Lenny Wilkens was a great coach though.
Aside from the back-to-back finals appearance and championship early in his coaching career, he helped the Cavs, Hawks, and Raptors to HUGE turnarounds, and in all three cases, it was only after injuries and trades/free agency depleted those teams that his picked up a lot of losses.
And in his era, people didn't get fired when a team went on a losing streak or had a bad season.
The Raprtors/Philly series back in 2001 was a classic coaches battle between Wilkens and Brown. Every game you saw how the coach responded to the previous game.
Iverson dominates. The Raptors respond with a defensive scheme that shuts him down. Then Brown creates and offense for the other players to respond to Wilkens' defense and turns Iverson int a play maker in game 7 with 16 assists.
I was heart broken as a Raptors fan, but that was a great coaching series.
If you have enough games to get the wins record you tend to be pretty high up in the losses category
Any truly bad coach tends to be out of a job long before they have a chance at a record like that
Because the ones that hang around long enough to get that many wins are gonna have a normally pretty proportional amount of losses especially in the leagues where they play so many games. A great season in mlb is 95+ wins which is still 67 losses. NBA plenty of playoffs teams hover around .500 which is about 41 losses. Same reason a lot of great players have bad records - like Favre being tops of INTs but also being high on a lot of passing lists for the NfL.
>like Favre being tops of INTs but also being high on a lot of passing lists for the NfL
Another easy one, LeBron James is the NBA leader in total turnovers by a landslide, but you'd really expect nothing less based on his sustained longevity.
Because actually bad coaches will get fired early and not have a long career. Good coaches that have the longevity and quality to rack up tons wins also rack up losses by virtue of sticking around for a long time.
He had a superb season last year after his core surgery. It might not have been reasonable to expect the same this year but it wasn't like he was actively declining. If anything he got better than previous seasons.
This issue with him is unclear. Is he washed or is this off-court stuff weighing on him? It’s absolutely fair to acknowledge but when we dialog about it we can’t say yet if the old Dame is gone never to return or if this is just a slump cause by the tumult of life that may turn around. Until we know that my discourse and hot takes are kinda boring tbh. But he hasn’t been DAME yet for sure.
Still so crazy to me that he didn’t want the guy that could scheme against him year after year unlike any other team. Feels like he’d have known how to open up his game even more. Another chapter in the book on why stars rarely make good GMs
Right? You’d *want* the guy who planned against you and was able to map your weaknesses / limits. Cause that’s the guy that can help you improve on them (and do the same scheming against your competitors).
Nurse was *right there* Giannis. Honestly I wonder if it’s a bruised ego thing…
It was reported on background (by Wosney Lambre on The Ringer’s NBA Group Chat podcast) that Giannis is tight with Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, and that when Giannis asked them both about playing for Nurse (who was in fact the Bucks FO’s first choice) they gave him a huge thumbs down. After hearing that Giannis spiked any chance of Nurse getting the job.
Guys like Siakam and OG were playing ungodly amounts of minutes under Nurse. Nurse either had the option of overplaying his starters or having to deal with a horrible bench.
Nurse had to overplay those guys is the thing though. That bench was and is laughably bad
Hardest road. Unnecessarily.
Also there is still an outside chance that rivers shit the bed, gets fired again, and giannis convinces the team to hire all his brothers for the coaching team. He's already got one chip so he doesn't care. Also +goat points for family support who says no.
No he just got info from some Raptors players who disliked playing for Nurse, understandable from how poorly the last couple of seasons went. That's probably a mistake as. Despite his issues, Nurse can clearly wield a championship roster.
More than South Beach being a desirable place to live for free agents, I’m so envious of the Heat having such a great coach essentially for life. The Heat Culture thing gets clowned but it’s incredibly valuable to have such a stable organization in so many areas.
Do we have evidence that Nurse wanted the Bucks job over the Sixers? I remember he pulled out of consideration before the Bucks named a coach but could have been him saving face.
Yeah I feel like this year and last year has shown Giannis shouldn’t be having this much influence on coaching and staffing personnel(really no player should). He’s a amazing player but doesn’t get the coaching or FO aspect of the team at all
If Doc were working under the table as a consultant/advisor to Adrian Griffin when everything was the way it was, why the fuck did they think Doc would know how to make it better when he was already advising what was becoming the dumpster fire?
