Wednesday, January 09, 2019

Tom Thibodeau Fired - My Thoughts.

Tom Thibodeau was fired and he has been replaced with Ryan Saunders.  I have been a Timberwolves season ticket holder for 30 years now.  I am one of under 200 individuals who can say that.  I have seen an awful, awful lot of bad things and terrible basketball.  I have seen many people come and go.  With that perspective, my thoughts on the Thibs Era:

The Good

1) Thank you Thibs for the one playoff appearance.  The Wolves had not reached the playoffs since 2004.  They managed to win game 82 against Denver and make the playoffs.  I went out to a bar and bought random people drinks after Game 82.  Why?  Did I view this as a step to an NBA title?  No.

I viewed the playoff appearance as a way to avoid the laughingstock label that has plagued this franchise for so long.  (I will note here that the people I know on the non-basketball side are excellent at their jobs, but the on-court product they sell is the worst in the history of professional sports, at least last I looked at winning percentages - it is possible that the new Browns are worse.)  When you see the graphic go up, "Have not made the playoffs since George W. Bush's first term" you cringe.

So, thanks Thibs.  That was worthwhile.


2) Thibs was a pretty good evaluator of talent.  Look, he knew Butler was good, and Butler was very good for us (on the court).  He knew that Jeff Teague was an above average PG who had gas left in the tank.  Same with Taj Gibson (old, but still good).  He drafted Okogie, who has been good for a low #1.  He drafted Bates-Diop, who has been good in the G League for a mid-low #2.  He acquired Tolliver, who (when played, see below) has been a worthwhile player.

He dumped Kris Dunn and LaVine and passed on Markkanen.  Sure he had missed on his odd love of Dunn originally (passing over Jamal Murray and Buddy Hield - who both were better players and filled a huge need).  But if you could say you would have one really good year of Butler and then get Saric and Coveington and not have signed LaVine to an $80M deal, I'd take that deal any day.


3  Thibs has a concept of what he wants to do, and he does it.  There is some benefit to this.  I mean, Kurt Rambis's players would say "We hate having to run the Triangle Offense" and he'd respond, "85% of what we run isn't the Triangle Offense."  OK, so that is WORSE!  Your players do not even know what they are being asked to do.  Thibs' players at least knew what they were being asked to do, and, quite frankly, they were often pretty good at it.  For example, while the Wolves ran a caveman style offense, they were in the upper echelon of the league in Offensive Rating.  This would be like an NFL team running th ball 75% of the time in today's game and still scoring 24 points a game.  Odd, illogical, but I guess it works.


The Bad


4.  Thibs' defense, his alleged calling card, never worked.  Whether it was (as most believed) because it was horrifically outdated, or whether it was (as Thibs believed) that his players were too bad or dumb to figure it out, what does it really matter?  When you run a scheme that makes you a bottom 20% defense (sometimes worse), how do you just blindly stick with it?  If you were teaching someone math, and they had the same blank stare at you for 2 years, would you show up every day and continue to use the same exact teaching method?  One would hope not.

This, of course, goes to Thibs' personality -- when something is wrong, it cannot be his fault.  "I know this defense works.  It worked in 2008 and 2011.  It works still today."  Well, here is an example of actual coaching -- I coached an 8th grade B team for my daughter.  We were pretty bad.  We started like 3-8.  So I had a sitdown with the girls and I said, "Look, what do you LIKE about what we do and what do you NOT like about what we do?"  Got input, heard things about how we could do better.  Where it made sense, I added more stuff they liked and reduced the stuff they didn't like.  Ended 15-15.  That is the sort of stuff you need to do.  Thibs was completely unable and unwilling to adjust his defense to his players or to the modern game.  In his defense, it appears that no player or coach or owner was willing to suggest that either. 

5.  Thibs hitched his wagon to different guys, generally not corectly.  Look, Taj is a very good player.  He shouldn't be getting 36 minutes a night.  Wiggins played 36 a night, regardless of whether he was good, bad, indifferent, or VERY indifferent.  There were absolutely no consequences for bad play if you were one of the guys Thibs liked.

