They say history repeats itself. So if we study it we should have some understanding of how the future will play out. Take for example the Raptors head coaching position. Let’s quickly run through the list: Malone, Walker, Carter, Wilkens, O’Neill and Mitchell. Aside from maybe Malone, not a single coach has left on even remotely decent terms with the club so its hard for me to believe that Mitchell’s time in Toronto will result in a happy ending. We Raptor fans have never been satisfied with a coach – ever! Even when Butch Carter was running the show with Vince and T-Mac, we still found reason to complain. Simply put, nobody is good enough for us. Nobody.
Mitchell’s talents and skills are probably somewhere between Darrell Walker and Butch Carter’s. He’s definitely got more control of the team than what Walker had and he’s simply not as sharp a basketball mind that Carter was. (On a side note, how Butch Carter never got another league coaching gig is beyond me) So given what we’ve seen of Mitchell over the last four seasons, is he on the threshold of finally becoming a coach that can actually get the majority approval of fans? Remember, there has rarely been a time when this was actually true. My personal opinion is no, he won’t and I can point to his playbook, his arrogance, his refusal to admit that he’s wrong, his know-it-all attitude, his substitutions, his handing of rotations, allocating player time, resource utilization etc. As you can see the man has shown us a lot of his flaws over the last little while.
If you’re asked to look at his strengths the first thing you’ll come up with is that he’s a great motivator, a no-nonsense type of coach that doesn’t stand for drops in effort and brings the lunch-pail mentality to the club. In other words he does as a coach what he did as a player. Although hi positive traits don’t come close to making up for what he’s shown to lack, this observer thinks that if he was actually just able to instill this kind of attitude in this team I’d be satisfied! That’s it! The most disappointing thing about Mitchell isn’t that he started Andrea Bargnani at a position he’s never played before in Game 1 of the playoffs but the fact that he’s so far been unable to get this team to play the hard-nosed type of basketball that he himself played.
Let’s forget about the X’s and O’s and yanking of players for no reason, let’s just look at the attitude and on-court personality of the Raptors. Do they resemble Sam Mitchell the player at all? Who on the Raptors could be considered a “lunch pail” type of player? Humphries is about it and he’s the 7th guy in the rotation at best. I care about wins and losses as much as I do about the personality of this team, I enjoyed watching Sharone Wright and Reggie Slater work their asses of while the team went 16-66 but somehow I don’t get the same feeling here even though this team will probably make the playoffs for a third year in a row. How do you explain this? Why hasn’t Sam Mitchell been able to instill the toughness, character and grit in this team that comes so naturally to him? He was hired primarily because of that and yet four years later we’re basically the same lost souls that we were back then.
Now you might say that he’s been handed the wrong team. That Colangelo’s vision doesn’t jive with Mitchell’s ways and that you can’t teach pigs how to fly or in this case Colangelo picked players how to play the Mitchell way. It even might be a valid argument up until last year but coming into this season things have changed. Mitchell has been handed an All-Star and two potential All-Stars to get the job done. O’Neal’s a hard-working and tough low-post player that fits the Mitchell mold of player and we already know about Chris Bosh. There’s no doubt the bench is weak but you can’t ask for everything, at some point you’re going to have to earn your money and produce more with less, after all that’s what coaches get paid for. Mitchell’s been given enough ammunition to prove if he can actually take a team with both talent and flaws to the next level by hiding the latter and highlighting the former. If he can’t do it now, he won’t have any excuses.
As commenter Chutney pointed out yesterday Mitchell seems to be instilling a flippant attitude in the team where one doesn’t have to answer for one’s mistakes and can get away with playing poorly as long as they’re playing with the “fake hustle” Mark Jackson so eloquently referred to. The point of this semi-rant? If Mitchell’s not the right coach for us we’ll find out before December as I doubt Colangelo would tolerate any more slip-ups and excuses from his not-hand-picked head coach and will unceremoniously end yet another Raptor head coach’s reign.
Why am I a little angry at Mitchell this morning? It’s because preseason’s over and we haven’t looked progressively better at the end of it. We were getting our trap split at the top of the key against Cleveland and we’re getting our trap split against Denver. We hadn’t figured out who the backup PG was then and we haven’t done it now. Kapono was supposed to be tightly integrated into the offense and instead he looks worse than last year. Aside from Bargnani’s added bulk and desire to improve this preseason’s given us very little. We might not look like deer caught in headlights anymore but we’re far from a functioning unit, especially the bench which I am terribly scared of. We might need to give this thing the first 10 games of the regular season before we can truly comment on what this team might be able to do. So yeah, preseason hasn’t ended, it sort of just began.
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The Raptors waived Jamal Sampson yesterday and I feel we hardly ever got to know him. It’s not like he was ever going to see the light of day in our rotation, at best he would’ve been a practice player and hopefully when Jawai comes back he can fill that void.
The league announced that they’ll be using instant replay to figure out if a shot was a 2 or a 3, where a foul was committed and game-clock malfunctions. How one defines “game-clock malfunctions” can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. For example, would TJ Ford’s layup against Atlanta would’ve counted? It appeared that he’d got the shot off in time but would they have considered the fact that the game-clock started a thousandth of a second early? Three words: Can of worms.
Just a quick thought, Ruben Patterson who looked like Kobe Bryant against us got cut by the Nuggets. I wouldn’t mind picking him up and see what he’s got left. He can’t be worse than Jamario Moon and looked like he could still slash to the rim and play defense. It’s good to have at least one guy on the team who starts hyperventilating if he doesn’t drive to the rim on every other possession. It might even give Jamario Moon a kick in the arse and signal a wake-up call of sorts for him. The guy’s been going through preseason like he’s stoned and needs to be reminded that we do have somebody who can take his minutes. I doubt it’s going to happen, you know, because Colangelo only signs character guys….
David Stern’s saying that by 2012 we’ll be playing regular season games in Europe. Any idea who some of the ideal teams for this experiment might be…oh yes, yes, you do. Stern keeps getting asked if he’s concerned about to players leaving heading to Europe for higher salaries and he finally said what everybody’s thinking, the economic model for basketball in Europe wouldn’t support the types of contracts players are allegedly receiving. The average attendance in Europe is 6000 and that’s hardly enough to pay for the ball boys. Then again there are deep pockets in Europe who wouldn’t mind owning a team in the loss just for kicks.
That’s it for me this morning. Raps Fan will follow up with a post of some sort later and remember that you can check out the latest web articles from around the internets and outernets on the front page of this site. For example this SLAM article about Denver’s trip to Edmonton.