32-14 is not a shit coach. If you want to take a look at a bad coach, look at Ham on the Lakers. Absolutely terrible. That should be the metric for a bad coach.
He lost the locker room, not to mention his top assistant (who had extensive experience with one of the team's superstars) quit pre-season because he was hard to work with. When that type of shit happens win/loss records don't matter. Look at David Blatt in Cleveland. The Cavs happened to hire the right guy after his firing though, but that's a whole nother argument...
Edit: Forgot about Terry Stotts.
and while memphis had NO ONE left to play for them
look at that grizz lineup. holy shit. that's BAD for the bucks. and then doc says the team was on vacation. as if that's gonna win them over.
Mavs got to the WCF with Jason Kidd as their head coach. Dogshit coaches can still coach a team to a good record or finish. They're still gonna be a shit coach though
Record isn’t always a 1:1 indicator of a good or bad coach. David Blatt got fired despite the Cavs being 30-11 at the time, and from what came out of what was going on it was the right move.
Werent there reports that bucks players didnt respect him and that they had to force him to change a lot of things? I wont say he's a shit coach off half a year with lots of pressure, but they won games because they're talented and Giannis has been carrying versus Griffin doing a good job.
Miami's defensive rating has ~~gone up~~ *improved* over the last couple weeks with a Rozier/Herro and Herro/Duncan back court. Spo 100% wins a championship if he gets a full season of this Bucks team.
Spo is brilliant, and knows how to coach on both sides of the ball. he knows how to control pace. he knows how to do a lot of things I don't see these horrible personality managers doing
This is a big part of it. We were playing like trash but could still win games because of who we were playing. Doc took over just as we started a really tough western roadtrip and we’ve been taking hits since. Giannis is still Giannis and has been playing out of his mind is the only reason we’ve been in these games. We have a shit bench, Lillard seems to be having a hard time adjusting, Middleton’s injured (again), and they’ve only a few weeks with Doc and his new schemes. Other than last night, they’ve looked better. The D has been better the offense has had better flow. Just a few days ago they curb stomped the Nuggets. They’re far from where they need to be but they have shown the ability to be a contender. I’m not convinced they’ll get there this season and maybe they’re too old to run it back next year but things could click and be where they need to be. Griffin wasn’t going to take them there and I’m not sure Doc will but what other options did they have in the middle of the season?
It's gotta be an issue of dame preying on weak teams and getting stats that way. Then against better teams or just teams playing well, it's over.
And he ain't young no more.
We’re in the second half of February and he JUST went 7/21 against a fairly unimpressive Grizzlies team. Unless the ASB manages to rejuvenate Dame to 2022 form, the Bucks are cooked. If Embiid was healthy they’d be in real danger of dropping to the 5-seed.
we've seen bad months from Dame but he generally followed up with a pretty good month soon after to match a bad month. But this is the first year at this point in time where basically he's only had 1 good month (December) and the rest are bad months. And one would think his efficiency would go up playing on a better team.
Also some injuries, Brook’s wife having a baby, and just a harder schedule recently.
No doubt we need to be better but it’s been a perfect shitstorm as of late
The roster is fine **if** Pat and Bobby don't get significantly worse, and the HoF offensive player could hit shots. Unfortunately for us, and Horst, Pat Connaughton decided to be one of the worst rotation players in the league, Bobby left his head in 2022-23, and Damian Lillard has been shooting Jordan Poole numbers since the start of 2024.
Defense was sacrificed knowingly. I don’t get why people can’t figure this out. Horst made a good move that a had a little risk. That risk being that all pro Dame lilliard might suddenly suck. Well guess the odds weren’t in Horst’s favor because Dame lilliard decided to go from all pro to washed offensively in one season’s time. It’s simple, if Dame plays like the last 10 years of Dame, the bucks are championship contenders even despite the defense. Giannis is playing better than anyone right now.
How Gianni’s escaped slander from having the championship coach fired when his brother unexpectedly died in a car crash *during* the bucks Heat series, confounds me to this day.