It took me all of one scrimmage to recognize that Jamal Crawford was a horrific defensive player and would give you almost zero rebounds a game.  Thibs played him a lot (from what I gathered, less than Crawford was promised, but way too much for what he was giving you).  Crawford averaged more shots per 36 than Towns.

Thibs' reliance on Derrick Rose (who has completely re-worked his shooting and become a good shooter) appeared to some to be a great idea.  But if basketball-reference.com has him at 116-116 ORtg/DRtg, what is he really giving you?  A lot of difficult isolation scoring which he gives back on the other end?  Thibs also was so happy to be correct about Rose that he literally played him to exhaustion, to the point where he was too tired/sore/injured to play!  I mean, a fair evaluation is that the guy is either a guy you trade and get value for ("sell high") or he is a guy you play fewer minutes (15-24) and prolong his career and what you can get out of him both during a single seaon and in the long run.  Thibs played him 30+ minutes, often over 34. 

6.  Thibs had a weird habit of signing players (Cole Aldrich, Anthony Tollver) and then not playing them.  While these guys are just role players, why spend money on them if you are just going to have them ride the pine?  You'd be better off signing no one and then acquiring prospects that other teams had to cut at the end of training camp.  It is cheaper, and there is probably a higher ceiling for some of these guys.

Weird.


The Ugly

7.  Thibs's primary weakness was that he could never take a long-term view and try to develop the franchise.  He viewed every game, even every possession, as the end of the world.  If someone literally told Tom Thibodeau within two minutes of the end of the Hawks game, "You better get Rose out or there is a 75% chance he gets hurt and is out for a week" Thibs would take the 25% chance.  He needed the Hawks win that badly.  To make matters worse, the risk did not always result in a reward.

Up 25, down 25, the starters were running the last 3 minutes of the game.  There might be a 2% chance that the bench could blow that lead or the starters might come back.  All that really mattered was the one single game. Every game was Game 7 of the Finals.

Imagine if you had to drive 3,000 total miles in 10 days. On day 4 you are sick and throwing up.  You'd spend that day in bed, maybe drive more the next day.  Thibs would get a bucket and throw up in it as he ground out his 300 miles.  It would be 100% completely unnecessary to do so, and it probably would endanger the entire trip and maybe his life, but he'd do it anyway, because it wasn't the trip, it was the day that mattered.

8.  Thibs was a horrific micromanager.  It is almost impossible to play excellent basketball if you do not enjoy it.  I would tell my players when I coached, "Look, if you cannot find joy in basketball, you ought to consider some other sports."  Now, I had a coach in 11th grade who screamed at us and constantly had us do sprints in practice and who employed a full-court press against every opponent (we were very white and very slow and small).  We had the #1 player in the three-county area.  We went 7-11.  The next year we lost our best guy, got a new (more rational) coach, and went 12-6.

It just isn't any fun to play basketball when your every move is scrutinized.  It sucks. So when a player is a bench guy getting maybe 15 minutes and he gets pulled for his first mistake, you have now effectively lost him as a player.  He will not provide you with much value. 

To make matters worse, some players were micromanaged and punished for errors, while others (see #5 above) were micromanaged but never disciplined for anything.


9.  Thibs alienated his players and did not understand how to play to their strengths, 

Towns - 3rd Team All-NBA, 4th on the team in shots per minute.  How does that possibly occur?  Towns at the end of a game stepped in-bounds while throwing in the ball.  Thibs, "You stupid motherfucker!"  Now, this is inappropraite coaching or teaching at any level.  If your 15th guy got in and forgot to dribble the ball, you'd treat him better than this. 

