Does Mike Brown Know What he is Doing, Part 2: Would Someone Either Fire Mike Brown or Teach him how to Organize an Offense?

Following their four games to two defeat to the Boston Celtics in the 2010 playoffs, the Cleveland Cavaliers should fire their coach Mike Brown, who will then undoubtedly be given a second chance at Minnesota or Sacramento or some team like that. Why? Because very simply, his coaching was horrendous in this series and, just as or more importantly, if the Cavaliers don’t fire this coach, LeBron James will most likely go to another team in the off season, whereas if they do fire Brown and they get a new coach James likes, James might decide to stay.

If LeBron James leaves, the Cavaliers will be lucky just to make the playoffs at all.

Here in Part two of why Coach Brown needs to go (or completely change how he coaches) we look at how badly and unprofessionally the Cleveland offense performed. Specifically, we look at how it was badly organized and how that led to bad playoff results.

LeBron James may have been bad in this series (relatively speaking of course) but the Cavaliers were not going to win this series or the 2010 NBA Championship with the shoddy coaching they had in this series regardless of what LeBron might do. Although he would never admit it in public, and although it might just be an unconscious thing, I’ll bet you that LeBron James realized in some way shape or form during game five (and probably a little earlier than that) that the Cavaliers were doomed because of poor offense and because of wrong playing time allocations. In a future report we will report on all the playing time errors but here we’ll concentrate on the offensive disaster.

We now know the answer to the most important Cavaliers’ question: were the Cavaliers too reliant on LeBron James the last few years in the regular season and in the playoffs? The answer is without any doubt now yes. The Cavaliers backed themselves into a corner by over relying on James for too many things too much of the time. All the Boston Celtics had to do in this series was to keep Cleveland backed into that corner the Cavaliers had put themselves in. When everything including the coaching is less intense in the regular season, the Cavaliers can and have gotten away with LeBron mania, but it has been a flop to one extent or another year after year in the playoffs.

Every year in the playoffs, the Cavaliers can only go so far with LeBron James playing, roughly speaking, three positions at once. The Cavaliers have been doomed as soon as they run into a high quality Coach armed with a healthy, top of the line roster. So why don’t we see who those high quality coaches were that sunk the Cavaliers each year:

2010 Doc Rivers sinks the Cavaliers in the playoffs in round two.
2009 Stan Van Gundy sinks the Cavaliers in the playoffs in round three.
2008 Doc Rivers sinks the Cavaliers in the playoffs in round two.
2007 Greg Popovich sinks the Cavaliers in the playoffs in round four, the Championship
2006 Flip Saunders sinks the Cavaliers in the playoffs in round two.

Yes, I know obviously there were also players on the opposing team who sunk the Cavaliers, but I intentionally left them out so that you can see that Coach Mike Brown and LeBron and the Cavaliers have been alright every year until they finally run into a Coach who is following the correct ways for playoff success and who has the players who can execute the correct ways. All four of those coaches understand and agree to the concepts of organizing around positions and to the need to at all costs avoid disorganization and bad organization on offense. And they also agree to one extent or another with the power point guard concept, depending of course in any given year on exactly how good the point guard they have is.

This year Doc Rivers can go all the way with the power point guard concept because Rajon Rondo is playing as one of the best point guards of all time these days. Doc Rivers knows a very good thing when he sees it and he knows you have to play a very good thing for all its worth if you want to win the Quest.

The biggest way the Cavaliers’ over relied on LeBron James was in playmaking. While you can get away in the regular season with one guy making both a huge number of shots and a large number of assists game after game after game, in the playoffs that is far more difficult to do even for the historically great LeBron James. He is not a magician. It’s much more difficult to score in the paint in the playoffs. And teams trap, double, harass, and confound players in the playoffs that they know have too many responsibilities. To the other team, any player with too many responsibilities is like blood in the water to sharks.

All historically great players need at least one more bona fide superstar playing with them, with that other superstar responsible for at least one extremely important thing (such as rebounding or assisting) or else winning the Quest isn’t going to happen.

THE RAJON RONDO CLINIC
In this Boston Celtics-Cleveland Cavaliers series, the contrast between the offenses could not have been more striking and obvious. While the Celtics were running an absolute clinic on how to operate a high quality offense with a power point guard who is now clearly one of the very best point guards of all time, Rajon Rondo, the Cavaliers were floundering in uncertainty, confusion, and the lack of a go to playmaker that everyone knew was the go to playmaker.

Although it is true that neither Mo Williams nor hardly any other point guard is as good as Rajon Rondo these days, the Cavaliers made this disadvantage far worse than it had to be because Mo Williams was not fully assigned the position of point guard on their team, because LeBron James took care of it too often. Mo Williams himself was left confused about how he should break down his efforts between passing and assisting on the one hand and scoring on the other hand. All too often in this series, Mo Williams (or LeBron James for that matter) would pass to a teammate not expecting the pass who would turn it over. The teammate was surprised because he thought Mo Williams or LeBron James were going to score or pass to someone else on the play. They were more thinking offensive rebound than looking for a pass. Worse still, there were turnovers between and due to miscommunication between Williams and James themselves. By game six the Cavaliers had become the keystone cops of basketball. To say there was little chemistry on the Cavaliers would be an understatement. There was anti-chemistry or reverse chemistry.

