re: Stan Van Gundy

People are just mad at the results, and I get it, we're fans, that's how we work. But listening to Stan's comments last night and today, I don't see what people think he is doing that's so wrong. He was brought in here to get these guys to play defense and that is 100% what he's focused on doing. Here are a few quotes from today:

quote:

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At the defensive end of the floor we've got to get our aggression back, we've got to get tougher. We've had stretches in those games where we defended pretty well, and a lot of times you defend well and the other team still scores and we have tended to drop our heads a little bit, get frustrated and discouraged instead of fighting through it, and that's something that we talked about today also.

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When asked if there were any things he saw on film that they could fix immediately.

quote:

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There's a lot of things if we would do it immediately, Will, we would get better defensively, but it usually is not an overnight thing when you're struggling, and it will take some time and it's about habit building and our habits have slipped since the early part of the season...we've got to find a way to get our habits back, but really to get our defensive disposition back, where we play harder, where we're into people more, putting pressure on people, where we're closing out harder, where everything is just done at a higher level and we've let it slip and we need to go to work to build better habits. You don't build a habit in one game or one practice or overnight, it's day after day after day after day.

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I'm not sure what people expect coaches to do. Thibs failure in Minnesota was an eye opening example of how little impact a coach has if even just a handful of your key players don't want to play defense. Thibs eventually had half the team stacked with former Bulls and they still couldn't build a good defense.

Building a defense is going to be a long process. Even if we had hired an up and coming assistant it would be the same long hard road.

Yeah, it's frustrating, but the team is never going to win a title unless BI and Zion can learn to play better defense. It's the key for NAW and Jaxson as well, whether they stay with us or ultimately get traded.

This team sucks and I blame Griffin 1st.
SVG sucks but shouldn't have been hired.
But our roster is trash.

I mean Griff is ultimately the final decision maker on any roster move and Griff is the final word on any hire.

I’m not ready to write SVG off, but this game is the first truly troubling thing I’ve seen. There is a lack of clean execution at pretty much every level and facet and it goes beyond just shitty circumstance.

I said at the beginning of the season but this sort of moment is gonna make or break this team. It’s all nice to talk up a tough coach and say you have bought in when you aren’t losing games, but the coming weeks will say a lot of about whether SVG can be our coach or whether these players want to actually be coached by him.