Re: The man in the middle

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

    Thanks Roy for that post on Blount. Since the coaching change, Mark Blount
has attested to his defensive impact with three-blocked-shot games on six
occasions. He is averaging an even 2.0 blocks during the 10-5 run, in fairly
limited minutes.

    As a caveat, Tony Battie was also averaging over 1.9 blocks this season
for Pitino, and Obie has not profited from this at all. Once he gets Battie
back, I hope we can find a way to keep our best defenders in there together.

    In addition to Blount, I think there are a lot of other MVPs behind our
defensive turnaround, with Eric Williams (a guy I've love to bash) standing
out the most. Fellow veterans Brown and Stith stand out. Also Miracle Milt is
nearly as much of a new regime debuttante as Blount.

    But it boils down to toughness. Last night, the most dangerous, talented
team in the East showed up, held our team to 34.5% shooting, dominated the
boards 62-46, outscored our bench 34-10, and saw "Jesus Shuttlesworth" record
his first career triple-double of all things against us. Yet who came out on
top? Celtics Pride, baby.

    This was the kind of ugly, playoff-type win that the Celts needed to prove
themselves in. Our captains are far more valuable this season than a lot of
NBA Allstars. They are young and we are going to be a good team down the road.
All season, we've had these routine combined 60 point performances from them,
yet the team would get betrayed by the worst defensive system in the league.
I'm someone who always believed that our players were more talented than the
system they played in, and based on talent predicted between 50 and 46 wins in
our annual preseason polls before this season. Yet even I didn't know how
dramatically better our players could be under a different coach.

    John Wooden is probably most famous for his comment that the definition of
a "great coach" is someone who doesn't have to speak a word once a game
starts, because all the teaching, criticizing and scouting is better done in
practice. In other words let the players play, once the game starts. Someone
pointed out that Obie shouts a lot during games and I have no reason to doubt
this is true. So did Red and Heinsohn. But while maybe these guys might be
lumped together with Pitino as "old school" coaches,  I truly think there is a
major difference between shouting at the refs to take heat of your players
(like both Heinsohn and Red) as well as calling out certain alignments and
plays for the team as a whole, as compared to the stream-of-consciousness,
love-the-sound-of-my-voice, non-stop approach of Pitino yapdog, wherby you run
the risk of unnecessarily singling out and distracting individual players from
doing their job, honing their own court sense, and communicating/building
chemistry with their teammates etc. Is this too stark a caricature of Pitino?
Probably so, but you can't argue that Pitino and his own ingenious system
basically needed to be the center of attention, even once a game started and
it was time for the players to go out and play.

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