Good points.

BBA,

I think you have a point about the quality of the Knicks back-court. Still, D’Antoni only has the player on his roster to work with. Unless he’s high there’s no reason to fantasize about what he would do if Duhon were Rondo and Hughes were Ray Allen. No one was saying Nate Robinson was an All-NBA guard, just that he was the Knicks best offensive guard (if he wasn’t then Douglas was, and he wasn’t playing much either).

If Nate were playing to his career numbers he’d be playing more for Boston. The last time Nate played as poorly as he is in Boston over a whole season was as a rookie. His PER has been above 15 his 3.5 other seasons as a Knick (19 last season, career 16), now he’s back down to 12.6 where he was as a rookie. Given how far under his career production he has performed in the 300 minutes he’s played for Boston, I think saying he CANNOT play 25-30 mpg on a contender is completely unfair. He has a TS% of .511 for them, but for the Knicks he was at .552 this season. D’Antoni didn’t have the foresight to say “if he were on Boston his TS% would drop by 40 basis points and, therefore, I will bench him in NY.” If he were playing the way he did last season right now for Boston, he’d be getting more minutes. His PER was 19 last season. (PER is a stat that’s well suited to Nate’s game, but that still shows that he was on his game last season and is not this season.)

Finley is a good fit for Boston. He can shoot, he’s a veteran, and he’s motivated. Whatever you think of Doc Rivers, the fact that he never gave Bill Walker a chance at all (29 minutes played this season for Boston) despite weak depth and now Walker is doing well for the Knicks… Bill Walker barely got a chance and Glen Davis has a regular role of 17 mpg for “scoring punch” (his TS% is .490)… Doesn’t say much about Rivers’ ability as a talent evaluator. Nate is also taking over the Eddie House role for them, which was never more than an 18, 19 mpg role. He’s struggled for the Celts, but you can’t look at an 8,000 minute career and say the 300 bad minutes are a representation of how he can play rather then most of the 7700 minutes before that.

My thing with Nate was that I always thought he was a nice little player whose value was overinflated by many here because Nate with the Knicks was playing on a team w/o much talent and that Nate isnt good enough to play consistant 25-30 minutes on a good team but on the Knicks he looked at times like hell he should play the full 48 because of the rest of his pretty pathetic backcourt teammates.

Dont get me wrong I wont be surprised if come playoff time he has a big game off the bench or 2 because he is certainly capable of doing so but to me he is a player who if he is hot he is worthy of playing 25-30 minutes for that game but the majority of the time he should only be playing 10 to 15 on a really good team like whats happening to him now in Boston.

BTW tonight in an OT loss to Houston Nate played 9 minutes and was a -13. He had 3 pts and 1 ast. Finley scored 3 pts too in only 13 minutes. I just brought up Finley because he is old and was rotting away on the Spurs bench with a PER below 9 and a TS% barely over 51% yet he joins the Celtics and is playing the same amount of minutes basically as Nate which to me doesnt speak highly of what Doc thinks of Nate at the moment.

I’ve been watching Nate’s whole career, and he has always been a showboat. You might think he was the best guard option the Knicks had, and I might agree, but he is a me-first player. The Knicks have had a losing culture for too long and this is just the sort of thing that needs to be cut out, so kudos to MDA if that was on his mind…but getting back to the point, it’s not clear that is what’s on his mind, and that’s a problem.

No doubt Nate is not playing well for the Celtics. He did play well for the Knicks, though. He also didn’t have Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen ahead of him. Nate’s play over one month on a 50 win team justifies any decision D’Antoni made? Looking at one month of stats when he has several seasons of stats to see what kind of player he is is silly. It’s as silly as if I were to call D’Antoni an idiot because Adelman was playing Hill 17 mpg and he was playing pretty decently (and to me Adelman is 100000x the coach Rivers is, Adelman is probably my favorite coach in the NBA).

“hell they just picked up freakin Michael Finley who is playing almost the same amount of minutes as Nate now.”

Yeah, and putting up a TS% of .621 so far. Pretty terrible…

“I mean thats what the Knicks were basically doing for the most part the last 2 seasons yet D’Antoni is still getting killled for not winning enough. Hell”

Just because you’re rebuilding doesn’t mean you get an automatic free pass on your coaching. No one is saying he should win 50 games with the current Knicks.

“criticizing a proven coach because he is losing with a roster that is not built to win.”

