TA

[Kim Malo]

At 09:21 AM 5/2/2008, steve knight wrote:
>since i started the TA thread, i suppose i should jump in and put 
>another 2 cents in.
>
>TA should be getting some minutes, warts and all. we are a better 
>team when the bench is playing, engaged and contributing. that 
>includes tony. i don't expect everyone to see the same value in any 
>of the players, but if we were benching people because they have 
>lots of warts, we'd be mighty damn thin. i know tony can be a 
>knucklehead and he doesn't have much confidence right now, but we 
>will need him as we advance to spell ray allen and paul on the 
>league's best 2 and 3 scorers, and we'll need him to be confident 
>when he does comes in. he can't get there if he doesn't play. you 
>could say the same thing about davis, house, cassell and powe--they 
>need the confidence to compete at a high level. that only comes from 
>playing and contributing. i hesitate to throw this comparison out 
>because so many people think scal is useless anyway, but he's 
>exhibit A. he's gone from a somewhat useful rotation guy to someone 
>who would have trouble keeping up in the ndbl
>  playoffs, all because his confidence is shot from not playing. i'm 
> not saying he should be out there, just that confidence is such a 
> huge deal for athletes in any sport. i see one of doc's primary 
> jobs right now to keep the team's confidence up. that includes the bench.

You know what, this is getting very old. Very, very old. Again, none 
of that has anything to do with what I actually said. I didn't talk 
about Tony's wart's in general or whether other people like him more 
than I do or whatever.

I spoke very very very specifically about what had happened when they 
did give him minutes at the end of the season, trying specifically to 
get him ready for the playoffs.  They gave him a lot of chances to 
get some playing time  - obviously because they know the positives he 
can offer and they wanted him to succeed and be able to help them and 
he is someone who seems to need minutes to play well -  and he played 
very, very badly, even regressing rather than getting better with 
more minutes (disproving the contention that the answer is just throw 
more minutes at him), thoroughly earning his solid spot on the 
bench.  And not only very badly but unreliably badly so you didn't 
know what he was going to fail at from game to game so you could 
allow for it to try to get whatever benefit was still there (and 
that's the real problem - he wasn't helping anyone, no matter how 
many minutes they gave him) to offset it.

Is this clear enough - I'm saying that he played badly THEN when they 
were trying to help him earn minutes and badly for what they know 
Tony can bring NOT  badly because he's not 20 other players that he's 
not. That is the old Pitino argument that we boo'd his teams just 
because they weren't Bird and McHale, not because they were bad on 
their own merits. It's pretty patronizing and insulting because it's 
saying that the critic isn't capable of judging for themselves and 
that they're only speaking out of bias.

Are you going to apply the same standards to list whipping boy Scal 
and say that they need to keep throwing him out for all the above 
reasons until he turns into a redheaded Dwight Howard up front? Yeah 
I didn't think so.

Look, I said I would have tried Tony. On a very short leash but I 
would have tried him. I'm not biased against Tony, I'm not saying 
he's garbage and always has been,  etc etc etc etc ad nauseum. I was 
merely addressing the claim that there was no excuse whatsoever for 
not playing him NOW.  Well there wasn't an excuse, there was a pretty 
legit reason instead and Tony supplied it himself. Based on his play 
the last month or two when given minutes there was absolutely no 
reason to think anything positive was going to happen from playing 
him ****OR**** that just giving him minutes was going to solve 
anything, because it hadn't during the season when we had a lot more 
margin for error while waiting for it to happen. And in fact what had 
happened when he played were a lot of negatives that were more likely 
to make things worse for us.

Kim