Mike D'Antoni Discussion: post in 7 seconds or less

They= them there who did that there with that thing at that time that it was needed.

Looks like he's saying that the Cavs, Hornets and Wizards have been more competitive at home as of late, so losing in their building isn't quite as pathetic as people think.

Lakers get everyone's A-game. Wins are harder for that reason. But the lack of defensive effort is inexcusable. But professional players, especially professional role players, should be expected to bring the defensive effort every night. They're role players, so they shouldn't expect to be featured in the offense. They should expect that Kobe, one of the greatest players of all time, will get most of the shots while they do the dirty work. I think that Kobe suffers from the bad image he has in the media, where he's portrayed as selfish. This causes his teammates to get upset over his dominance of the offense, at what they perceive as their expense, when really they should be happy to be playing with him. MJ's teammates didn't demand more shots, and neither do LeBron's.

I haven't posted much in Antoni thread but wow does this guy not give a rats arse bout Defense.....Meeks is getting abused every SINGLE possesion but because of his "floor spacing" he gets to play regardless all the meanwhile he can't hit a shot to save his life either

Earl Clark wasn't any better IMO we gave up 37 points with Clark in the game in 1st Quarter, end of the 1st Q Derozan blew right by him for a layup. Sadly Meeks got abused I dont think it would've been any different with Clark in there

Serious wtf is he thinking keeping Meeks in there when he's not contributing anything on offense. Was an absolute defensive liability. And even if you insist on keeping him in there, ever heard of offensive/defensive subsitutions when there's a dead ball?

his refusal to make adjustments in OT was a little alarming.

khmrP wrote:I haven't posted much in Antoni thread but wow does this guy not give a rats arse bout Defense.....Meeks is getting abused every SINGLE possesion but because of his "floor spacing" he gets to play regardless all the meanwhile he can't hit a shot to save his life either

Truly he does not . . . Mike Antoni no D for good reason. The last few games they have looked EVERY BIT the Mike Antoni team. Trying to simply outscore the opponent. Complete lack of defensive cohesion and concept. It's horrible to watch.

playing meeks almost cost us the game. and it wouldve if gay wasnt absolutely sucking the entire game.

What a worthless coach. Absolute garbage.

That was horrible coaching... D'Antoni & Meeks both owe Kobe their jobs

Considering he's just gonna let Kobe (and Nash) do their thing, what was the point of hiring this guy and basically sacrificing any hope of seeing any effective defensive strategy.....or rather any defensive strategy at all.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if his defensive coaching begins and ends with him telling the players "we gotta get stops!".

lakersyunowin wrote:his refusal to make adjustments in OT was a little alarming.

I've seen games this year where he didn't make in-game adjustments. It's not surprising...

https://twitter.com/forumbluegold/status/310302089379205121

For all the grief MDA gets, he rode his hot lineup tonight to a win. 19 minutes of Nash/Meeks/Kobe/Ron/Dwight: OEff of 120.4, DEff of 101.2

https://twitter.com/forumbluegold/status/310305282804809729

Getting a lot of "Meeks was bad on D comments". Okay. Lineup w/ Clark instead of Meeks played 10 minutes: DEff of 133.3. Just saying.

9 out of 10 times I'd prefer Clark over Meeks on D but not tonight, Earl had nothing going for him so good on MDA to stick with that lineup

I'm actually liking what I've been seeing from D'Antoni. I still don't hate the hiring, nobody ever questioned his genius and understanding of the game.

Useless coach ... "fortunately" the roster is flawed so he isn't wasting a real shot at a title

He is a truly good offensive coach. But sometimes I believe he's delusional when it comes to defense. I think he believes that defense is not important when the offense is really clicking. Whenever his Suns teams would lose a playoff game, he would say that they lost because they didn't play well. It was that same belief that if they ran their offense and hit their shots, it didn't matter what they did on defense. I don't have any other explanation for why he ignored the Meeks mismatch on defense, especially since he wasn't even hot offensively. It's like he was ignoring defense and just focusing on his offensive schemes. He didn't even sub out for offense versus defense, which would have saved those few times that Meeks was scored on. He literally ignored, or at least doesn't see, the defensive side.

i had my back to the TV doing highlights and i heard his postgame interview. i heard "theyre a good nba team" referring to the raptros and wasnt sure if he was serious. then he finished the sentence with "they have good offensive players." so a team thats 15 games under .500 is a good nba team because they have good offensive players.

Tobias Funke wrote:They = Cavs, Hornets, Wizards

This.
I think it did make sense lol

"Because of the way they (the Cavs, Hornets and Wizards) have been playing at home of late, losses on the road against teams like the Wizards, the Hornets or the Cavs shouldn't really be considered baaad losses, and I agree."

No?

MDA seriously needs to address these glaring defensive issues!
We're not even playing elite teams and our D is getting picked apart (except for a few stretches where everyone was playing "balls to the wall" and Dwight looked like pre-injury Dwight).

Set any type of screen against any of our perimeter players, and we're in DEEP trouble.

Run after every miss / turnover / even made shots, and you'll probably score. Our transition D is so bad Derek Fisher scored on us a couple of nights ago..

Even if you miss, because of our s****y rotations, you'll have a good chance to get the board. Most of the times, Dwight is the one causing the misses near the rim, but we still haven't really found a way to fix the whole "help the helper" issue in that scenario. A lot of times the opposition is getting second chance points.


We need STRATEGY. We need schemes, a system, something. It can't all rely on just "trying really hard".
It doesn't strike me as guys have really been focusing on these GLARING issues. Pick and roll D tonight for the most part was just as weak as it was against OKC and NO.
We are showing little improvement from a systematic / strategic standpoint on D. Our improvement has a lot more to do with better on-court chemistry between our players, better effort.

On offense it really doesn't take a "genius" to do what he has the guys doing. So if he's not working out our defensive issues, and on O he just has Kobe activate GOD-mode, Nash hit clutch 3s, Howard get lobs from simple Kobe pick and rolls, then why is he hired? Anyone can run that. It's riding your talent, basically.
He's coaching ala Scott Brooks, only we're much, much more desesperate than OKC.

I thought he should have played Blake more when Meeks was struggling.. At least you'll get consistent defense & decision making.

I guess I can dream, but it would be nice if we could find a poor man's Thibs on one of these top defensive teams and throw some money at him to come in and actually get the team to play some defense, even if it means letting go of one or two of our current assistants coaches.

Take the Wizards for example, you could probably count on one hand the amount of teams that are worse than them overall this season, and yet they are legitimately one of the top defensive teams in the league, after being among the worst in the league last season (as most would expect). They did bring in an assistant coach that spent quite a few seasons working with Pop in San Antonio, and I cant help but wonder how much that hire has to do with their improvement on defense.

Thats what Id like to see with the Lakers.

This is the problem with Antoni's 8 man rotation. We DO have a capable defender sitting on the bench who would have done a much better job on Anderson than Meeks. His name is Ebanks.

Antoni's philosophy is.... it's ok if they score because we can score too. While true, the opposite is also true, if we stop them from scoring, it's ok if we don't score.

Problem is, we have the Mamba and Nash and D12. Our problem wasn't scoring.......

lakersin4 wrote:I thought he should have played Blake more when Meeks was struggling.. At least you'll get consistent defense & decision making.

Blake was getting lite up by the midget John Lucas III, just saying.