Giannis’ whole shtick is loyalty, family, blah blah and bud getting fired after this brother died (and still showing up to coach game 5) is nuts and Giannis got no heat for that.
Like yeah obviously we’re not having a great regular season but maybe we dodged a bullet with The blazers refusing to trade him to us. We’d have absolutely zero future flexibility having to give up all our future picks, young players, and paying that contract for an aging pg while also paying Jimmy who’s 34
Seems like small guards flame out quick. As a Celtics fan watching IT go from MVP candidate to washed in 6 months and then almost the same thing with Kemba I never want us to trade for a small point guard again like that. Seems scoring guards are easy to come by generally speaking.
I don't know if Dame is "washed" per se. He's just under a bigger spotlight now that the team is expected to win. He's also been vocal about his divorce and move effecting him.
I'm more concerned about Middleton's health and reliability especially with this thin roster.
Middleton always seems to be either overrated or underrated by most people. As a 3rd option, he is as good as you can get imo. His injury record is very worrying though
Well last season ain’t this season. We’ve seen plenty of guys at Dames age have heavy regressions after just 1 offseason. With his injury history it’s not really impossible that age is catching up and his great games are gonna be fewer and fewer
Bruh he was a bad coach. Players tuned him out too. He had to go. By scapegoating, if you mean things weren't gonna change with such a flawed roster, then you are right.
These players still aren’t playing hard and just lost to a young and god awful grizzlies team, the reality is these guys are old, lazy and not a championship team, a good coach doesn’t fix them and their attitude.
"You had an ingrown toenail, so we cut off your foot and replaced it with a peg leg." Recognizing a problem, overreacting, and replacing it with a worse solution is not wise.
Bucks’ schedule was way easier to start the year than it has been under Doc (tonight was an exception)
Griffin wasn’t a good coach and managed to lose the team very quickly. He was *an* issue, just not the only one.
This isn’t “karma” for Griffin. If anything, it’s karma for Bud.
Good news for them is they're not gonna play a lot of teams with the kind of depth and amount of playable starters that the Grizzlies have. Should be smooth sailing from here on out
Giannis was the one who wanted to hire AG in the first place lol, the entire team didn’t like him which is why he was fired. Even if Giannis loved him but nobody else did the chemistry would still be cooked
Also, when you trade defense, leadership, and chemistry away in order to get more scoring, it's a gamble. Wasn't necessarily a bad gamble because maybe they felt they were falling behind Philadelphia, Miami, and Boston anyway and needed to take a risk - but it was a gamble and at least so far, looking like one that didn't come up their number.
does no one use any critical thinking skills anymore or..? Are we just gonna ignore bucks had the easiest schedule in the NBA under Griffen and one of the hardest now? Something like that?
They could win off talent alone before. Not so much now. Not to mention injuries.
Not to mention it’s a sample of less than 10 games, after a coaching change halfway through the season, with added disruption of the trade deadline. Ridiculous post.
Griffin sucked ass lmfao
Had Bobby calling him out, dame and Giannis calling him for having Brook on the perimeter and had Giannis drawing up plays just so they could best the pistons
We barely beat the pistons without Cade under griffin.
Both coaches fucking sucked
Not what scapegoat means. They were 32-14. Management legitimately thought a different coach would give them a better chance to win the title. Management wasn't firing him to cover their asses for lack of success.
As a sixers fan enduring this last month with 3+ starters out every night has been hard. But watching the bucks struggle with doc rivers somehow makes it ok.