Right before Thibs' firing, he was willing to say that Towns had played "the best he has played."  Well, wow!  Alert the media!  Towns had gone 28-12 for 6 straight games, the longest such streak since Moses Malone in 1982.  Thibs phrased this once in a generation streak as, basically "Towns is playing better."  Towns' reply, "He said something nice about me!?!?  Wow."

Tyus Jones - as I have said numerous times, Tyus Jones is a great "with the ball" player.  he SUCKS as an "off the ball" offensive player.  Where does Thibs insist on playing him?  With DRose and Jamal Crawford getting huge Usage and Tyus standing in the corner waiting for the ball.  So, you are taking guys with MAYBE a 2-1 assist to turnover ratio and having them handle the ball while your 6-1 assist-to-turnover guy (who is a very poor spot-up shooter) stands in the corner.  If you are going to operate with this strategy, then you need to not play Tyus at all.  Play an off guard or just play a huge defensive lineup.  Play someone who will compensate defensively for how terrible Crawford and Rose have been as team defenders (and Crawford as an individual defender).

And can we pry ONE positive comment from Thibs abaout Tyus?  I mean, here is a guy who you don't value (he wants to play him 12-16 minutes a game) and when forced into action as a starter (due to injury) he was one of your best plus-minus players (generally the best) and was a key to several winning efforts.  Answer - no, that will not occur.  In one such game earlier this year, Tyus was a key to victory, when asked about Tyus, Thibs said "I thought Jarryd Bayless played very well."  Um, OK. 

Wiggins -- now, it may be that no one can ever unlock Andrew Wiggins, but I can assure you this - playing him as a standstill "end of the play" spot up shooter - this is not his highest and best use.  So, again, if you believe that he can only be used in that role, you need to cut his minutes and play Tolliver or Bjelica instead.  Same as the Tyus example.  If you have a car that will go 120 miles per hour and rides rough when under 40 mph, don't drive it the 5 miles to and from work.  Drive it on long trips. 

What is really clear is that Towns hated Thibs, Tyus resented Thibs, Teague regularly tried to embarrass Thibs with the media, Bjelica couldn't wait to get away from Thibs, Butler knived Thibs in the back (maybe in the front), Gorgui almost had a mental breakdown playing for the guy, Crawford felt lied to and betrayed.  And those are the guys I, as a fan, know about.


10.  Thibs' Behavior Was Unprofessional

Look, we all wish we were king.  And I think Thibs figured he was king.  Great.  But if you really ARE NOT the king and you have a boss of any kind, then you need to build up some relationships and gather some relationship "chits" you can cash in later when things go poorly.

-- When your boss asks you to a barbecue, go.
-- When you are the coach of a team, appear in the media and do some PR.  If you come off poorly in person, have someone write you some B.S. emails to the fans, or recite some text written for you on video..
--  Do not lock employees from one side of the business out of your side of the business.
-- Do not throw a laptop through a glass conference room wall.
-- Do not tell free agents you want them and then don't play them as you said you would.
-- When your owner tells you to trade a guy, do your effing job and trade the guy.
-- Don't call your superstar a "stupid motherfucker" for committing a turnover.

-- Reward consistently good play and punish consistently poor play with minutes.
-- Talk to your players.
-- Say nice things about your best players or guys who give a lot of effort, even if you don't want to.
-- Don't scream and micromanage every possession.

-- When your team is playing poorly, don't panic.
-- When your team is playing poorly, don't demonstrate by your body language that you are disgusted/worried.  Instead, put up an aura of "we know how to recover from this".


These are 13 things that, again, I know about just as a fan.  Imagine the plethora of other terrible unprofessional things I am forgetting or that I am unaware of right now.


Conclusion

Grading on the very kind grading curve that is Wolves Coaches, Thibs was not terrible.  He had a team that made the playoffs and he was almost .500 overall.  So, I'd place him here:

1) Flip
2) McHale
3) Adelman
4) Dwane Casey
5) Thibs.

