Final thoughts on Pitino

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

At the end of the Pitino era, the team was really beginning to deteriorate,
and he did the right thing by stepping down. He deserves credit for
abandoning the remainder of his contract. He was impossible to fire so he
had all the leverage in this situation, but he stuck to his word. In
addition, I respect the fact that he didn't try to trade his way out of the
problem. He surely had the opportunity to make a short term improvement to
the team by trading away future first round draft picks, but he didn't.

He clearly failed in his mission and has stated that without any ambiguity.
I don't really understand how people are still criticizing him for
"spinning" things. The guy quit and left $25M on the table because he
wasn't getting the job done. I've also read, and heard on talk radio,
people criticizing him for wimping out and quitting on the team. These guys
are huge hypocrites. They've been hounding him to leave for years and when
he does, they have to try to get a few more parting shots in.

I've been hearing how Pitino was both the worst GM in the league and the
worst coach. Surprisingly enough, we didn't have the worst team in the
league given this combination. My feeling is that he missed some major
opportunities as a GM (McGrady, Marion) and added some poor pieces
(Anderson, Potapenko). On the other hand, he did pretty well to get Battie
and got pretty decent value out of Mercer -- better than any of the other
teams that had him, in any case. Overall, below average, but nothing
amazingly bad on the order of trading Webber for Richmond, or Eddie Jones
and Elden Campbell for Glen Rice and then Horace Grant, for instance.
Missing on McGrady hurts but so did about five other teams.

As far as coaching, he never got the team to execute on offense (passing)
or defense. On the offensive end, the major problem was that he could never
get Antoine Walker to consistently buy into playing team ball. I don't know
about the idea of discipline that some people have. I'm not aware of any
success story where the coach got through to his star player through
suspensions, benchings, or whatever. You hear about how Iverson would skip
practices, and Larry Brown would always complain to the media and threaten,
but Iverson would be out there 40 minutes per game. Or now, how Phil
Jackson wants the ball to go through Shaq, but Kobe has decided that Kobe
goes first, and not the team. Another example is how Paul Westphal
suspended Payton, lifted it, and then got fired shortly afterwards. I don't
think you can't discipline people into buying into what you want them to
do, especially when they're more powerful than you. But in any case, this
was a failure that Pitino had.

On defense, I guess I don't know exactly what the problem was. My
impression was that he didn't get the right players to be a good defensive
team. During his show, he stated that his philosophy was to acquire good
offensive players and teach them to play defense, and he compared that to
Larry Brown's opposite approach. Obviously Larry Brown was smarter. I still
don't believe that this group is going to be any good at defense any time
soon, regardless of what system is used. Even so, I don't think they
executed as well as they should have, and the blame lies on the coach again.

Rather than say "Pitino the GM failed Pitino the coach", I would say that
Pitino the GM and Pitino the coach somehow didn't work together very well.
I look at Larry Brown's personnel moves in Philly and they're hit and miss
in terms of success rate, but almost every move has been consistent with
his vision for what he wants to accomplish as a coach. Pitino, on the other
hand, didn't seem to have a very clear vision, and the overall effect of
his moves were less than the sum of the individual parts, in a sense.

Alex