The Dame move didn’t work because of poorly timed injuries, cap restrictions and having Doc at the wheel. Giannis/Khris/Dame played a whopping 0 minutes together in the playoffs.

I’d argue a better coach than either Griffin or Doc would have been able to scheme something to make an offense with two high-usage players like them work.

Those two coaches were literally the worst to get them to co-exist. Yet they still somehow managed to win the NBA Cup despite the trash coaching.

Jeff was also only here like 3 months lol

Jeff Teague averaged 2 handshakes and 7 water bottle assists in his time in MIL. If guys like Middleton, Jrue, Lopez feel the same, then that would mean something.

That’s why I didn’t really want him at Lakers. Luka and Giannis sounds great and there’s absolutely a chance where they play great together and win a championship. But Giannis would have to adapt a bit for that. Be more focused on defense and just setting picks and catching lobs on offense. But I don’t think he wants that and there’s a much bigger chance they wouldn’t work well together and there’d be a lot of drama

Jeff Teague has no reason to hate. He played with Giannis for 1 year and they won the championship that year. What exactly should he have changed?

I’d argue Giannis-Dame didn’t work because of the surrounding roster and injuries… This guy is a two time MVP and NBA champion, this to me is typical Doc (you know i didn’t work because of that guy over there)

Can you imagine how bad he’d be without the therapy?

Yah it’s not an unreasonable take at all and makes a lot of sense

Doc also has a history of blaming his players for his failures and taking absolutely no accountability for anything

Not very well obviously. Either you fix the flaw or don’t shit on the player for having the flaw. No inbetween

Agreed, I’ve been saying this for years.

Offensively maybe, but Giannis it was a significantly better defender than Westbrook.

Nah westbrook is probably the all time best interior passer ever. Thats where he made his money. Giannis is limited to kicking out for 3 in comparison.

He’s way, way, way better than Westbrook.

Edit: Man, people are so high on shitting on Giannis today that they’re trying to convince themselves to elevate Westbrook to his level. Bizarre.

The best Run and Dunk™ man

i mean love Russ and think he’s gotten too much criticism but let’s also keep perspective. Even to get to the point of being “Big Man Westbrook” like another commenter said, Giannis had to develop a lot more, physically, mentally, and in terms of his skillset, than Westbrook did.

I mean yeah, that’s literally what winning a chip does as the main guy - it validates that your game can win at the highest level. Dude had a 50 piece to close it out

And the ring was just because he injured kyrie

If you are a pro you listen to feedback to get better. You work on your weaknesses. Think of the future… what will Giannis be when he ages? Doesn’t seem like his game will age well.

I don’t even like doc rivers but don’t know if I love that idea. Should star players only want to listen to coaches like Jason Kid or Steve Nash who had amazing primes?

“Why should Giannis want to listen to him?” and that’s why Giannis continued to fail after the ring to the point where the Bucks had 3 coaches on their payroll all at the same time

Yea he is like his problem is execution well that’s your job to set him up plays etc lol.

Wade & Bosh: Giannis doesn’t have the IQ or durability to adopt a new small ball and move up a position. If he did, he would’ve done it by now.

Love & Kyrie: Giannis can’t carry an interior defence by himself (even in his DPOY phase he was a help defence and weakside guy; never showed the rim protection LeBron did in the ‘16 finals).

AD: He’s not a good enough floor general to make Davis into one of the most efficient playoff scorers of all time.

Giannis had an absolutely elite defensive supporting cast and - more importantly - atrocious opposition. He was a great player that season but there’s nothing versatile about his game and he never really warranted comparisions to LeBron.

That run they beat a ton of weak competition due to injuries.

They barely beat an injury plagued nets team in 7 games.

Hawks who were probably one of the weakest ECF opponents in a while also dealt with injuries in the ECF like missing Trae Young for 2 games.

And the suns also faced injury plagued competition to get to the finals for the bucks to play.

That’s not exactly how I remember it going down. As I recall, they hired him on to be a consultant to lead their coach search, and not long after that Doc Rivers was the coach. He fucking hired himself.

I mean you never even coach before so

The problem is it’s all he ever does, I’ve never seen him talking about how his scheme was wrong or he should’ve done something different. It’s always the players. Even if it’s true that it’s the players, a good coach doesn’t say that.

