John-Blair Bickerstaff: Currently The 6th Longest Tenured Head Coach

I've been consuming all the Coach K stuff I can the last few months. Books, interviews, etc. This is a bad habit of mine. I don't appreciate a guy until the very end of his career and then I circle back and try to catch up.

Anyway, in the second half of Coach K's career he had no schematic dogma. He had certain values he expected his players to adhere to. But every off-season, he would look at the roster, the film on incoming players, watch all the film of team and individual workouts, and meet with his assistants and devise the schemes for the anticipated roster. Holding JBB (or any coach) to the expectation of an all-time coach isn't fair really. but he isn't even trying to do this sort of thing. On defense it's schematic rigidity + effort. on offense, it's "Get Garland the Ball and GTFO of the way."

Coach K also talked about screaming at players. How it works in college because 1. they're not paid and HC is god and 2. by the time they want to tune you out, they're out of the program already. He also talked about how he changed his approach a lot when he went to work with Team USA (pros) and how each player required a different type of motivation. Barking platitudes about effort and rah rah stuff eventually falls on deaf ears. that's what I took away from it.

Coach JBB seems like a cool dude and the players seem to like and respect his get down. but he's clearly the "the guy before the guy." I don't see the traits. or even glimmers of traits seen in great coaches.

Was great how he brought in pre retirement crew Rondo and Love to fuck up our run last night.

Having Okoro out there as well jeeeeze, don’t have to be a genius to understand Rondo and Okoro can’t be out there together in 2022

Lastly wtf was up with Stevens being benched in the 4th? He was playing fantastic defense against Durant.

The Nets were down and discouraged and awful coaching decisions let them back in it

This coach is embarrassingly bad. Like unwatchable. Fuck him.

Brown surprise, surprise is back to mope up duties like we all thought despite his good play.

I'm beyond done with this coach.

Bring back mike brown. I always liked him and he's had time to learn under golden state.

It is very rare to watch an NBA head coach so consistently misuse time outs and
challenges.

The contract extension was rash no matter how much of the early team
success you want to give to JBB. I don't believe anyone could
have thought that another NBA team was going to steal him
away. Signing up JBB into a contention window could have been
done after having this full season to have for evaluation, IF warranted.

Sure it's a good thing that the team mostly plays hard ,, with little outward
discord among the roster. But the youngsters are going to bust their
asses regardless, especially if they have the character traits that the
front office keeps telling us about the players and franchise 'culture'.

And we have all experienced watching teams who have the good clubhouse/camraderie
start going the other way when the record heads south.

How much resentment is under the radar concerning how so many minutes
consistently are given to coach's decision instead of merit or game
situations?

letgocavs said:

Bring back mike brown. I always liked him and he's had time to learn under golden state.

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JBB is basically a copy paste of Mike Brown, unimaginative defense first coach that doesn’t instal any resemblance of an offense and relies on his star players to carry him. But maybe all those years with Steve Kerr could have rubbed off on him I guess

I would love to see if you take the 3 best players off of every team and only able to play them for 6 games from Jan to the end of the season (Allen, Garland,Mobley) and we’re not even talking about key reserves being injured at the same time (or out for the season) I would love to see how any Coach would be doing…..Kerr one of the most overrated Coaches of all time would tell you how that feels…..

Its was JBB ideal to go with the triple towers and we were destroying the league before all the injuries, people want to say the league figure us out, no injuries kill that run…. I’m not sure the starting 5 with Okoro in it have even play 6 games together since January,…….Do JBB have faults hell yes name one coach who doesn’t, people giving Pops a pass this year but he has a nice young team over there, they play in look like shit most of the year, Denver Coach has the potential MVP of the league, we beat them twice with him playing, and people would love to get there hands on that Coach…..I could keep going on in on but what the fuck that would useless ……LOL

The problem is that other coaches have shown adjustments over the course of a season when faced with injuries. You play smaller when your bigs go down. Start moving some offensive initiation to your skilled passing big men. etc. JBB has also shown he can sometimes do these things. The problem is that we see it for a game or two then go back to the same old same old nonsense.

There are issues with many coaches, but when your gameplan is "play hard," you are going to get figured out by anyone with a semblance of strategy. The ATOs in particular show how weak JBB is in this area. Will defer to some of our more knowledgeable posters on this but I think this has been an issue with JBB since his Memphis and Houston days. JBB is tactically weak and makes slow, if any, adjustments and we have seen how things bad it gets when things stop going according to plan.

Going to bump this thread with a complaint I've had for a while that cost the Cavs the game tonight.

Other teams routinely start out games getting whatever they want offensively against the Cavs. They run their set plays, get good looks, and force the Cavs to adjust.

Meanwhile, the Cavs come out and are struggling from the get go to generate good looks on offense. They're running the same limited sets with 2 players moving and 3 watching for all 48 minutes.

That is purely on coaching. Those first few possessions should be relatively scripted, and a quality offense is going to generate good looks for a variety of guys to start the game. It simply ain't happening for the Cavs, and the result is that they continually have to dig themselves out of holes.

Cassity14 said:

Going to bump this thread with a complaint I've had for a while that cost the Cavs the game tonight.

Other teams routinely start out games getting whatever they want offensively against the Cavs. They run their set plays, get good looks, and force the Cavs to adjust.

