https://www.si.com/nba/bucks/n...tter-season-wears-on
Why do I think this will not end well?
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I guess you can look at this as glass-half-full or glass-half-empty.
Glass-half-full is that Griffin was flexible enough with his philosophy to go back to something that worked.
Glass-half-empty is that Griffin was an idiot to think Brook Lopez was going to be effective chasing guys out in the open court. Anyone who had watched Brook Lopez play for the last 5 years could have told him that his the defense Griffin wanted to implement was a terrible fit for a guy they just extended for almost 50 million dollars. It would be like buying a brand new half-ton pickup truck and then spending most of your time driving it for fun around tight turns and expecting it to go from 0 to 60 like a Corvette. Or like having a good DE and expecting him to play Davante Adams or Justin Jefferson in coverage.
The challenge for the Bucks is that whoever they replaced Bud with was going to be a worse regular season coach. Bud has taken two different franchises to conference finals and won a title. He has 2 coach of the year awards. He recognized something in Brook Lopez that no one else did and made a guy who was considered a defensive liability for a decade in the NBA into a first team All-NBA defensive guy.
What they really needed was to have Bud coach the entire year and then when it becomes crunch time in the 4th quarter of a close playoff game, have a Mariano Rivera come out of the bullpen to close it out as a coach so that you don't have either Giannis or Middleton trying to go 1 on 3 with the three other players standing and watching them.
Let's hope Griffin figures out something on offense- which is what Terry Stotts was supposed to help with.
Two good articles on Adrian Griffin. One is biting satire the other is very well sourced and argued. The conclusion of both is that Adrian Griffin is a problem they are going to have fix at some point.
A key takeaway, which I didn't know, is that Adrian Griffin interviewed for 14 other head coaching jobs before he landed the Bucks head job. Were 14 other teams wrong about passing him over?
In the end, it's pretty clear he's here because Giannis forced their hand. I guess I'd rather have Giannis and a (potentially) shitty coach for 3-4 years than a proven Budenholzer-type without Giannis. But the one article really is a sobering takedown of Griffin.
https://www.brewhoop.com/2023/...an-griffin-jon-horst
https://www.brewhoop.com/2023/...ffin-coaching-change\
The benefit of hiring a first-time head coach is that cutting the rope should be relatively painless if the organization has the courage to do so. If the Bucks are truly serious about winning a title this year, they need to rip the Band-Aid off soon. Waiting until the summer where a playoff exit gives you an easy off-ramp is already too late. They will have wasted 25-50% of this group’s remaining title window by doing so. It will require bravery to do something that will be unprecedented. Every day that goes by is another day without a competent coach getting valuable time and reps with this group, and another day wasted trying to force something that clearly isn’t there. The other fourteen teams were right. Adrian Griffin is in way over his head, and the Bucks cannot afford to waste time for him to try and swim to the surface. A surface that, in the end, he may never reach.
It's not like all the stars on the Bucks are 25 years old.
The article nails it the time is now and when I say now I mean this season. PERIOD!
They don't have time to wait for Griffin to figure it out
Unless Griffin is going to get that done before the All-Star break and I don't see that happening
So what would you do if you dumped Griffin? Who's out there today that could step in?
@PackerHawk posted:So what would you do if you dumped Griffin? Who's out there today that could step in?
That's the problem at this point. Kenny Atkinson (who I thought they should have considered more strongly) is an Assistant with Golden State.
The best candidates to step in mid-year to right the ship if it continues to go badly would have to be not currently working as Assistants elsewhere. You'd want someone with head coaching experience that had experience with deep playoff runs.
That leaves Mike Budenholzer and Terry Stotts.
Bud has one title and 3 conference Finals appearances while Stotts has one WCF appearance.
Neither of those are going to happen.