I don't know, if the whole PACE thing is really that important as the discussion here seems to indicate.
Pace is actually rather critical to everything we are talking about.
1) Pace DOES create more open shots...for both teams. It is thus an offensive gooser for statheads who only see half the floor.
2) BUT it makes it much harder to lock up a team defensively because the defense is constantly scrambled and so many plays are "numbers" plays in th open or semi-open court
3) and it PARTICULARLY dilutes the defensive (and offensive) effectiveness of big men, who are slower to get up and down the court, and who's looming presence inside in a halfcourt defense is largely wasted in an open court game.
Thus given our team structure pace is intimately involved in our inability to get control of things defensively. Pace is a choice, and one that Karl has made consistently almost no matter what for 20 years now. Some further notes:
4) in order to be effective defensively in a hyper-paced system normally you have to be an aggressive, gambling, scrambling mess of a defense You should be a defense notching huge numbers of steals and blocks and other surface defensive stats, while conceding the occasional open shot when the gambles fail. That's the way Karl has liked to coach defense since the 90s. BUT, we don't have the personnel for that. On our whole team we only have three players who have ever been or could ever be defensively disruptive (Moreland = possibly the 4th), but those days appear largely behind Rondo, the coach won't even play WCS consistently, and even Boogie has been saving himself from foul trouble by keeping his hand out of the cookie jar -- a good thing unless you are trying to scramble things on defense. In short, we don't have many defensive playmakers. Given our personnel a much more conservative defensive philosophy emphasizing staying big, playing defense in the halfcourt, and using our length (if everybody is at their natural positions) to cover ground and squeeze the open gaps in the defense would be a much more natural fit. But Karl isn't trying to design a defense to fit our personnel.
5) I don't recall all this switch switch switch everything all the time stuff as being part of the Karl lexicon. Maybe its always been and I just wasn't paying attention, maybe its new. Either way it works much much better if you have a bunch of midsized players bunched between 6'4" to 6'10" let's say, all capable of fighting in the post and moving on the perimeter. You could adopt that tactic with a team like Atlanta for instance. But once again our roster is particularly ill suited for it with out of our main rotation players, 2 of the 9 being little scrawny PGs, and 3 of them being near 7 footers. Less than half the rotation is a mid-sized jalopy, and the rest of the guys are all players who classically get taken advantage of in a switch (WCS has potential to not do so).
6) and of course the last Pace note is this: Pace is very often used as a disguise for lack of talent. Any athlete can run, and in a pace game a lot of shots are open shots and layups that talented and not so talented players are both going to hit. So if you don't have anybody who can create, get out and run and you can generate offense that way even without effective halfcourt players. All it takes is a willingness to lose defensive control. On the other hand when you have one of the league's preeminent floor generals running the team, and one of its 10 best players at center, as well as another 1 on 1 scoring specialist at SF, you CAN score in the halfcourt. You don't need the gimmick. In fact one of the huge and unsung advantages of having a superstar is precisely that they can score against a set defense, thus allowing you NOT to have to speed up the game, thus allowing you to play a better defensive game, while still getting enough points from your stars on offense.
So for all of the above reasons the question of pace is intimately involved in the question of a lot of what is going on with the Kings. Its a choice, and not one made to benefit our players, but rather to benefit an naive casual fan/entertain me with ooh dunk!! owner and an old ideologue of a coach who knows nothing else.
