What happened with TJ was all TJ. He was given minutes when he came back, and he was given his starting role when he came back. He straight up blew it.

TJ got into it with (at varying degrees) Mo Williams, Jose and last year Jack….all 3 teams he has been on in his NBA career. Should we assume its the responsibility of all the other coaches there aswell or can we see that there is a pattern with TJ?

Hopefully Triano got a lot of rookie mistakes out last year.

Biggest encouragement last season. Triano called a time-out. Put in an in-bounds play when it mattered and the play worked. I couldn’t remember one time that happened with Mitchell.

He needs a team of lunch box men and classic position players (ie. true Centers,PF etc.), and run a half court offense.

Another great thing about JT is that he also seems to be really good at experimenting with different lineup combinations and figuring out which ones are losing propositions – though I am still waiting for him to find a combination that has a reasonable shot at putting up a W. So far, I believe we’ve found 18 different lineup combinations that don’t work. Maybe another preseason game against Boston will allow us to find some that do.

Also, in the year since Jay took the reins, I have seem great improvement in the Raptors. Just look at Bargnani, for instance. The big man used to average 9 points a game on a team that won 47 games, but the knock on him was that he couldn’t rebound. Now he still can’t rebound, but at least he averages 18 points a night for a team that wins 3 games out of 10. So that’s a step forward, (although in fairness, we ran Mike James out of town for putting up stats like that. That, and being crazy). And Calderon, he’s really improved under Jay’s watchful eye. I’ve never seen a man put out so much effort to play so little defense. How quickly has he fallen back from the all-star level? And who can forget the way Jay brought along young Humpheries, Graham, Bosh and Jawai? All three of those players really took their games to the next level under Jay’s tutelage. When it comes to who should be the head coach – I’m surprised there’s even a debate.

I’m not saying Smitch was a better coach, just that BC hung a flawed roster on him and when he failed (and balked publicly) BC canned his azz. It wasn’t really to directly improve things. BC is quite machevillian.

You need to back up. Colangelo never said this is a 50-win team. He never predicted a 50-win season. What he did say is how 50 wins should be the team’s goal. If you actually take fault with that, then perhaps you’d be happier with Rob Babcock and his (and I paraphrase) “this team won’t amount to much”.

If BC had brought in the right coach after Mitchell, one that could have handled the CaldeFord situation better, one that had the x’s and o’s to close out games now that the Raptors were actually being scouted, one that knew that “defense could be taught”, then I doubt BC would have been in a hot seat about not resigning the “coach of the year”… especially after winning executive of the year the season prior.

Just so you don’t claim I’m talking out of my ass:

“Triano was largely respected by players and the basketball community alike for his work with Team Canada and then with the Team USA Selects”

We already know this – what we don’t know is if this means anything in the NBA.

“Handed a rag-tag roster at the end of a lost season, we saw little of what Triano was capable of last year.”

We don’t know this. How do we know last season isn’t exactly what Triano is capable of? You can’t just make statements like this and end a paragraph.

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When the article does get to the point where it provides “examples” of Triano’s strong IQ as a source of optimism… well, it falls short. I mean, the examples don’t even refer back to the premise about Triano’s IQ and rely instead on opinions of his actions.

“There are a few key examples of what I mean that stick out, not the least of which is Triano’s insistence that rookie DeMar DeRozan will have to earn his playing time.”

This isn’t even entirely true. Before camp started, Triano talked about how DeRozan was going to be the starter. Once preseason started, aside from yanking him in that one game where he took two bad shots, I haven’t seen Triano “insisting” that DeRozan has to earn his playing time. DeRozan basically has the spot thanks to being a lottery pick, the underwhelming play of Belinelli, and the absence of Antoine Wright due to injury. Not saying he hasn’t been playing hard, but I haven’t seen many indications that Triano will take away his minutes if he isn’t playing up to snuff – hopefully that will change in the regular season.

“In addition, Triano seems to have a pretty sound grasp of how to run a training camp already.”

How do we know this? We can’t look at our preseason record as an indicator. We can’t just use what the media has told us because it’s likely biased and based on a few quotes rehashed by several different outlets into the same damn story. This is just not quanitifiable. The article refers to the video sessions and the focus on balance between defense, offense, and down time. First, we don’t even know if the video sessions are helpful, and it certainly hasn’t shown in preseason. Second, the offense is still stagnant and hasn’t been focused much in preseason… so much for balance.

Sorry for the critical view of the article, but the beginning was hard to read and in my opinion the content was a let down. If you want to provide your opinion on the subject, do some research and put some stats down or something. It looks like simply had an idea for an article, jotted it down, and posted it up. Which is fine, this is the internet and you can say w/e you want. I just don’t feel it was fleshed out enough.

p.s. I posted it on YouTube :P

That being said, I think that the league (and the East in particular) is VERY competitive this year. Some of it is competition in tiers, but there just aren’t too many teams that will take a beating night-in, night-out.

If I had to pick teams that are just awful, I’d say:

EAST
- New Jersey
- Milwaukee
- New York is borderline, but they have some young talent and one more year under D’Antoni’s system.

WEST
- Minnesota
- Sacramento
- Golden State
- Memphis is borderline because I can’t imagine all those experiments working out, but there is enough talent on that roster to be dangerous.

I think that that the following number of wins will be attained by each seed in the east:

1st: 63
2nd: 58
3rd: 55
4th: 45
5th: 43
6th: 41
7th: 40
8th: 39

I honestly don’t see more than about 6 wins separating 4th from 8th in the East.

I think that if we grab the 5th seed, it will mean that we overcame early struggles with solid play later in the season, which would put us in a great position to upset the 4th seed.

And I also think that Atlanta is a pretty good matchup for us: Bibby isn’t someone who can exploit Jose these days, and our front-court should create major mismatches offensively against their undersized front-court.