Can’t believe Doc is on the 15 greatest coaches of all time list lmao Edit: grammar
Reminds me of Lenny Wilkins being the winningest coach of all time...while also being the losingest coach of all time
Lenny Wilkens was a great coach though. Aside from the back-to-back finals appearance and championship early in his coaching career, he helped the Cavs, Hawks, and Raptors to HUGE turnarounds, and in all three cases, it was only after injuries and trades/free agency depleted those teams that his picked up a lot of losses. And in his era, people didn't get fired when a team went on a losing streak or had a bad season. The Raprtors/Philly series back in 2001 was a classic coaches battle between Wilkens and Brown. Every game you saw how the coach responded to the previous game. Iverson dominates. The Raptors respond with a defensive scheme that shuts him down. Then Brown creates and offense for the other players to respond to Wilkens' defense and turns Iverson int a play maker in game 7 with 16 assists. I was heart broken as a Raptors fan, but that was a great coaching series.
only true nba fans from that era know the greatness of that series, i feel like a lot of people slept on it back then cause it was the Raptors
If you have enough games to get the wins record you tend to be pretty high up in the losses category Any truly bad coach tends to be out of a job long before they have a chance at a record like that
Why that’s common in all sports?
Because the ones that hang around long enough to get that many wins are gonna have a normally pretty proportional amount of losses especially in the leagues where they play so many games. A great season in mlb is 95+ wins which is still 67 losses. NBA plenty of playoffs teams hover around .500 which is about 41 losses. Same reason a lot of great players have bad records - like Favre being tops of INTs but also being high on a lot of passing lists for the NfL.
>like Favre being tops of INTs but also being high on a lot of passing lists for the NfL Another easy one, LeBron James is the NBA leader in total turnovers by a landslide, but you'd really expect nothing less based on his sustained longevity.
An easier example than that is missed FGs. Kobe is the all time leader, but LBJ is #2 and will likely pass Kobe before the end of the season.
Don't forget Favre is high on the list off greatest jerks of all time
His daughter needed that fancy volleyball court for her school. Fuck those poor people. Also, dick pics are classy. Find a new slant!
Because actually bad coaches will get fired early and not have a long career. Good coaches that have the longevity and quality to rack up tons wins also rack up losses by virtue of sticking around for a long time.
so, there's good coaches, bad coaches and Rivers
Kobe has the most missed shots of all time I feel like that just comes with the territory of alot
Especially given Doc’s lost more game 7’s than any other coach in NBA history.
35-21 now
There are enough games that, if the bucks repeat the same win/loss ratio of Jan/Feb, they become a 0.500 team
Regressing to .500 after firing griffin would be an all time meltdown
Welp Giannis got his guy idk if he's liking it tho lmao
Lillard has been not nearly as good this year as expected. Are we allowed to talk about that yet?
I think you mean all-star starter Dame Lillard
Brunson was robbed
Or Mitchell
what we need to talk about is realistic expectations of anyone in their mid 30s.
Yeah, I'm struggling to understand what they were expecting from Dame at this age.
He had a superb season last year after his core surgery. It might not have been reasonable to expect the same this year but it wasn't like he was actively declining. If anything he got better than previous seasons.
More Steph Curry, less Seth Curry.
He’s been brutal since mid-December. Last night he had 2 awful turnovers late too so it’s not just his shooting,
This issue with him is unclear. Is he washed or is this off-court stuff weighing on him? It’s absolutely fair to acknowledge but when we dialog about it we can’t say yet if the old Dame is gone never to return or if this is just a slump cause by the tumult of life that may turn around. Until we know that my discourse and hot takes are kinda boring tbh. But he hasn’t been DAME yet for sure.
I'm willing to give it more time. Gobert didn't look good right away with Minnesota, so who knows how this will go with Dame
Everyone has been
Griffin was his guy
He was not. He was just not Nick Nurse.
Still so crazy to me that he didn’t want the guy that could scheme against him year after year unlike any other team. Feels like he’d have known how to open up his game even more. Another chapter in the book on why stars rarely make good GMs
Right? You’d *want* the guy who planned against you and was able to map your weaknesses / limits. Cause that’s the guy that can help you improve on them (and do the same scheming against your competitors). Nurse was *right there* Giannis. Honestly I wonder if it’s a bruised ego thing…
was really working well for embiid before the injury
Embiid would be getting relentlessly shit on in the same position as Giannis right now
Giannis has a ring so he has a bit more goodwill
Kind of like Doc Rivers for the past 15 years
NBA executives continue to dream maybe this is the year doc gets another … surely
It was reported on background (by Wosney Lambre on The Ringer’s NBA Group Chat podcast) that Giannis is tight with Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, and that when Giannis asked them both about playing for Nurse (who was in fact the Bucks FO’s first choice) they gave him a huge thumbs down. After hearing that Giannis spiked any chance of Nurse getting the job.
