So in your view Westphal is only responsible for rotations?!
On the basketball court, primarily rotations yes.
Coach is a lot more than that obviously. Amongst a few things he is also motivator...someone that is responsible for getting his team up and about and knowing which buttons to push to get them going. Throwing players under the bus does not get them going...it gets them to quit.
A coach is supposed to motivate his players to play? I dont agree with that. A player should be ready to play whether or not their coach is telling them to or not.
A lot of the things that you are mentioning are responsibility of the coach. If we had a clear offensive set maybe the rest of the team wouldn't be standing around when Jimmer has the ball. Maybe, just maybe they will be getting into their spots on the court and executing their offensive sets. It may well be that Westphal's fault that players go one on one or kill the shot clock precisely because no one known what they are supposed to be doing and that is on the coach. I have not once this season seen us run a set play. Not once! Whose fault is that?
My opinion was based on confidence that the players knew how to play basketball. I don't think that they had to be babysat and told what to do. It doesn't take a superstar to know that wing players make back door cuts, stretch the defense, hit spot up 3 pointers and the other stuff. I thought most of our guys knew their roles. DMC as the post player, rebounder. Jimmer playmaker, spot up shooter. Thornton scorer. Salmons wing player. Hayes rebounder and ballmover. That goes for the others as well. Even if it weren't specifically specified to them, it looked as if just about everybody figured out their role on their own. Reke however i dont think did, and that was a big problem, a problem that WP failed to address.
And if players are looking lost out there or not interested it is absolutely on the coach. Its a first sign that the players are tuning him out. In other words he has lost the players. It is interesting that every year to date Westphal has lost the players, only to get them back once he start running something resembling a system, raise the hopes for next season and go back to wacky stuff all over again.
Who gave up on WP out there? In the past, IIRC, Hawes, Noce, Beno, Casspi, and there might've been others that i can't recall atm, complain about lack of plays, lack of ball movement, lack of passing. It is my opinion that that was due to the problem with Reke, and WP's failure to address the Reke problem.
Its time to do the right thing and cut our ties with a coach that is clearly not up to it and whose tenure with the team is ending in pretty much the same fashion as all the previous ones. When he gets question by players he throws them under the bus for daring to question him but he doesn't realise if he had a system that worked to start of with, chances are those questions would never be asked. I agree, he handled the DMC situation poorly. He should've never made it public. However, i wouldn't argue against the disciplinary action that he used.
Section 101 did some research and found articles about how PW functioned in Seattle and Phoenix. It was eerily similar to the present situation. For those who want actual facts about PW's personaility/leadershiop style, read the first note in the thread. This "find" was one of the better "finds" about the whole issue called Paul Westphal. Many posters here are incredibly knowledgable about basketball and have posted opinions over and over and over about Westphal but this link provides real solid back up to what several people seem to already know. At the least it has to make the people who still are holding out hope that Westphal is competent a reason to pause and reconsider their opinions. I sure hope so.