I haven’t watched the podcast so my question is, did he also analyze his coaching for that same period? If he critized himself for not being able to put a respectable defense with that roster i would give more weight to his opinion. Otherwise its just trying to find excuses for the teams performane so he doesnt get any blame

He can, it’s just that there’s always a cloud of disingenuousness with Doc and his pattern of throwing players under the bus. Even ones he’s actively coaching lol

Are you talking about Doc or Giannis here

while i agree giannis could be a hard to coach player i’d find it more believable from anyone but doc lmao. dude is literally the poster child for not taking accountability for being a shit coach.

Things can have validity to them but still shouldn’t be said. Especially by one of your former coaches. It’s a bitch move. He didn’t like it so much when critics were saying he was an awful coach that didn’t make adjustments. If you’re going to criticize a former player then you should also criticize yourself too.

Fine I guess we’ll take him to put next to Luka, you guys really twisted my arm.

Like Herro…. should have traded anyone but him…

Honestly the warriors are the one team who I thought it would work with pretty perfectly. But they would have had to convinced Milwaukee to take jimmy and that was a nonstarter

I think Steph and company could make it work, also the dynamic of that team would force giannis to try and fit in more imo. It wouldn’t be “his” team

I don’t think the warriors are a hard fit at all, in fairness it’s likely the best fit for Gianni’s. Because of Steph gravity you don’t need to change Gianni’s it just helps him do what he’s already great at.

Your argument doesn’t make any sense. Being “easy” to build around does not directly correlate with your number of chips.

You can be the easiest superstar to build around and just have one chip, because a lot of stuff comes into play like injuries, role players, the front office, etc.

You can be a plug & play superstar that plays well with almost anyone, incredibly easy to build around, but your front office is absolute shit. That doesn’t mean they’re not easy to build around though.

Wemby seems really easy to build around. He anchors your defense and discourages tons of layups and dunks. You just need four competent players around him and you’re a contender.

It also probably extremely difficult to convince a player who’s won so many awards playing a specific way to change.

Defense? Passing? Bullshit to claim a mvp and championship 1a barely does anything outside of it

Very coachable and learnable skill, which is why all the high lottery picks who have had criticisms about their general passing skill and/pr read-and-react play have all developed leaps and bounds as well. You know, Jaylen Brown, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine, Brandon Ingram, DeAndre Ayton, JJJ, RJ Barrett and so on… all so very easily have developed leaps and bounds in “executing aka reading and reacting to the defense” and have little trouble with it at all.

Esp compared to Giannis… who wasn’t a lottery pick… and was extremely raw when he came into the league… 2 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than he is now…

Doc Rivers sucks

I described giannis as a superstar with a limited game on comparison to other superstars. He has been a top 5 player for 7 years. This barely qualifies as criticism. He cant shoot, you have to build around that. His defense isnt dpoy caliber anymore. You have to build around that. He isnt an embiid level mis range creator or jokic level passer. But nobody can run and dunk like giannis can for an efficient 30 ppg. maybe wemby can match his current 2 way production thats it.

If giannis was an embiid level free throw shooter, hes the goat. Every player has issues.

Giannis has missed more playoff series than embiid which is funny you mention the injuries. Embiid has never outright missed a series.  Giannis missed most of 2 first round series and the bucks lost cause of it. Embiid missed 3 games from appendicitis but it ended with the celtics blowing a 3-1 lead.

Giannis’  legacy is basically carried by the singular ring. Which is valid. That was a great run from the bucks.  But what if kyrie never hurt his ankle and harden didnt play on a ground beef hamstring. Does kds toe being 2 inches shorter ruin giannis’ legacy or change how i feel about him as a player? Absolutlely not. The ring or no ring doesnt matter to me in this conversation.

If you build the perfect team around Giannis he will take you further but Embiid will give you a better floor of performance.

Embiid can self create 33 points per game and is also an elite 2 man game. Look at maxey, he goes from all nba to jalen green with aura when embiid isnt creating for him. Embiid is also a true defensive foundation as hes a rim protecting 5. Embiid has played on rosters with zero entry passing, ben simmons as his co star, zero defensive personnel.

I never said any scheme, i said he is way easier to buile around. he has the skills to help many archetypes of players without needing to helped himself. Hes a true offensive creator. He has self creation from the mid range, a 3 point shot for floor spacing (in the past), can play in the post and the paint, can be a short roll play finisher (harden era). He can anchor a defense as a true rim protecting 5.  Embiid is the peak form of a traditional center. Thats why i said that. He does everything which is why he can slot himself onto pretty much any team. Peak embiid was getting doubled on the short roll. You had an automatic maxey drive or kick out into the corner just off a free 3v5 advantage that embiid created off most plays.

