It's safe to call Toronto's start a disappointment: Canucks were thinking conference championship, not below .500 ball into December. As such, impeccably dressed Sam Mitchell has seen the end of his Raptors tenure. The team has named assistant Jay Triano (a former captain and coach of Canada's national team) as the interim man in charge.Doug Smith of the Toronto Star reports that the lack of effort shown by the team in Tuesday's 132-93 disaster against Denver set Bryan Colangelo's mind. If anything, the game highlighted what has become an abysmal Toronto defense, ranked 26th in the league in opponents points per possession. Last season, Toronto's D was slightly above average. You'd think adding Jermaine O'Neal, one of this era's elite post defenders, would help. It has not.
If you took a time machine to 2005 when Colangelo took Toronto's reigns, and you said Smitch -- the antithesis of the prototypical Colangelo coach -- would be around until December 2008, we would have all called you crazy. (I mean, you have a time machine and you're worried about the Toronto Raptors coaching job? Weirdo.) Mitchell stuck around longer than he had any business to, and he'll get another job. Hopefully his next gig will have a team that better fits his persona/philosophy (smashmouth, defensive basketball).
Triano becomes the league's first Canadian-born head coach. I have a hunch he's also the first NBA head coach who saw Rent on Broadway more than 10 times and whose favo(u)rite musician is Sarah McLachlan.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Avery Johnson and Sam Mitchell get fired...D'antoni changes teams. Being coach of the year doesn't seem to matter much. Byron Scott might be next to get the boot!
Flip Saunders?
Yes, the Raptors are underperforming, but egregiously enough to fire the coach? There could very well be anti-Mitchell sentiment in the locker room (I would hope Colangelo at least ran this by Bosh's people to see what his reaction would be), but this team isn't well-enough constructed to be expecting a conference championship.
Bosh is a blue-chipper and Calderon is solid -- a Chauncey type who doesn't necessarily light up the box score but who gets the job done for his team and is serially underrated -- and that's about it. Bargnani, Parker, Moon, O'Neal -- these are all solid role players, but there's nobody to carry the offense when Bosh isn't on the floor. They're just system guys.
Parker and Moon are feisty, but as good as they are on the defensive end, they're not stoppers in the mold of Bruce Bowen or even Ira Newble. They're just guys who don't make a lot of mistakes, and the bench is nearly nonexistant, with only shooter Jason Kapono and whoever doesn't start between Bargnani's offense and Moon's defense.
Yes, having a team full of role players means that they need to be given roles to succeed in, and that's up to the coach, but there's a distinct lack of talent in Toronto and I don't see how this roster could be reasonably expected to be in the same discussion as Detroit, Miami, or even Atlanta for first round home court advantage. Sam Mitchell was not the problem.
Thanks for the correct spelling ;)