Thibs defeats Musselman, Lowe, Blair, Rodgers, Wittman, and Rambis, Sam Mitchell and anyone else I am forgetting.
(For you Muss defenders, he was crazier than Thibs when it came to lack of player development, lack of professionalism, and winning at all costs.  For Sam fans, Sam understood player development, but his teams were very poorly prepared and he could never adjust in-game).

So, how terrible has the Timberwolves franchise been?  Thibs is clearly a top-half coach in their history! 

Ryan Saunders -- long-time assistant.  Will undoubtedly have better relationships with the key Wolves players and is an immediate huge upgrade on professionalism.  His dad was an offensive genius, but didn't give a damn about defense (Garnett was basically the eraser for all of Flip's defensive indifference, with mixed results).  Hopefully Ryan will take the good of his dad and find some way to care more about defense. 

As someone who has seen 30 years of basketball and yet only 1 year where we won any playoff series, obviously I am rooting for Ryan very hard.


HM

Friday, January 04, 2019

Tucker Carlson's Speech On How America Is Going Wrong

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tucker-carlsons-galvanizing-speech/


This is an interesting speech to give.  Carlson, apparently upset by Mitt Romney's disagreement with Donald Trump's behavior, basically goes after the Rich Wing of the Republican Party and states that the only way to a happier and healthier America is the abandonment of tax cuts and wars and finding some way to increase pay for men, particularly for men in rural areas.

The part of the speech that is getting criticized is the call for women to stop working so much, go back to making less money than men, and (for God sake) please stop having kids out of wedlock.  Do like the wealthy do -- get married first and only then have kids. 

The difficulty with this approach is that it lumps in every sort of person into the category of "single parenthood is bad."  Is a woman who makes $200,000 and who has never been married going to be a worse parent than a "2 parent family" where one works, or neither works, or both cannot afford daily necessities for themselves or the child?  Certainly not.  And if you have a child out of wedlock, is that worse than the person who has a child in wedlock and then divorces when the child is 5-8-10 years old?  We know that 50% of marriages end in divorce.  We also know that many middle-income and lower-income non-custodial parents do not pay their child support.  How is that child better off?

I think that what Tucker Carlson is really describing is the lower-middle-class or poor 16-22 year old woman who gets pregnant by an acquaintance and decides to have the child and not give it up for adoption.  Yes, that generally ends poorly because the child lacks both attention and money.  This is the worst of al worlds. 

But Carlson uses the terrible results of this sort of relationship/condition to justify his position that women should stop making so much more than men -- since these men are not marriage material, and the wealthy women just have a kid on their own.  Again, I refuse to believe that a child raised by an affluent single mom is generally in a worse situation than a child raised in a divorced family, a family where a parent dies, or any of a number of abusive two-parent families.  I guess we could see the data, but you'd have to convince me that is true.

I'd like to say one last thing on that topic.  I grew up in a lily white county in western NY.  In the 1970s and early 80s, we were #1 in NY in per capita teen pregnancy.  #1.  And 90% of the teen preganancy was due to poor to lower middle class guys having sex with poor to middle class women.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with these teenagers seeing men as unworthy of marriage.  They lived a shitty life, they wanted something to do, they had unprotected sex.  We also know that out of wedlock pregnancies exist in poor urban areas where a majority of the population has never had any decent job.  So to blame women having kids out of wedlock on men having fewer manufacturing jobs seems like an awful stretch.

Anyway - Tucker Carlson's other points are rather weird ones for a Republican to be making:  1) Mitt Romney doesn't get taxed enough; 2) the tax code favors the wealthy, 3) government should do something to make sure working men get fair wages (he really doesn't say what, other than to say he opposes socialism or libertarianism). 
; and 4) we should stop waging foreign wars.

