bench

[Kim Malo]

At 08:46 AM 5/1/2008, steve knight wrote:
>agree as well on the need to use the bench more. keeps the starters 
>fresh and is a rejunvenating factor for the whole team. no excuse 
>for tony allen not playing. or house. none.

Then you apparently didn't watch the last month or two of the season, 
because Tony thoroughly earned his seat on the bench despite their 
going out of their way to give him opportunity after opportunity. He 
wasn't even just reliably bad, he was inconsistently bad so that you 
didn't even know for sure what he was going to do from game to game 
to allow for it - and if the turnovers on offense weren't bad enough 
it had started to edge into his defense, which is the main reason to 
play him, probably because of his emotional state, where he was out 
of place and getting fooled by guys who shouldn't have been able to.

I'd have tried him on JJ down in Atlanta, myself, since he was 
probably not going to be able to make us much worse on either end and 
it's possible that totally out of control Tony could disrupt him even 
if we didn't have effective Tony to do so. But that's all it would 
have been - a short leashed attempt to see if throwing the changeup 
could fool them (and don't forget that Tony's been bad enough that it 
has to have been showing in practice too, which Doc sees and we don't).

Kim