My problem with this is that he’s not all that proven. He’s lost a lot with two NBA teams and won a lot with one. That one team happened to have great talent that was perfectly suited to . I am not saying this proves he isn’t a good or even great coach, I am just saying that it does prove he’s not unquestionably an above average NBA coach just because he took the exact same core (Nash, Marion, Amare) along with a revolving door of good supporting talent (Johnson, Diaw, Barbosa, Bell, KT, Grant Hill, etc.) to a few 60 win seasons.
Walsh, on the other hand, did it for like 20 years in Indy. He kept talent coming and accomplished the difficult task of rebuilding a young team without missing the playoffs.
However lucky he’s been, Jax has at least done it with 2 franchises and basically 4 different teams (first and second Bulls, Shaq and Pau Lakers). Other guys like Adelman, Larry Brown, JVG, etc. have basically just won. I am the first to say that talent is WAY more important than a coach, but my concern with D’Antoni is that we know he is good at coaching one system. We don’t know for sure he’s a great coach. That’s where adaptability comes in.

rrude,
“Even if it’s not shown in stats, the idea that he gets away with celebrating while he should be getting back on d, shouldn’t be tolerated.”
This is ridiculous. The play that Breen blew out of proportion saying Nate was celebrating (while single-handedly keeping the Knicks in a game against last year’s eastern conference champs… it was a 6 pt game with 5 minutes left)… he was waiting in the back-court to pick up his man. He guards the other team’s PG most nights, you pick up the PG in the back-court. You don’t have to get all the way back into the paint and wait for the PG to walk down he court into the lane before picking him up. All-Defense Douglas literally cost the Knicks a basket the other night because he was celebrating. I have not seen posters here saying Douglas is a renegade who needs to be firmly disciplined.

Agree 100%. My biggest concern: adaptability. He’s been too much of a system coach too often. I can agree with trying to get the 5 best players on the court even if it’s an unconventional line-up, but at what point do you cross over into Don Nelson territory.

If you have LeBron and good supporting talent, you can play any system you want. If the Knicks miss on LeBron (and Wade) it’s a matter of both how Walshtoni communicate on personnel issues (does Walsh go out of his way to get the guys D’Antoni likes) and then who he’ll

cgreene re: #6,
The Duhon example is a leading example of a lack of adaptability. I’m more worried about it with bigmen going forward (not so much so far: I’m comfortable with not playing Darko given his attitude though I can also see a minor beef given the Knicks terrible interior D, and Curry stubs his pinky toe every time he steps on a basketball court…). D’Antoni was so set in his mind that he needed a “pure PG” and/or that Duhon would rebound that he rode Duhon to the point where it probably cost the Knicks several wins. A lot of coaches do that, I just think if I built a perfect NBA coach they would not.

D’Antoni did eventually shift away from the 7SOL, but it took a year plus, and came at a time when everyone and their mother knew the Knicks needed to do something different. It came at a time when you could literally say his job was in jeopardy if something didn’t change (Knicks were on a Nets like pace).

“The difference is, Berman/Vescey/Isola don’t work for the Arizona Republic so the dirty laundry from 55-60 win teams wasn’t aired until well after the fact.”

The difference is that they had a ton of talent and won a ton of games. Stoudamire came back stronger than before after his surgery and has ALWAYS been an All-Star caliber player almost since stepping into the NBA out of high school, Diaw was one of the most versatile players in the NBA and only their 4th or 5th man, Marion was an All-Star. If the Knicks were on a 60 win pace D’Antoni would be a saint in NY. Hughes would be like Jalen Rose on the Suns and no one would care what he had to say.

“if he has the same players and was coaching w/the same results in say, Milwaukee, I don’t think this would be an issue.”

Any team that wins under 30 games in an 82 game season is going to come under scrutiny, people will call for change. The calls will be fewer in Milwaukee, but I’m sure no one in Pittsburgh or KC is happy that the Pirates and Royals are pitiful every season.

http://realgm.com/src_wiretap_archives/65727/20100402/iowas_earl_barron_signs_with_knicks/

The Knicks sign Earl Barron.

That’s right, Earl Barron.

You could argue that the opposite is true. The Knicks have a lot of guys who are around the same talent level. It’s easy enough to accept that you’re not playing when there are better players ahead of you. When D’Antoni was in Phoenix, for example, he usually had 8 or 9 NBA players and then some D-League players. The guys not in the rotation were either young guys who hadn’t shown anything (and largely never would) or veterans who were grateful just to have an NBA job. When you look at Duhon, Hughes, Robinson, and Douglas… who gives you a better chance to win more games throughout the season? I really don’t know. Even with Douglas, the one you could most easily dismiss, one could argue that given playing time early in the season he could climb the learning curve and be better than the others at the end of the season.
Even Al Harrington, who I would argue is one of the best players on the Knicks, gets criticized to the point where it seems most posters here think the team would be better off without him. Darko has one of the worst attitudes in the NBA, yet many posters were outraged that he wasn’t handed minutes.

Same thing with roles. When you’re Mo Williams and you play next to LeBron James, your role is clear. Nothing to do with him specifically, but if Mo Williams were on the Knicks he might feel like he’s the best player and try to take a bigger role than D’Antoni wants.

Winning also soothes egos. If you’re the 12th man on a winning team, a. you’re the winning and b. it’s harder to argue you should be playing ahead of players who are winning. If you’re the 12th man on the Knicks… in the middle of a 10 game losing streak it’s hard not to think you could at least not do any worse than the guys out there.