The Republican Party, as long as I have been alive (since 1964) has done everything in its power to defeat every single one of these things.  It is the party of huge tax cuts, huge favors for the wealthy, union busting, and endless foreign wars.  Every truly wealthy person I know is a Republican.  Every one.  There are some people who are worth $1-2M who hang in there as Democrats, but the people I know who are worth $5-500M are all GOP, and strong GOP.  I have attended conventions where these people gather.  The things I have heard just absolutely shock me.  I attended one presentation where the presenter bragged that he had convinced a group of minimum wage workers that their wages should never go up or they would all be fired.  He had them fill out form letters to send to their elected representatives arguing that any increased wages would cost them all their jobs.  I know people who make $10M a year and yet fight a $1 minimum wage increased because (they say) it would "bankrupt" them.  Again, these are all Republicans. 

The things that most help raise wages for the bottom rung of wage earners are 1) unionization, 2) minimum wage increases.  The GOP opposes these as if they were a bill to endorse widespread  introduction of The Plague.   So, exactly what Republican position is the GOP going to take that would make it so the white male in Lewiston, Maine who Carlson cares so much about can make more money?  Well, he needs givernment "help."  What is that?  That is unclear.  But we know that Carlson can no longer stand a world in which the millions of people who live in NYC and LA get more done for them than the 40,000 people who live in Wyoming County, NY. 

This seems an unbelievably odd position for anyone (Democrat or Republican) to take.  As someone from the sticks, I realized early on in my life that if I wanted to make something of myself that I needed to 1) do well in school, 2) get higher edication, and 3) take advantage of any scholarships or loans that favored me.  Then I had to move to a growing area where jobes were plentiful and my acquired knowledge would be worth money.

I was born into a family that made about $25-40,000 during my K-12 years.  My parents had five kids. That was my life.  I had a better life than 98% of people I knew where I grew up.  But that was not a life I wanted for myself.  I wanted out.  Everyone knew that, and many people sneered at that idea, that I was not content with my place in life and did not want to stick around and make the best of the area where I grew up.  But I really could not see myself ever being that person.  I got scholarships, I borrrowed money, I left.

I cannot accept, then or now, that as a lower-tier economic person I had some obligation to stay in a rural area where no one made any money.  While I am fully 100% aware of the derogatory manner in which city people treat rural people, and it sucks, I would never, as an educated person, suggest that the government owes my 40,000 person county the attention that it owes the 30,000,000 people in metro L.A. and NYC.  Carlson's suggestion that the person in a rural area should be given a greater chance than the people in areas close to jobs and industry is nonsensical.  It is like someone saying that 5'8" white guys from rural areas need a chance at the NBA, not just the much taller and more athletic players found almost entirely in the city and surrounding suburbs. 

So, if what Tucker Carlson is suggesting is that men need higher wages and more manufacturing jobs, he needs to support unions, increased minimum wage laws, and government requirements upon industries to keep and create jobs.  None of these are Republican positions.  If he wants tax increases on Bain Capital, that is a VERY easy fix.  There are under 20,000 people who game the system that way.  They have 20,000 votes.  If you pass a law, there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop it.  Again, the GOP under Trump passed an enormous tax cut.  Had they wanted to pass an enormous tax INCREASE on the super welathy and private equity companies, they could have done that in a snap of their fingers.  They did not, nor will they ever.

While I agree that the Poor Wing of the GOP should draw more attention from elected reprsentatives than the Rich Wing of the GOP, the only attention that Wing has received is tacit or not-so-tacit support for their rampant racism, and maybe a bone thrown to them for reduced sentences for opiod crimes.  Great.  Where are the jobs promised to these poor unfortunate rural white guys?  There are none.  And Tucker Carlson's proposal appears to be that we get General Motors to build plants it doesn't need in poor white rural areas......hiring only men.  Therefore, the guys I went to high school with, who had sired three children by the time they were 23, will now suddenly be deemed to be desirable target for marriage.  Their wives will agree to stay home and not work, and the world that has sucked since the steel industry went under in 1977 will suddenly srping to a glorius life. 

(Or else the company will pay them $10/hour, no benefits, and the sole shareholder will make $300,000,000 and ship their jobs to Mexico when they unionize.  One or the other.).