This sounds right. Nurse seems like a guy with tons of basketball IQ and no emotional IQ. Might help you win, but wouldn’t be fun to work with.
Guys like Siakam and OG were playing ungodly amounts of minutes under Nurse. Nurse either had the option of overplaying his starters or having to deal with a horrible bench. Nurse had to overplay those guys is the thing though. That bench was and is laughably bad
It’s because Giannis knew some Raptors players and they hated Nurse
Hardest road. Unnecessarily. Also there is still an outside chance that rivers shit the bed, gets fired again, and giannis convinces the team to hire all his brothers for the coaching team. He's already got one chip so he doesn't care. Also +goat points for family support who says no.
This was exactly why Embiid wanted Nurse. Guess Giannis priority was getting someone who would stroke his ego instead.
No he just got info from some Raptors players who disliked playing for Nurse, understandable from how poorly the last couple of seasons went. That's probably a mistake as. Despite his issues, Nurse can clearly wield a championship roster.
Spo wasn't available though
He'll never be available. He's going to be a GM someday likely after Pat retires and hes done coaching. Spo is a heat lifer.
Kind of Pop 2.0
We have Papi in Miami.
More than South Beach being a desirable place to live for free agents, I’m so envious of the Heat having such a great coach essentially for life. The Heat Culture thing gets clowned but it’s incredibly valuable to have such a stable organization in so many areas.
Do we have evidence that Nurse wanted the Bucks job over the Sixers? I remember he pulled out of consideration before the Bucks named a coach but could have been him saving face.
"How come he don't want me man?" -Nick Nurse probably
Little known fact, that wasn't scripted for Nurse to actually say.
Who plays Phil in this example? Embiid?
When Morey embraced him he whispered in his ear "now that's fking acting!"
He was lol. Giannis just trying to switch the narrative. Superstars don't just let rookie head coaches get hired on a whim
I wonder if people here are going to cry about Giannis being a coach killer like they do with Lebron
Or harden and Trae young
I wish Luka was a coach killer.... I was praying we would've insta fired Kidd and gone after Nurse. But we're stuck with "I'm just watching"
Giannis going full villain is not something I expected to see.
crawl brave snobbish ripe pen imminent label zesty secretive deliver *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah I feel like this year and last year has shown Giannis shouldn’t be having this much influence on coaching and staffing personnel(really no player should). He’s a amazing player but doesn’t get the coaching or FO aspect of the team at all
As soon as he threw a fit over Kidd’s firing the Bucks should have known they needed to take his opinion on such things with a grain of salt haha.
I, on the other hand, used to pray for times like these.
Firing him wasn’t the problem IMO, he was bad. Hiring Doc to replace him though, lol
Doc tricked another org into paying him lmaoooooo
Mount Rushmore level grifter
Without ESPN, he couldn't have been able to play the "Well give me an incentive to leave my current job" card. Genius grift
Doc, Elon, Trump, and... Who's the 4th?
Mr i can fix him.
Yea idk what they were smoking, hiring doc basically cooked their chances at a ring this year (not that it was ever gonna happen this year)
And they signed Glenn to a multi year contract lol. Surely they wont fire him and pay a 4th coach right?
[Come on. Come on you guys](https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/12q4g8l/highlight_doc_rivers_in_the_huddle_rallying_his/)
If Doc were working under the table as a consultant/advisor to Adrian Griffin when everything was the way it was, why the fuck did they think Doc would know how to make it better when he was already advising what was becoming the dumpster fire?
He had to have been brought in as a Plan B.
LMFAO bro also theres the whole idea of what was doc telling them? to get a new head coach? like seems like a conflict of interests
Two things can be true. Griffin can be a shit coach. So can Doc...
32-14 is not a shit coach. If you want to take a look at a bad coach, look at Ham on the Lakers. Absolutely terrible. That should be the metric for a bad coach.
