A lot has been said in the past 24 hours about the Cavs’ 55-point humiliation at Staples Center on Tuesday night. There’s the quantifiable and historic angle: largest margin of defeat in franchise history, fewest points scored in franchise history, etc. There’s the dramatic angle, courtesy of LeBron’s Twitter-supplied middle finger to Dan Gilbert and who knows who else. This being Cleveland, there’s also the totally cliché self-pity angle coming from some sectors (“Why oh why do we have to suffer the embarrassment of being associated with this team?”)
What I haven’t seen anyone else mention is the coaching angle.
By this point in the season, my opinion of Byron Scott has been well-documented. Simply put, I think he’s a fraud. The only way that a team led by a coach with a “defensive mindset” can lose a game by 55 points is, frankly, if his system is horribly flawed; he’s not teaching it properly to his players; or he’s not motivating them effectively enough to make them execute it. Regardless of which of those doors you choose, they all open onto a portrait of Byron Scott in a Hamburglar costume, since at this point he’s basically stealing money from ownership under the guise of “rebuilding.”
Clearly the Cavs are not rich in talent at this point. But even with their injuries, I defy the notion that their skill level is low enough to lead to a 55 point burial on its own. I don’t care if it’s against the Lakers, the Heat, or any other top-tier team in the league. A 25 point loss? Totally reasonable given what this season has become. Even 35 is within reason. But 55?
No, I believe that a large portion of the blame should be laid at the doorstep of the head coach and his philosophy. He, not the players, is primarily to blame for this outcome.
How can I say this in good conscience, you ask? Because this isn’t the first time a Byron Scott-led team has been torched by an almost inconceivable margin.
Less than two years ago, Scott’s New Orleans Hornets made their way into a first round post-season match-up with the Denver Nuggets. On April 27, 2009, the Hornets hosted—hosted—the Nuggets, who returned their hospitality by bludgeoning New Orleans to the tune of a mind-blowing 58 points. Final score: DEN 121 – NOR 63. In the playoffs.
Was the roster the problem then? I don’t think so. Not when you consider that NOLA’s starting five included a healthy Chris Paul, Tyson Chandler, and David West. On their own, that trio should make a 58-point loss virtually impossible, unless they were all being mind-controlled Manchurian Candidate-style from the opposing bench to pass into the bleachers and shoot at their own basket.
Look, you won’t find a bigger proponent of the “small sample size” caveat than me. Despite the shock and awe, we are still only talking about two games. But it’s worth pointing out that Scott was fired by the Hornets 9 games into the season that followed the end of the aforementioned Nuggets series.
Why is this important? Because it means Scott’s teams have lost by 55 points or more twice in his last 50 games as a head coach. In one of those losses, his squad was being captained by arguably the greatest point guard, and one of the greatest players, of the past decade, and the team surrounding him was good enough to be in the playoffs. And none of that mattered.
So while two games are not statistically significant on their own, they help clarify the picture created by the Cavs’ many other quantifiable deficiencies. (For instance, that they are now a full 3 points per 100 possessions worse in efficiency differential than Sacramento, the 29th place team.) Under Byron Scott, the team has gone from being a weak one to an unwatchable one, and his previous job performance suggests that it may have less to do with the players than with the man commanding them.
The Browns are set to interview current Giants’ defensive coordinator Perry Fewell today, but according to sources such as Peter King, Rams’ offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur is the current favorite for the job.
This is not news in and of itself. I won’t bother listing out all the boxes Shurmur has checked; undoubtedly you’ve read that somewhere else by now. Suffice it to say that he has past relationships with both Holmgren and Heckert.
What’s notable, though, is what King tweeted earlier this morning in response to the question of who else was looking at Shurmur as a head coaching candidate. The answer was clear, concise, and unmistakable.
King simply wrote—and I quote—“No one.”