Meanwhile, the Cavs come out and are struggling from the get go to generate good looks on offense. They're running the same limited sets with 2 players moving and 3 watching for all 48 minutes.

That is purely on coaching. Those first few possessions should be relatively scripted, and a quality offense is going to generate good looks for a variety of guys to start the game. It simply ain't happening for the Cavs, and the result is that they continually have to dig themselves out of holes.

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We don't run offensive basketball plays. Even the Nets, with K fucking D, and K fucking I, run plays at least some of the time. Not us. JBB is a roll the ball out and let' em create coach 100%. It's my biggest gripe with him. I'm not saying all the time. But at the start of quarters, after time outs, anytime the P&R or handoff sets get stagnant? The point guard should stick a finger in the air, call a play, and the players should go through a series of motions, cuts, screen, passes that result in two or three scripted shot opportunities. High schools and colleges do this, and good NBA teams do this. Why don't we do it, like, ever?

I don't know man, when the coach is yelling at everybody to slow down, feed the big men, take advantage of the mismatches on switches, and those guys still dribble into the paint to miss, get blocked, or turn the ball over, that's hard to put on the coach. At one point in the first half, Cedi and LeVert were a combined 1-13. Okoro was 0-3. This Cavs team has some serious roster construction issues in having four guys like LeVert, Okoro, Cedi, and Stevens. You only need a couple of those guys on roster, or at a minimum, they should all be moved down the depth chart. Every one of them falls victim to not playing within their game.

We just don't have enough shooters. Kevin Love should not be finishing the fourth quarter of a playoff game, but our spacing was basically irreparable without him and Lauri on the court at the same time tonight. If they don't add shooting this offseason, I don't know of a coach who can fix what's wrong in a playoff setting.

Did Okoro even leave the corner once this game?

I can’t think of another coach that has their starting SG just sit in corner like this.

Has to be the worst unimaginative offensive coach in the league by a mile

BigZ94 said:

Did Okoro even leave the corner once this game?

I can’t think of another coach that has their starting SG just sit in corner like this.

Has to be the worst unimaginative offensive coach in the league by a mile

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I just don’t know what else you can do with him? The offense is already going 4 on 5 with him out there. They hid Curry on him for the 15 minutes Isaac actually saw the court, and he just sagged off him to help pin down on the post or step towards the lane on drives.

If you put Isaac in the post it’s pretty clearly going to be a pass out, turnover, or a blocked shot.

If you have him run off screens to look for openings his defender is just going to trail on the interior and stay between him and the bucket since he is zero shooting threat.

If you try to make him the pick man, his defender will just trap the ball handler since they know they can leave him open.

That pretty much leaves having him initiate the offense, which we’ve seen him fail at before and makes no sense with at least 4 guards on the team who are better than him at it OR park him in the corner and pray he is willing to shoot and can get one to fall.

I think he cost the Cavs the game. Bad game plan on both ends. Lineups were not ideal either. You needed to attack Kyrie and Seth. All day. You didn't do it. You didn't even put the best lineups on the floor to try to do it. It sucks.

A lot to be optimistic about once they add shooters and a new coach. I applaud Garland for growing so much this season. He actually looks like a leader and a Giga chad. A lot of flexing and alpha vibes coming from him. You can see that the is getting stronger and more mature, and he is going to become a lot stronger and his game is going to be beautiful.

JBB, I don't like you one bit.

B Mac said:

I just don’t know what else you can do with him? The offense is already going 4 on 5 with him out there. They hid Curry on him for the 15 minutes Isaac actually saw the court, and he just sagged off him to help pin down on the post or step towards the lane on drives.

If you put Isaac in the post it’s pretty clearly going to be a pass out, turnover, or a blocked shot.

If you have him run off screens to look for openings his defender is just going to trail on the interior and stay between him and the bucket since he is zero shooting threat.

If you try to make him the pick man, his defender will just trap the ball handler since they know they can leave him open.

That pretty much leaves having him initiate the offense, which we’ve seen him fail at before and makes no sense with at least 4 guards on the team who are better than him at it OR park him in the corner and pray he is willing to shoot and can get one to fall.

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I do agree with you, but if he’s so bad you can’t even run basic cuts for him (although I thought he was driving and finishing pretty well early in the season) why is he starting? Especially against the nets who have really bad defensive guards.

Instead we’re starting Lavert at the SF which isn’t his natural position, Lauri at the 4, which should be his natural position but he’s been working much better as an SF for us this season and Mobley at the 5 which also hasn’t been working for us.

Feel like it would make far more sense to either start with either:
Garland, Lavert, Mark, Mobley, Moses

Moses would be guarding Drummond so his inability to guard anybody on the perimeter would be negated and we could keep playing to what has been our advantage all season: size

Or we could have gone with:

Garland, Lavert, Stevens, Mark, Mobley

Stevens gives us more size on Durant, can literally do everything Okoro can do on offense and more, again allows Lavert to play SG where he can bully Curry or Kyrie.. once again giving us a size advantage allowing us to play to our strength.

Playing all these guys out of position so we can fit into our starting lineup our worst offensive player…

Instead JBB in his stubborn ways refuses to move on from his golden boy who plays slightly above average defense and is probably the worst offensive guard in the league.

And lastly if you are so stubborn in starting Okoro at least have him do SOMETHING, make a cut, keep his defender guessing, set offball screens (which nobody on our team does) anything just not sitting in the corner so he can brick wide open 3s