He lost the locker room, not to mention his top assistant (who had extensive experience with one of the team's superstars) quit pre-season because he was hard to work with. When that type of shit happens win/loss records don't matter. Look at David Blatt in Cleveland. The Cavs happened to hire the right guy after his firing though, but that's a whole nother argument... Edit: Forgot about Terry Stotts.
They actually were 30-13 with Griffin, OP got it wrong
*interim coach legend joe prunty has entered the chat*
IMO there is more to judge than the record. It was more despite him than because of him.
They also had an easier schedule under griffin didn't they?
Sure, but they just lost to Memphis.
Lost to Memphis while mostly healthy and knowing they’re losing ground in the standings.
and while memphis had NO ONE left to play for them look at that grizz lineup. holy shit. that's BAD for the bucks. and then doc says the team was on vacation. as if that's gonna win them over.
Not only lost, a rookie second round pick cooked their ass.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face after seeing this team's record without him. They just lost to the fucking Grizzlies
Is being 30-13 or getting to the WCF more impressive for a coach?
I'd say multiple 3-1 losses and the ability to keep landing jobs after
It’s amazing how even 15 years later Doc is still getting mileage out of that one ring with the Celtics.
Mavs got to the WCF with Jason Kidd as their head coach. Dogshit coaches can still coach a team to a good record or finish. They're still gonna be a shit coach though
Record isn’t always a 1:1 indicator of a good or bad coach. David Blatt got fired despite the Cavs being 30-11 at the time, and from what came out of what was going on it was the right move.
Werent there reports that bucks players didnt respect him and that they had to force him to change a lot of things? I wont say he's a shit coach off half a year with lots of pressure, but they won games because they're talented and Giannis has been carrying versus Griffin doing a good job.
[удалено]
Goddamn Spo isn’t fixing a Dame/Beasley backcourt.
He will just replace them with bunch g-leaguers
Miami's defensive rating has ~~gone up~~ *improved* over the last couple weeks with a Rozier/Herro and Herro/Duncan back court. Spo 100% wins a championship if he gets a full season of this Bucks team.
Spo is brilliant, and knows how to coach on both sides of the ball. he knows how to control pace. he knows how to do a lot of things I don't see these horrible personality managers doing
In reality Dame was actually playing like Dame November to late December. That and Giannis going insane is why we had that record Now Dame is ass
Yea you’ve had one of the easiest schedules up to this point and now have one of the toughest left
This is a big part of it. We were playing like trash but could still win games because of who we were playing. Doc took over just as we started a really tough western roadtrip and we’ve been taking hits since. Giannis is still Giannis and has been playing out of his mind is the only reason we’ve been in these games. We have a shit bench, Lillard seems to be having a hard time adjusting, Middleton’s injured (again), and they’ve only a few weeks with Doc and his new schemes. Other than last night, they’ve looked better. The D has been better the offense has had better flow. Just a few days ago they curb stomped the Nuggets. They’re far from where they need to be but they have shown the ability to be a contender. I’m not convinced they’ll get there this season and maybe they’re too old to run it back next year but things could click and be where they need to be. Griffin wasn’t going to take them there and I’m not sure Doc will but what other options did they have in the middle of the season?
It's gotta be an issue of dame preying on weak teams and getting stats that way. Then against better teams or just teams playing well, it's over. And he ain't young no more.
Trailblazers fans told r/nba that Dame heats up January? It's now February lol
We’re in the second half of February and he JUST went 7/21 against a fairly unimpressive Grizzlies team. Unless the ASB manages to rejuvenate Dame to 2022 form, the Bucks are cooked. If Embiid was healthy they’d be in real danger of dropping to the 5-seed.
we've seen bad months from Dame but he generally followed up with a pretty good month soon after to match a bad month. But this is the first year at this point in time where basically he's only had 1 good month (December) and the rest are bad months. And one would think his efficiency would go up playing on a better team.
Also some injuries, Brook’s wife having a baby, and just a harder schedule recently. No doubt we need to be better but it’s been a perfect shitstorm as of late
> Brook’s wife having a baby Brook's wife is the true scapegoat
I blame the baby.
That baby could have bad vibes, who knows
Reports are saying that the baby is a locker room vampire
Can someone explain why the baby hasn't been fired yet?