Now, there are two totally opposite ways to interpret this information. One is to conclude that the front office is being too heavily influenced by their past ties to Shurmur. Their judgment is being clouded by the fact that, on some level, they would really like Shurmur to be the real deal just because they like him as a person, even if there’s evidence that his professional chops are under-developed. As a result, they’re strongly considering elevating a guy who no one else in the league thinks is ready to take over head coaching duties.
However, the other way is to conclude that the front office is being influenced by their past ties just heavily enough to be able to see something about Shurmur that no other front office in the league right now does. In other words, because both Holmgren and Heckert have past personal and professional ties with him, they have inside knowledge that suggested to them that he was a more worthy candidate than anyone else did. So they took a flyer on interviewing him and—possibly to their own surprise—came away thoroughly impressed.
As we’ve discussed many times in the past, this is where GMs and Team Presidents really earn their keep: by identifying undervalued assets. This is true in any sport. It’s especially true in situations where franchises need to reshape themselves dramatically. Despite any improvements we can argue ourselves into seeing, the Browns are still such a franchise. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have fired their old coach in the first place.
With that in mind, there’s certainly no reason to limit this thinking to personnel. The process of evaluating coaches is essentially identical. As I’ve written before, the AFC North is proof of that. Remember, there was no league-wide interest in Mike Tomlin when the Steelers hired him; to my recollection, he was brought in simply to fulfill the Rooney Rule requirement. Instead, he blew away the Rooneys themselves and now has a Super Bowl ring.
Similarly, the only reason John Harbaugh had the opportunity to even interview with Baltimore was that their first choice, Jason Garrett, rejected the Ravens’ contract offer in favor of staying as a Cowboys assistant. It was the only interview that John got. At this rate, though, his may be the last head coaching interview the Ravens conduct this decade.
By no means am I saying that Pat Shurmur is definitely going to be a brilliant hire and a successful head coach in the NFL. What I am saying, though, is that Browns fans shouldn’t bring out the pitchforks if the front office ultimately hires a guy who no other franchise saw fit to interview.
To broad the perspective momentarily, too many people in life chase the cool and spar with one another for a hot candidate for anything, not necessarily because the person in question has actual substance, but because they believe someone else wants to him/her first. This is true in business, in the arts, in sports, in dating, in everything. The phenomenon will never change; it’s basic human nature.
However, those among us who have the ability to fight through the jealousy traps ultimately open themselves up to possibilities and advantages that the rest of the pack simply won’t see. It may be that Pat Shurmur is one such advantage. We may never find out. But instead of blasting Holmgren and Heckert for considering him, I think we should all, for the moment, keep in mind the possibilities of the undiscovered.
After the Browns dropped consecutive disappointing road games to 2-win teams, the sports punditry seems to have decided once again that Eric Mangini is running out the clock on death row.
I’m still not entirely sure that I agree with this opinion or, if it is true, the actual decision. As Mike pointed out earlier, good teams require continuity, and firing a coach every two to three seasons is a pretty huge impediment to continuity. It’s also no secret that the Browns’ are still lacking in the personnel department, and they’ve had a rash of injuries to make matters worse. In light of all that, dumping Mangini seems at best a grey area.
Still, nothing reflects more poorly on a coach than losing games to teams like Buffalo and Cincinnati. Even if the Browns somehow manage to beat either Baltimore or Pittsburgh in the final two weeks, losses in games like the previous two carry a stench that clings to the head coach.
With all that in mind, the punditry has begun flinging around names for possible Mangini replacements. There’s almost universal agreement that whomever would come in would be a client of Bob LaMont, Holmgren’s agent and possible shadow President of the team. But aside from John Gruden (who still may not coach at all next season), the other early favorite appears to be Carolina’s John Fox.
Fox is one of those coaches who the NFL analyst community loves unconditionally. They talk about what a great motivator he is, what a sharp football mind he has—all kinds of intangibles that would make him a steal for any organization.
