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After four games of each playoff series have been played, we have had the chance to evaluate every team in depth.
While a couple of teams have exceeded expectations and have made stellar runs so far, we’ve seen a number of teams let fans down in one way or another.
The following five teams have all the star power in the world but have simply been unable to perform anywhere close to their ceiling. They are all languishing at the floor of their capabilities, and are finding it way too difficult to find a mantra for success.
Much of the blame for such a state of affairs has to be laid on the head coach’s feet in every single case. And thus, we rank the coaches whose teams have played so far below potential this postseason that their management would be better off letting these head coaches go in the offseason.
5 Joe Prunty
A team shooting 54.1 per cent on its field goal attempts (lead the league) should not be tied at 2-2 in a series against a team missing three important players, including two All-Stars.
Joe Prunty, in his tenure as interim coach, has been below-par and is nowhere near capable of filling in for the head coaching job full-time.
As a former assistant for Gregg Popovich, it should be assumed that Prunty is capable of making reads that casual fans are able to. For instance, given that the Bucks have an objectively weak center rotation that has got even weaker after John Henson’s injury, it makes sense to play a 6’11” forward with a 7’4″ wingspan at center.
But instead, Tyler Zeller has been named to the starting line-up and has not made any impact whatsoever. Giannis Antetokoumpo being in the post every possession for a continued stretch is basically a guarantee of an offensive bailout in the worst-case scenario, but such a simple idea does not seem to be good enough for Prunty.
He neglected to place Malcolm Brogdon in the starting line-up for the first two games, opting instead to ease him back into the setup. That was one of the major reasons why the Bucks got outmatched in the backcourt. With all due respect to Terry Rozier and Jaylen Brown, veterans like Snell and Bledsoe shouldn’t be getting cooked as they did in the first two games of the series.
Jabari Parker has not been able to find any rhythm, and it was expected that he would be a featured scorer on their roster. All-in-all, this is not a good look for Prunty on the sidelines.
(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
4 Terry Stotts
The very fact that the Trail Blazers have been blown right out of the water by the Pelicans in four games should be enough to show a disparity in the coaching between the two sides. But the issues with Stotts’ coaching go deeper than that.
The Pelicans aggressively double-teamed Damian Lillard for the length of their series and used Holiday to stifle Lillard’s shooting from deep. It is OK to let things pass by him for one game, but Stotts never got Lillard playing off the ball as he should have, resulting in the All-Star playing the worst playoff series of his career.
Alvin Gentry did not use these tactics on CJ McCollum, and Stotts should have used this opportunity to shift the responsibility of offensive mainstay from one high-scoring guard to another.
Stotts did not run any plays for Lillard to come off screens or shoot threes on drive-and-kicks. Such opportunities that he did get were basically in-game improvisations by the players.
Stotts could also have done a lot better than allowing Holiday and Davis to put up gaudy point totals against his team three times out of four in the series. This Blazers team looks like it has hit a glass ceiling, and the front office might consider blowing up the roster this offseason.
If at all they commit to a rebuild, however, the first move they make should be the firing of the head coach who got swept in the first round despite homecourt advantage.
3 Ty Lue
The Cavaliers are tied with the Pacers at 2-2 after the homestand for both teams ended. But given the roster strength of the Cavs, this feels like a thoroughly weak spot to be in against a team that has neither more depth nor more star power.
Even Nate McMillan has not been at his best – if he hadn’t sat Victor Oladipo out for so long in Game 2, the Pacers would have had an even better chance of taking it, which they didn’t. And that says a lot about Ty Lue’s coaching.
(AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
He messed up big time in Game 1 by moving Jeff Green and Rodney Hood into the starting line-up. Neither of the players played much defence, or indeed contributed any offense at all, as the Cavaliers got blown out 98-80.
While he did make amends for Game 2 by starting JR Smith and Kyle Korver in their places, he tried to keep introducing Tristan Thompson into his rotations in the subsequent games. Thompson has not been himself this season, and the minutes he saw on the floor were essentially inconsequential to the Cavs who would have been better served with Nance taking those minutes and building playoff experience.
The one thing Lue can be credited with getting right is the trapping scheme that he’s set up for Oladipo. But it has left more than one Pacer player wide open, and more often than not Oladipo played through the double-teams without a fuss.
Lue has been unable to find LeBron James any of the rest his 33-year-old body requires, resulting in James playing north of 46 minutes in three of the four games. He has nothing in his playbook, and the Cavs’ offensive schemes stink to the high heavens.
If at all the Cavs are lucky enough to retain LeBron’s services past this summer, they should seriously consider firing a coach who has simply not coached this team to anywhere near their full potential.
2 Tom Thibodeau
To say that the Timberwolves have underperformed through 86 games played this season would be massively underselling the problems that viewers can see from the eye test. The Minnesota franchise has made it to the playoffs and is still alive after four games purely because of the talent they have, and not due to any coaching maneuvers made by Thibs.
In truth, Tom Thibodeau looks like a coach who would have thrived in the 90s era of basketball rather than now. He has run his starters into the ground all season long – three of their starters rank among the top 20 in the league for minutes played per game.
Despite acquiring adequate talent, all Thibodeau has used them as is fodder for extreme garbage time, instead of getting all his players into a rhythm and in readiness to take the floor at any point of time.
On top of that, Karl-Anthony Towns has got hardly any shots at all. Despite being a top-20 3-point shooter over the course of the regular season (percentage-wise), Thibodeau seems to have expressly denied him a green light from downtown, which makes zero basketball sense.
All-in-all, this is a massively messed-up situation at Minnesota as Thibs is both the coach as well as the GM for the franchise, and surprisingly it is his work as a GM that has been better despite his pedigree at the touchline.
(AP Photo/Jim Mone)
1 Billy Donovan
Oh, the travails of coaching a megastar.
Billy Donovan has genuinely tried to make the best of his roster, but his lack of appreciation for the finer points of modern NBA offense have left the Thunder in the wake of their Western Conference rivals in the three years that he’s been in the head coaching role.
He’s left the keys to his offense to Russell Westbrook, who’s one of the most lethargic off-ball players in the entire league. Because of his propensity to stand in the corner instead of doing any kind of off-ball facilitating, Donovan has been unable to get a motion offense going.
But the rest of the Thunder’s issues do arise from bad coaching, and they’re down 3-1 to the Utah Jazz because of this. In Games 3 and 4 Donovan was unable to get his stars the kind of looks they should’ve been getting. His players shot poorly on top of that, compounding his problem.
(Wikipedia Commons)
Losing to the Jazz in blowouts, away from home, in such ignominious fashion must hurt morale a lot, especially that of Westbrook. It is the reality of this season, however, that all 3 stars on the Thunder roster have put in the work defensively, but have been unable to get anything going on offense for the most part.
It’s all down to the coaching and the pick-and-roll offense which the Thunder seem to have resolved to take to their graveyard. It works a few times every game, but they are so predictable these days that practically every team has by now worked out a way around it.
And Donovan has simply been unable to adjust.
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