Had it been Casey.

[Diesel]

Dawayne Casey will soon be sporting a championship ring after masterminding the Mavs defense. Last offseason , Our Coaching position came down to LD vs. Casey and we took LD.

Had it been Casey, where would we be??

[NineOhTheRino]

Woody has a ring. Where did it get him? The real discussion should question the net benefit of firing Woody then hiring his assistant. Does not matter what you think about Woody. I don't see how anyone can disagree that the Hawks would have been better off with Woody and LD.

and the media makes it sound as if the Mavs did something special on defense. They played some zone but I didn't see much difference in what Doc and LF tried against LeBron and gang. This time instead of making the circus shot Bron and Wade missed.

In this case we are giving these coaches too much credit for the teams success, and in Woody's case we gave too much blame for the team's playoff failures.

Edited June 13, 2011 by NineOhTheRino

[Guest]

Dirk also gave Avery the credit for a lot of the defensive philosophy, said that Carlisle kept it in place.

[gsuteke]

Maybe he'd bury Smoove on the bench when he started making bad basketball decisions? Maybe he wouldn't have kept running Bibby out there when he was obviously hurting the team. We'll never know though.

[AHF]

Woody has a ring. Where did it get him? The real discussion should question the net benefit of firing Woody then hiring his assistant. Does not matter what you think about Woody. I don't see how anyone can disagree that the Hawks would have been better off with Woody and LD.

Last postseason was a huge strategic fail by our coaching staff. We did not adjust to the adjustments made by the Bucks and almost lost to one of the least talented "playoff" teams in memory. Against Orlando our auto-switch D and iso offense resulted in the worse series beatdown in NBA history - one with no real strategic adjustments.

This year we were better prepared and adjusted. That seems like an improvement to me.

[AHawks89]

LD will be a great coach. Can't forget it was his first year as the boss.

[capstone21]

I think LD did an admirable job

[sturt]

I was probably among the bigger Casey cheerleaders, but I'm not regretting LD at all. Who's to say if Casey would have exceeded LD's work? For all we know at the moment, Casey is the next coaching genius... or next coaching flunkee... but probably merely average, or ever-so-slightly better or worse.

[thecampster]

Let's remember the myriad of games missed due to injuries and the myriad of games played through injury (horf, smith, johnson, williams all played 20 or more games while nursing some ailment).

As a reminder games missed:

JJ - 10

Smith - 5

Horf - 5

Crawford - 6

Williams - 17

Hinrich/Bibby - 2

Of your top 6 in the rotation, that's 45 games missed due to injury but JJ played through the elbow injury for most of the first 18 games, Smith had bad knees for most of the last 3 months and Horford hurt his back with 25 or so games left in the year.

The previous year that group only missed 14 games due to injury. Woody had a much easier road to hoe in that sense.

[lethalweapon3]

...not only that, but Woody had an easier row to hoe, too! (runs and hides from DJlaysitup)

I was a proponent for Dwane when the Hawks went for LD instead, but I think they'd be looking at about the same time-of-exit for this particular season. Maybe a better record in regular-season, maybe. Maybe not so many blowout collapses. Maybe a kinder, gentler exit. But who knows for sure?

There would have been a lot more player movement earlier in the season to get Casey the defensive skills he'd want on the floor (Bibby and Craw would be gone), we'd probably not have added Jason Collins for strategic purposes, and we'd definitely not have added J-Pow. Also most if not all of the assistants would be gone. What replacements we'd have for all those guys would have made a better assessment of where we'd be under Casey.

LD was certainly the best coach suited to the personnel the Hawks started the season with.

~lw3