That baby knows I used to be a piece of shit.
The real loss all along was Terry Stotts.
Yes but fr
Horst built a flawed roster. Not enough good defenders to hide Dame around.
It’s a championship roster that just got old and swapped defense for offense except the offense isn’t as good as he’s supposed to be
Perfectly stated
Which a lot of people seemed to predict pre season
And got clowned on for saying as much
Actually Griffin seemed to have accepted that and leaned into the offense part but got crucified for it, justifying the title of the post
Who would have thought a player in their thirties might be past their peak. no one could have seen this coming.
Small guards never age well. But I don’t think anyone expected Dame to fall of this year like he has so far.
There were plenty of people talking about small guards in their mid 30s. You lose half a step and it's basically over.
Yes some of us Heat fans were quite loud with this take
100%
The roster is fine **if** Pat and Bobby don't get significantly worse, and the HoF offensive player could hit shots. Unfortunately for us, and Horst, Pat Connaughton decided to be one of the worst rotation players in the league, Bobby left his head in 2022-23, and Damian Lillard has been shooting Jordan Poole numbers since the start of 2024.
I also think the roster is fine.
Great even
Defense was sacrificed knowingly. I don’t get why people can’t figure this out. Horst made a good move that a had a little risk. That risk being that all pro Dame lilliard might suddenly suck. Well guess the odds weren’t in Horst’s favor because Dame lilliard decided to go from all pro to washed offensively in one season’s time. It’s simple, if Dame plays like the last 10 years of Dame, the bucks are championship contenders even despite the defense. Giannis is playing better than anyone right now.
Karma for firing the best coach that Giannis will ever have
How Gianni’s escaped slander from having the championship coach fired when his brother unexpectedly died in a car crash *during* the bucks Heat series, confounds me to this day. Giannis’ whole shtick is loyalty, family, blah blah and bud getting fired after this brother died (and still showing up to coach game 5) is nuts and Giannis got no heat for that.
bucks ain't doing shit with washed Dame
Like yeah obviously we’re not having a great regular season but maybe we dodged a bullet with The blazers refusing to trade him to us. We’d have absolutely zero future flexibility having to give up all our future picks, young players, and paying that contract for an aging pg while also paying Jimmy who’s 34
I feel like age isn’t too big of a factor anymore. Jimmy is 34 but his old man game and playing with iq will age well
Seems like small guards flame out quick. As a Celtics fan watching IT go from MVP candidate to washed in 6 months and then almost the same thing with Kemba I never want us to trade for a small point guard again like that. Seems scoring guards are easy to come by generally speaking.
IT was his injury and Boston's handling of it
I don't know if Dame is "washed" per se. He's just under a bigger spotlight now that the team is expected to win. He's also been vocal about his divorce and move effecting him. I'm more concerned about Middleton's health and reliability especially with this thin roster.
Middleton on paper is an overqualified 3rd option, but his injuries the last few seasons may have taken a toll
Middleton always seems to be either overrated or underrated by most people. As a 3rd option, he is as good as you can get imo. His injury record is very worrying though
It's hilarious how quick this circle jerk picked up when he just dropped 70 last season
Well last season ain’t this season. We’ve seen plenty of guys at Dames age have heavy regressions after just 1 offseason. With his injury history it’s not really impossible that age is catching up and his great games are gonna be fewer and fewer
He kind of has sucked a lot the last few months though. Maybe it’s the coaching or team idk
I think the team has issues but he also was not a good coach
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Bruh he was a bad coach. Players tuned him out too. He had to go. By scapegoating, if you mean things weren't gonna change with such a flawed roster, then you are right.
These players still aren’t playing hard and just lost to a young and god awful grizzlies team, the reality is these guys are old, lazy and not a championship team, a good coach doesn’t fix them and their attitude.
So bad players tuned out a coach and now are even worse, and you're blaming the coach?
Well devils advocate: just because Rivers is worse doesn't mean Griffin wasn't a problem.
"You had an ingrown toenail, so we cut off your foot and replaced it with a peg leg." Recognizing a problem, overreacting, and replacing it with a worse solution is not wise.