This is precisely the problem for laymen like us, though. Coaching is essentially all intangibles, and everyone but the players is cut off from most of those. We’re not in the locker room; we don’t know what the players think of the coach; we can’t access the X’s and O’s side of what he provides. Hell, most of the time we don’t even get to see what formations he’s running out on defense since the standard NFL camera angle doesn’t show the secondary.
Really, there’s only one quantitative measure that people like you and me can use to try to decide whether or not a coach is “good”: his win-loss record. So the question is, does John Fox’s record support the euphoria from the NFL congregation?
Counting the current season, John Fox has coached Carolina for 9 years. To date, he’s compiled a 73-69 record (51.4% wins) with the very real probability that Carolina loses its final two games of the season and drops that record to 73-71. In short, through his career, Fox is a .500 coach.
What about the topic of consistency? Well, here’s a year-by-year recap of the Panthers under Fox:
2002: 7-9, missed playoffs
2003: 11-5, lost to NE in Super Bowl
2004: 7-9, missed playoffs
2005: 11-5, lost to SEA in NFC Championship game
2006: 8-8, missed playoffs
2007: 7-9, missed playoffs
2008: 12-4, lost to ARI in NFC Divisional game
2009: 8-8, missed playoffs
2010: 2-12 (currently), worst record in the league
There are two ways to look at the above. One is that with the exception of this season, Fox has never won fewer than 7 games, and 44.4% of his teams have made it to the playoffs.
The second is that his career is marked by a serious yo-yo effect. Fox’s Panthers (which sounds like a villainous faction in a Disney movie) have never posted consecutive winning seasons. Further, every time they’ve made it to the playoffs, they’ve performed worse than the previous time. Super Bowl losers in 2003, booted from the NFC Championship game in 2005, blown out in the Divisional round in 2008.
Call me a pessimist if you will, but this doesn’t exactly give me a great deal of confidence that Fox is the guy to turn the Browns around at a coaching level.
In fact, it reminds me of a disturbing parallel. It was less than a year ago when the members of the NFL analyst fraternity collectively started touching themselves over Washington’s hiring of the great Mike Shanahan. I am on record as being critical of Shanahan’s godly status in the football world, at least based on recent reality. For all the clamor about his defense and rushing expertise, he won a grand total of 2 playoff games in the 10 years after John Elway retired. Flash forward to today: Washington is not only tied for last place in the NFC East at 5-9, but their personnel situation and Shanahan’s handling of players like McNabb and Haynesworth has been almost universally panned.
The truly scary part: even in the post-Elway era, Shanahan’s ten-year record with the Broncos (91-69) was still significantly better than Fox’s nine years in Carolina, regardless of what happens in the final two games of the 2010 season.
I’m not saying definitively that Fox is a bad candidate. On some level, coaching is sorcery. But I am saying that based on the only hard facts we have available, I think it would be wise for Browns fans to be skeptical.
As I concluded in the coaching post I linked to regarding Shanahan, the goal for GMs around the league should be to find the next great coach, not hire some guy beloved by the old guard who’s had some past success. Analysts talk all the time about how the keys to the AFC North are smash-mouth defense and a good running game. It’s rarely mentioned that the consistent rulers of the division, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, not only have good-to-great young QBs, they also have (supposedly) two of the great young coaches in the league in Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh—both of whom were hired out of obscurity and initially met with skepticism around the pundit community. If Mangini is fired, the Browns’ brain trust would do well to keep that in mind.
For months, I’ve been hearing the same chorus about LeBron from Clevelanders: “It’s not that he left, it’s how he did it.” Last night, I think we could all say it’s not that the Cavs lost, it’s how they did it.
The size of the egg they laid makes a few things crystal clear to me.
Byron Scott is, at this point of the season, a fraud. I wrote about this once last week. But every principle that Scott preached as being foundational for this franchise is M.I.A. after 18 games. For a supposed running team, the Cavs are almost exactly average; they currently rank #14 in the league in Pace. For a supposed defense-first team, they are below-average; they currently rank #19 in the league in Defensive Efficiency. And speaking of defense, the numbers aren’t even the be-all end-all.
