The cool thing about twitter is that at times, you really get a sense of what certain athletes think of situations of others around the league that you would otherwise never hear about.
Some may express their opinions outright, while others reveal their thoughts in a more subtle manner – perhaps during a conversation with a friend. The latter form is how we now know that Stephon Marbury – the Michael Jordan of China – thinks the Golden State Warriors mistreated Mark Jackson:
@MarkJackson13 @TBranchNYK_chat thanks!! Means a lot coming from you.. They did you dirty in the field but something better is coming.
— I AM PEACE STAR (@StarburyMarbury) September 6, 2014
The Warriors fired Jackson this summer despite a 51-31 record – their best in more than two decades – in the regular season and taking the Los Angeles Clippers to seven games without center Andrew Bogut. To the average viewer from the outside looking in, the coach was instrumental in turning the franchise around, so firing him instead of giving him an extension probably looked like a screw job.
Of course, it’s not that simple. While it’s true that Jackson’s voice and leadership helped the Warriors change their culture, that reasoning alone can’t be enough to extend him if he had other fundamental flaws that would disturb the organization. As last season progressed, it started to become pretty clear that they could only go so far with him as the coach for a number of reasons.
Defensively, he helped the team become one of the best in the league. No one can take that away from him. Offensively, though, it was a nightmare to watch them function, be it the over-reliance on Stephen Curry (the result would sometimes be an inordinate amount of turnovers from the talented point guard) or the tendency to let various players on the team isolate against “mismatches” over and over again rather than relying on more of a team concept. Iso can be great if utilized properly with players who are good at doing it in certain situations. It’s not so good if you keep going to it with players who aren’t great at creating their own shots like David Lee, or even terrible at it like Harrison Barnes. With the amount of talent on the roster, it just didn’t make sense for the team to be ranked 13th in the league on offense.
Lets use Barnes as a primary example of Jackson’s biggest flaw: the unwillingness to adjust. Barnes shot 39.9 percent from the field last season, and that doesn’t even begin to explain how much worse he got throughout the season. At some point, it got so bad that any time he touched the ball, you knew something bad was going to happen and couldn’t help but wonder why this continued to happen. In the month of March, he shot 29.6 percent from the field – unfathomably bad. Still, he was regularly playing 26 minutes while continuing to get touches in the post and wasting possessions instead of being used in a way where he could be a more effective player. Meanwhile, a giant Australian who converted on nearly 63 percent of his field goal attempts never received such touches in the paint and was repeatedly overlooked on offense.
Jackson went with this ridiculous method of going to Barnes until the very bitter end: with under two minutes left in Game 6 of the playoffs against the Clippers in an elimination situation, he went to Barnes in the post to “take advantage of a mismatch” two consecutive times and relied on him to make a play. The concept behind that move after everything that happened in the season was simply mind-boggling, regardless of the results. Even if Barnes was a competent post-up or iso player, which he so flipping clearly wasn’t, that should not be your choice of offensive possession with your season on the line (twice!) on a team that has Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala.
There was a certain stubbornness about the way Jackson operated, and he was never going to change no matter what anyone said. That stubbornness extended off the court as well, and it’s what ultimately turned the front office and even some of his own coaching staff against him, as detailed by Jesse Taylor of WarriorsWorld:
Mark Jackson turned out to be a metaphorical cancer, creating his own devils within the Warriors organization as he fought to rally his players around him. This is according to non-management sources from within the Warriors locker room (as recently as Saturday’s Game 7 season finale in Los Angeles) who expressed a desire to tell “the real story” behind Jackson’s dismissal. This is their account.
Jackson, in conjunction with Lindsey Hunter and Pete Myers, worked to create false enemies within the Warriors organization as a means to motivate his players and provide built-in excuses if he failed.
When hired, Jackson claimed he was creating a new culture; that “things be changin’ in the Bay Area.” However, outside of his inner circle, he was creating a culture of fear. Warriors staff members were afraid to speak with Jackson, who had proven over and over that he would be friendly to your face and rip you behind your back. If you weren’t in his inner circle, you were the enemy. And he made sure the players got that message.
He worked to convince players that he was the only one who believed in them. He created an “us against the world” mentality. He guaranteed a playoff appearance in his first season; a perfect example of a leader creating a big hairy audacious goal that is near impossible to reach. But it set a tone.
So did the Warriors really do Jackson dirty, as Marbury put it? To some, it will appear that way. To those who followed everything that happened with Jackson on and off the court, they know the Warriors did what needed to be done.
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James Park is a blogger and editor of Sheridan Hoops. Follow him on twitter @SheridanBlog.