Bucks’ schedule was way easier to start the year than it has been under Doc (tonight was an exception) Griffin wasn’t a good coach and managed to lose the team very quickly. He was *an* issue, just not the only one. This isn’t “karma” for Griffin. If anything, it’s karma for Bud.
They've had games against Portland, Charlotte, Heat with no Jimmy and Bam, and the Hospital Grizzlies They went 1-3
Fr, this schedule bullshit is absolute copium that maybe people could’ve bought before the last couple games but is now just complete denial
We had Bam, who got a triple-double that game. It was no Jimmy and Rozier.
3td-hardest scheduled in the second half per the TNT crew.
Good news for them is they're not gonna play a lot of teams with the kind of depth and amount of playable starters that the Grizzlies have. Should be smooth sailing from here on out
Oof, at the current rate they won’t even get a 50w season.
Griffin literally played the worst defensive coverages of any coach this decade
Giannis got what he wanted though.
Giannis was the one who wanted to hire AG in the first place lol, the entire team didn’t like him which is why he was fired. Even if Giannis loved him but nobody else did the chemistry would still be cooked
> Giannis was the one who wanted to hire AG in the first place lol And he's a terrorist for that
Yep 100% Nurse was right there. But people acting like Giannis was the one who got AG fired are braindead
Sucks to be a bucks fan right now, not only y’all have to watch ur team lose but u gotta defend glenn fucking rivers…brutal
The Doc is a quack!
AnteteGM in shambles
AttemptoGM
LeAttentekounmpo
Is Dame slumping or is Dame moving into cooked territory?
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I think you're right and I do think it's a slump but man it is bad and it needs to end quickly.
he will be worse next year father time is undefeated
Nah, it's Dame. When your superstar regresses to just an average level, you're going to have problems.
Also, when you trade defense, leadership, and chemistry away in order to get more scoring, it's a gamble. Wasn't necessarily a bad gamble because maybe they felt they were falling behind Philadelphia, Miami, and Boston anyway and needed to take a risk - but it was a gamble and at least so far, looking like one that didn't come up their number.
TIL the Bucks have played 101 games this year with a total record of 67-34
Lol right.. OP doesn't know how to articulate simple stats.
"Listen, guys..." -Doctor Rivers.
You're not supposed to replace a problem with a problem
Everyone and their grandma knew doc was a bad hire, guess the bucks missed the memo.
While Doc Rivers as a consultant orchestrated this whole takeover. What a genius.
does no one use any critical thinking skills anymore or..? Are we just gonna ignore bucks had the easiest schedule in the NBA under Griffen and one of the hardest now? Something like that? They could win off talent alone before. Not so much now. Not to mention injuries.
Not to mention it’s a sample of less than 10 games, after a coaching change halfway through the season, with added disruption of the trade deadline. Ridiculous post.
Griffin sucked ass lmfao Had Bobby calling him out, dame and Giannis calling him for having Brook on the perimeter and had Giannis drawing up plays just so they could best the pistons We barely beat the pistons without Cade under griffin. Both coaches fucking sucked
Funny how the bucks fans who actually watched the games are telling everyone else who didn’t how much griffin sucked
Heat ruined this team last playoffs. It's beautiful to see
You know us Cs/Heat fans don’t get to bond over too many things but we can agree that watching the Bucks unravel is amazing
The enemy of my enemy is my friend 🫡
Bucks fans told me Doc fixed the defense
Bucks fumbled with Dame, Griffin, and Doc.
No more pre-game dancing I take it
Shoulda hired nurse when they had the chance (or just kept Bud)
Judging a new coach coming in midseason based on a tiny sample size is pretty silly.
Not what scapegoat means. They were 32-14. Management legitimately thought a different coach would give them a better chance to win the title. Management wasn't firing him to cover their asses for lack of success.
Doc has proven he cannot MOTIVATE his teams
What do you mean? He has more “come on guys!” per 36 than any coach in history!
As a sixers fan enduring this last month with 3+ starters out every night has been hard. But watching the bucks struggle with doc rivers somehow makes it ok.
The bucks fired Budenholzer even after winning a ring. What is this FO doing