What you just said isn't logical. Think about it for a moment. To say that having a knowledgable person do something, gives you the same, or close to the same result as having an unknowledgable person do something, flies in the face of everything we know about improving at our job, whatever it may be. The reason one person gets paid more than another, is because in most cases, he has more experience. He knows more!
I appreciate your response, but in this and your other post above you seem to overlooking points I have already made. For example, you mentioned the Kings teams of the glory years. I already discussed how that Kings team was great at defense in 2002-03 and very bad in 2003-04. What changed? Did the coaches change? No. Did players' attitudes change? I doubt it. Did their commitment to team defense change? I doubt that, too. Did they lose experience? Of course not. Or was it a change in personnel? Bingo! Swap a healthy-ish Webber for Brad Miller (and later a post-injury Webber) and switch out the defensive-minded roleplayers for offensive-minded ones and what happens? The defense suffers. Bibby, Jackson, Christie, Stojakovic and Divac didn't forget how to play team defense, they just didn't have the same guys around them that helped them excel the year before. I (with Kingster's help) gave several other examples of coaches who have led great defensive teams and mediocre or poor ones, or of teams that changed a couple players and went from bad to good or vice versa, including Popovich's teams. I can't think of a good explanation for why those examples don't support the notion that which players are playing is the number one factor in how good of a defense you have. (BTW, did you know the Bulls moved into the top 10 in defense under Del Negro the year before Thibodeau started as coach?)
As for what I quoted above, I strongly disagree. People tend to do well in jobs that they have talent for. Hard work, practice, and experience all help, just as it does for defense. But if you plug a hard worker into a job that they don't have the talent for, they won't succeed. This is especially true for something like basketball. And defense uses basketball skills just like shooting, passing and other skills help on offense. Some people just have a talent for different skills. Some guys are naturally good at lateral movement. Some guys have naturally quick hands and timing. Some guys can jump quickly or jump back up quickly after landing on the first jump. Some guys are tall. Some guys are fast. These are all skills that lead to talent on defense. The guys with less talent can work hard, but they can't become great. And a team that is missing certain skills can work together to try to overcome them, but they need the talent to be able to do so effectively.
This whole discussion is getting ridiculous. No one here that I know is arguing against having a shotblocker. I would love to have one. All were saying is that if you don't have one, you don't have to automaticly start considering sucide. You can still win without one! Its been done! And maybe the teams that did it, did it with a combination of players blocking shots. But you know what thats called? Team defense!!!!!!!!!! Thats what you do when you don't have an ELITE shotblocker, and thats what were talking about here. So lets keep apples, apples, and oranges, oranges! Lets not mix them together in the discussion, and I think we'll come to some sort of agreement.
My comments weren't specifically about shotblocking, although that's the most glaring weakness on the current Kings team defensively. I just think the whole notion of "commitment to defense" and "team defense" is extremely overrated as a tool for getting better.
Still, I'd like to respond to this since you brought it up. I think you're creating a straw man here. Most of the calls for shotblocking don't specify that an elite shotblocker is a requirement to avoid suicide. Instead, people are saying that a shotblocking presence is
almost essential and by far the easiest way to improve the Kings' defense. They are also saying that because the Kings have a group of players already that don't block shots very well, the ideal solution is for one individual who is very good to great at it to come in and provide that skill rather than switching out most of the players in the group to get several mediocre guys to do it as a team.
That example epitomizes the futility of the Kings D last year. And I agree wholeheartedly that it has much less to do with ability, much more to do with discipline, coaching, and desire.