The Cavs are soft and lax. I’ve now heard multiple national commentators—some of whom I normally like quite a bit—proclaim the Cavs to be some kind of hard-nosed, blue-collar team that gives maximum effort on every possession but just doesn’t have the talent to win consistently. This is as bogus as the notion that the problem of the last few Cavs’ teams was “Mike Brown’s offense.”
I’ve watched Scott’s Cavs enough to know that they consistently refuse to close out on perimeter shooters, consistently give easy lanes to uncontested shots at the rim, and consistently go about 6 minutes of regulation in every game giving strictly token effort. Result: they now rank #27 in the league in Opponent 3P% (39.3), gave up 60 points in the paint to Boston on Tuesday night (which 48 minutes of effort should render impossible), and don’t appear to be showing any sustainable level of improvement. Of their last 10 games, 7 have been losses, and only one of those Ls was by less than 11 points.
The debacle against Miami was a perfect indictment of Scott, in my mind. Many writers touched on the point that this was likely to be the closest the team gets to a playoff-atmosphere game for several years. I agree with that sentiment. Frankly, it was the only game on the schedule this season that had any real importance to the fan base and (likely) to the players. Without a doubt, it was the only game that meant anything to Dan Gilbert. One game out of eighty-two. This was the entire season.
So what happened? By halftime, the Cavs were down 19 points. By the end of the third quarter, Miami’s starters went to the bench and stayed there. At game’s end, the only thing that kept the Heat from hanging a +30 on the Cavs was a meaningless Jawad Williams layup in traffic.
Scott couldn’t keep his bench from joking with LeBron during dead-ball situations, even after he explicitly jammed them on it during halftime. Not a single Cav fouled LeBron hard on his way to the rim. Instead, James was allowed to do whatever he wanted, however he wanted. He was given permission, in many ways, to feel comfortable on the court, even as 20,562 paying customers did everything in their power to try to counter-act it.
It’s not that James laid 38 points on the Cavs in 29 minutes. It’s how he was allowed to do it.
Sometimes it’s impossible to stop a player with James’s skill level from exploding. But it can be made more difficult if his defenders exert effort, persistence, tenacity, toughness—all of the elements Scott has preached since signing his contract. The Cavs showed none of those things tonight. The players are complicit to a degree, but a finger has to be pointed at the coaching staff as well. I know which one I want to use right now.
Had the Cavs won or at least been competitive in last night’s game, I could see them gaining confidence, buying into Scott’s system, playing for something larger than just one game, possibly eking their way into the playoffs. But to be donkey-punched like they were last night means the only thing that matters now is rebuilding the team as quickly as possible, and the players know it. I find it hard to believe that they’re going to suddenly go all in on Scott’s system at some later point in the season. Last night may already have been his Waterloo, at least with this roster.
This means that the worst possible outcome for the 2010-11 season is the #8 seed in the playoffs. The Cavs as an organization need to start looking toward the future and the lottery. The trade clock needs to start on every member of the roster with any name value. This means Varejao, Jamison, Mo Williams, and even JJ Hickson. (My take after watching him for the past three years: Chris Grant should sell high while other teams are still enamored with his potential and his shiny new jump shot. Because he still can’t consistently hold onto a rebound, catch a pass, or defend any player of merit.) The talent evaluators need to see if players like Christian Eyenga, Manny Harris, and Samardo Samuels have any real shot at contributing at an NBA level.
In short, if last night’s game really was the 2010-11 Cavs’ playoffs, they were shown the exit in just as embarrassing a fashion as the 2009-10 Cavs in the Eastern Conference Semis. And that means that it’s time to re-evaluate. Again. And if I know anything about Dan Gilbert, I feel like Scott may have the least job security of any rebuilding coach in league history. If that’s indeed the case, right now I am 100% in Gilbert’s corner in that line of thinking.