Embiid could self create an efficient 33 ppg, anchor a top tier defense as a rim protecting 5 and run a 2 man game with any guard. Those are skills that sre very easy to play around. Embiid has lead a million different sixers rosters to high seeds. He has never had a consistent team and its due to the fact that you can put anybody around embiid and make a good team where he shoulders the load on both ends and makes everyones life around him easier.

Different issue

Not by much. I was wishing sometimes that he’d just take potty shots at the free throw line because we were over it with all the bricks

He benefitted from good teams. I watched his dumbass coach the Celtics, he’s lucky he had Allen, Pierce and Garnett to drag him to a championship

Yea it’s funny everyone always throws the coach under the bus but at the end of the day the players are the ones out there playing. A coach can only do so much

That “most stacked roster” was 5th in championship odds in the preseason. You weren’t even watching basketball at that point

I mean hes probably the best we’ve seen, regardless of accomplishments. I still have him battling with Wilt for #2, but like Wilt and Jordan played in a very much worse league.

Ah, a world where Kobe is still above LeBron all time…r/NBA’s worst nightmare

Lebron would still have 3 nba championships without it, without Boston big 3 doc’s greatest coaching achievement would be repeatedly choking away 3-1 leads

Theres no reason that Celtics team going 7 against that Hawks team.

it was a high-fat breakfast, the bacon and hash browns, hard to resist, costed them.

Both can be true in that Giannis is difficult to coach and that Doc has a history of deflecting accountability.

Yeah I would probably be more likely to believe it coming from a coach that doesn’t have a history for blaming everybody but himself.

It’s not about being super fluid lol

It’s about processing a defense to make the simple, right pass, which he’s underwhelming at

Ex. At the top of key he has the dumb habit of trying to make the homerun pass to the corner rather than swinging it to the wing and allowing the wing player to get it to the corner man

It’s simple basketball

Niko jovic shows a better ability to make the simple, right pass than Giannis

You’re star player cannot have a low IQ/understanding of fundamental basketball

For real, it’s Giannis yall. You know what you’re getting when he’s on your team. We’ve seen the ceiling (championship), a team needs to accept him if they’d like to accept his ceiling as well.

Well yeah, they gutted the roster to add him. Of course they’d be awful without Giannis AND last year’s contributors

Other NBA players who im sure are genius passers and elite defenders and so on and so forth

Listen, the criticisms of Giannis are 100% valid in a sense but I truly think we’re losing a lot of perspective on his journey with this convo. I’m not even talking about the whole poor immigrant perspective. Just as a developmental project, Giannis was a wet noodle when he came into this league compared to now. He is the 99th percentile outcome of where he started as a player. Sure, he could be better, but really how much better can we expect him to get? There are a hundred Kevin Knoxes and Tidjuane Salauns and Bruno Caboclos and Stanley Johnsons and Thon Makers and Cam Reddishes and… you get the point. A bunch of skinny rake wings and bigs everyone said would amount to this and that and ended up doing nothing, and here we are talking about a 2 time MVP lol

Yeah like James Harden who infamously choked in every playoff run he had

You have Doc Derangement Syndrome. Doc is like top five all time in playoff wins and top ten all time in wins but he’s somehow not a good coach. Use your head.

Yes, he tried to coach and it didn’t work. I’m not sure how that is his players fault, if sounds like (and we already know) he is a terrible coach.

He has tried to do it in multiple teams with multiple superstars and yet they always seem to collapse when he is around.

The fact is: if Doc admits he couldn’t coach Giannis, to me that’s a fireable offense. Find someone who can do the job. And if Giannis truly isn’t coachable (which has never really been proven, certainly not part of the narrative when Doc was actually in a position to do something about it), then Giannis should have been shopped earlier (after many other steps taken, like management sitting him down and discussing). But it’s all hypothetical right now, because we know Doc always blames others, and we know he failed miserably with the Bucks, so we don’t actually need for Giannis to be uncoachable to explain what Doc is saying.

My opinion is: if a coach can’t do his job (coaching players), then he should let management know and probably be fired. I know it’s hard, but that’s why coaches get paid big bucks. We have no idea how Doc talked with Giannis or what he said–all we know is that after clearly failing, NOW he tells us he wasn’t capable of coaching Giannis. Good timing, Doc.

People just love to parrot old talking points for karma

Making public statements like this is classless. Whether he’s right or wrong.