Re: coaches

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

> Mark Berry wrote:
> > [Pitino] is one of the top 5 basketball coaches in the world, and that's a
> > conservative estimate...  
> 
> And who might they be? Rabid UK fans? (Riley is a UK grad, btw.) I'll grant
> that he's a successful college coach, but even if we limit it to NCAA, it's
> difficult to see how he could crack top 5. 

I believe that Larry Bird was quoted as saying Riley and Pitino were his
top two. Jerry West tried to hire Pitino for the Lakers. I'd say these
two know a bit about basketball. He hasn't proven anything at the pro 
level yet, but at the college level, it's hard to find anyone who has 
gotten faster results in rebuilding situations than Pitino. 

> In other words, he already had at least a
> 36-win team when he took the job. The fact that he promptly dumped 4 of the
> 5 starters (Wesley/Fox/Williams/Radja), and then had to scramble to get 36
> wins does not make his actions miraculous, but stupid and unnecesssary.  

You keep Radja and Williams and sign Wesley and Fox to contracts and you
have no salary cap room and no room for improvement for the next few years.
What is Williams doing now? He's getting paid $5M a year to come off the
bench for Denver, of all teams. If Radja was valuable, why didn't the Sixers
want him, or any other NBA team that could have claimed him off waivers?
Why did Paul Silas say, "This team needs a point guard" even though he 
had Wesley? Do you seriously believe that keeping these guys would leave
the Celtics with any chance to be more than a .500 team for the foreseeable
future? 
 
> As for GM duties, we hardly even need to blame someone else for M.L.'s bad
> signings to make him at least comparable to Pitino - after all, M.L. made
> the brilliant trade that gave us Walker and Mercer (NB!). If you think the
> Ellison signing was bad (2 mil/yr), what about the Popeye signing (2.67
> mil/yr)? At least Ellison was a Grade-A NBA talent, the #1 pick, a 20/10 guy
> when healthy, and a shot-blocker to boot. The point is, both signings made
> sense at the time. You say the Minor or Barros signings were bad? Well,
> Minor's 2.6 mil/yr, and Barros' 3.67  mil/yr look like a bargain compared to
> McCarty's 2.67 mil/yr, given their respective performances. And having Marty
> Conlon, or even Szabo to round out the bench made a lot more sense than
> getting the likes of Garnett and Schintzius. 

You are guilty of the same thing: comparing Pitino's bad signing of McCarty
to ML Carr's signings, and then spinning Ellison as a Grade-A NBA talent.
Your description of Ellison could be used for Tim Duncan. But how about 
the Travis Knight signing, who got us Battie, or DeClercq, who helped us get
Potapenko? Minor, Barros, and Ellison were completely unmovable so evidently
no other NBA team considered them to be good signings. And you are saying
that Popeye and McCarty's three-year contracts are already terrible without
seeing them for more than a season (lockout shortened to boot). They can
still redeem themselves in the next two years. 

Alex