system? or at least a defensive focus? you may be right, im jst not so sure as i never really got warm with dantoni

Phil Jackson hasn’t adjusted? He uses one system, but the dynamics of the system change based on who’s playing it. The fact that he’s posted winning seasons with one system in a variety of distinguishable teams (early Bulls, late Bulls, 00s Lakers, Kwame-Lakers, Pau Lakers, Pau/Bynum Lakers) should be enough to prove that he can adjust his system to personnel. Again, D’Antoni has had one successful tenure as a coach while pushing his system, and that was in PHX.

I compared him to HOF coaches because that is how people revere him, and that is how this hiring was revered – we were hiring a first class coach. He is a great coach, but the best coaches can usually make even the worst of teams overachieve, and can adjust, no?

D’Antoni is underachieving despite a top-heavy roster, which he prefers. Granted, Nash hasn’t been implemented yet, but a roster of Kobe, Howard and Pau should be enough to win you games. And I’ve seen the games.

Also, I HATED Mike Brown. I also hated that we hired him. Ditto for D’Antoni. I really would have preferred we hire Brian Shaw or maybe Rick Adelman (he was available in 2011 I believe), or best of all, PJax when we had the chance to and Jimmy decided to pull a Jimmy.

when has a team without an isolation scorer EVER been great by focusing on defense and not offense.
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F*CKING LOOK AT THE NUGGETS SINCE THE MELO TRADE.
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They alone should squash your entire theory. Why aren’t they? because George Karl is the coach and you think they focus on defense? cause they don’t.

That’s a weak a** winning percentage.

there has to be some sort of relation here..im guessing nephew

Have you seen some of the teams Sloan pushed to over 50%? There sure as hell wasn’t a Melo or Stoudemire on his rosters after Stockton and Malone left. You have way too much confidence in D’Antoni and you’re tying yourself in pretzels trying to be his cheerleader.

I’m sorry but this is an indictment on the coach. It’s the coach’s job to adapt his offensive sets around his players not the other way around. It’s not Gasol’s job to become a 3pt shooter overnight, his skillset calls for him to be close to the basket and as a matter of fact, Gasol should be the focal point of the frontcourt not Howard.

we’ll see if Steve Nash is going to come back and “fix” this team, because D’Antoni has no idea how to play Dwight and Pau together…

Yes you are simple, you’re right.