Sean Deveney of the Sporting News looks at the increasing disposability of NBA head coaches: “The sense among coaches is that front offices are minimizing their importance, beginning to see them as interchangeable. When it has come time to reward coaches who have won, teams have shown reluctance, and, in two notable examples, chose to replace a successful coach with a younger, cheaper alternative. That happened in Denver, where reigning Coach of the Year George Karl was let go when he could not come to an agreement on a contract, replaced by Brian Shaw. It happened, too, in Memphis, where Dave Joerger took over for Lionel Hollins after Hollins led the team to the conference finals. Neither Shaw nor Joerger had previous head coaching experience. The Clippers did not re-sign coach Vinny Del Negro, who won 56 games and the franchise’s first-ever division title last year, but replaced him with the more expensive and experienced Doc Rivers. Still, the impact is there—NBA coaches these days are a besieged lot. Winning used to bring job security. Now, no one is quite sure what the key is to keeping one’s job. “I think right now, the 13 changes have scared a lot of coaches,” said Karl, who is working as an ESPN analyst now. “When you have three coaches who won 57, 56 and 56 get dismissed, and move on, it’s just difficult to understand. You have nine new coaches who have never coached an NBA game, and I am not saying there are not nine assistant coaches who are qualified to be good head coaches, but I just think the whole puzzle right now is, it’s too much. It’s too much change, it’s too much drastic reaction to failure and I think the pendulum will swing back to more realistic opinion of it all.” “
Mitch Kupchak doesn’t expect Kobe Bryant to return in next two weeks http://t.co/T0mJ59x08m
— Eric Pincus (@EricPincus) November 11, 2013
The Pacers are 7-0 and playing like the best team in the game. Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com reports: “The Indiana Pacers were still basking in a 96-91 victory over the Brooklyn Nets that was satisfying for so many reasons. It made them 7-0 on the young season and finished perfect off one of those dreaded four-games-in-five-night stretches. It was their best road win to this point. And they did it by out-executing the Nets over the final minute in a game they didn’t think they’d have won a year ago at this time. But the Heat, the team that put them out of the playoffs the past two seasons, are never far from the Pacers’ minds. And, even in November, neither are the standings. “We believe in this locker room that we can get the No. 1 seed and we started the year with that attitude,” said Pacers forward David West after registering 18 points and eight rebounds. “The fact that Game 7 of the conference finals wasn’t in our home building we felt was the difference in a trip to the Finals, and we’re going to do everything in our power to get a Game 7 in our building. And we have to start from the beginning of the season.” Saturday night, the Pacers were playing in a reasonably hostile environment against a Nets team that was badly looking to get a statement victory. After blowing one in Washington on Friday night, the expectation-laded Nets were 2-3 and looking for a pivot point. With three minutes to play it was a three-point game, and the Nets had their $80 million starting lineup out there, one loaded with experience and savvy. Yet it was the Pacers who made the clutch plays, got the important defensive stops and made the icing free throws. “A year ago we don’t win a game like this,” Paul George said.”FOR PREVIOUS BLOGS, CLICK HERE
Dan Malone is in his fourth year as a journalism student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent this summer as a features intern at the Cape Cod Times. He blogs, edits and learns things on the fly for Sheridan Hoops. Follow him on Twitter.
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It says a lot that Copeland would rather sit on Indiana’s bench than get playing time in the trainwreck in New York.