Check this, assists made by guards and by anyone who makes 3 or more assists per 36 minutes. Only uninjured players who were “in the mix” for this series are included:

CAVALIERS’ ASSISTS PER 36 MINUTES
LeBron James, small forward 7.9
Mo Williams, point guard 5.6
Delonte West, shooting guard 4.7
Anthony Parker, shooting guard 2.5
Daniel Gibson, point guard 2.4

CELTICS ASSISTS PER 36 MINUTES
Rajon Rondo, point guard 9.6
Nate Robinson, point guard 4.8
Paul Pierce, small forward 3.3
Kevin Garnett, power forward 3.2
Tony Allen, shooting guard 2.9
Michael Finley shooting guard-forward 2.8
Ray Allen, shooting guard 2.7

The problem for Cleveland is that they are not following the best way to organize a team to win playoff games and they did not keep their offense slightly organized. In football, offenses are far more organized and planned than basketball offenses are. But that doesn’t give basketball coaches the right to run disorganized or unorganized offenses, as for example George Karl does, or badly organized offenses, as for example Mike Brown does. We say that the basketball team that wants to win NBA playoff games has to be “slightly organized”. Slightly organized is far, far better in the playoffs than disorganized, unorganized, or badly organized.

Yes, it is possible to be too organized in basketball, but that problem is relatively unusual compared to not being organized enough. If left uncoached players will be unorganized or disorganized whereas players will rarely become "too organized".

"Slightly organized" starts with following the position protocol. There are five positions and if you want to win in the playoffs you have to start organizing your offense by understanding and respecting the positions and what they can and can not do in the offense. The two most important positions for winning NBA playoff games are point guard and center. However, teams with power forward superstars can win with centers who are merely outstanding and not superstars, so technically the two most important positions are point guard and either center or power forward, whichever is better on the team.

In the back court, although you don’t have to worship the point guard position you have to at least respect it and to at least make sure your point guard is responsible for making assists, for keeping the overall assist total up, and for keeping the passing game from dying out completely when times get tough in the playoffs and players start to think shoot first and pass later (in which case they start missing more shots compared with if the passing game is up and running.)

IT'S NOT A GOOD THING IF A SMALL FORWARD IS THE BEST PLAYER
Teams whose best player is a small forward, such as Denver and Cleveland, have a much more difficult time winning the Quest for the Ring simply because the small forward is not as important in basketball as the center (and / or the power forward) and the point guard. If as with Cleveland a small forward (LeBron James) takes over the point guard role to some extent, that leads to disorganization or bad organization, because now you often have effectively two point guards on the court at the same time, which hurts the chances of winning playoff games (and some regular season games against the best coached and the best teams putting out big efforts).

You want one strong starting point guard who is responsible for keeping the offense slightly organized, for getting as many assists as possible, and for preventing the passing game from fizzling out. You also need a quality backup for that starting point guard. Meanwhile, the small forward needs to help the other front court players with rebounding and paint defending on defense and with scoring in the paint on offense.

LeBron James and Mo Williams were both effectively point guards in this series against the Celtics and they were out on the court at the same time for most of the games and this subjected the Cavaliers to confusion and a bad organization. This led to way too few assists and/or to way too many turnovers in many of the games.

The Nuggets made this mistake when Allen Iverson was on the team. Iverson, whose point guard instincts could never be stamped out despite being assigned the shooting guard role for years and years due to a major coaching error by Larry Brown, would be usually playing both guard positions at once because that is what he had morphed into due to bad coaching. Meanwhile, the official point guard, Anthony Carter, would also of course be playing the point. So you often had two point guards out there at the same time and the other players were confused to one extent or another by that set-up. Two point guards generate a little confusion and a little confusion is all it takes to lose playoff games.

Meanwhile the Celtics, basketball royalty whose managers and coaches probably understand and agree with just about everything we recommend here at Quest, including which positions are the most important, all of a sudden have a point guard better than even they thought they had. The Celtics have Rajon Rondo, now one of the best point guards of all time.

Since you will seldom if ever see the difference between a slightly organized and a badly organized team so starkly, let’s check the assists and the turnovers:

ASSISTS AND TURNOVERS IN THE CAVALIERS—CELTICS SERIES
Game One: Cavaliers 101, Celtics 93
Cavaliers 18 assists, 10 turnovers
Celtics 20 assists, 16 turnovers

Game Two: Celtics 104 Cavaliers 86
Cavaliers 17 assists, 15 turnovers
Celtics 30 assists, 18 turnovers

Game Three: Cavaliers 124 Celtics 95
Cavaliers 25 assists, 12 turnovers
Celtics 20 assists, 7 turnovers

Game Four: Celtics 97 Cavaliers 87
Cavaliers 19 assists, 17 turnovers
Celtics 19 assists, 12 turnovers

Game Five: Celtics 120 Cavaliers 88
Cavaliers: 20 assists, 17 turnovers
Celtics 25 assists, 10 turnovers

Game Six: Celtics 94 Cavaliers 85
Cavaliers: 17 assists, 22 turnovers
Celtics 24 assists, 13 turnovers

TOTALS for the six games:
Cavaliers: 116 assists, 93 turnovers
Celtics 138 assists, 76 turnovers

AVERAGES for the six games:
Cavaliers 19.3 assists, 15.5 turnovers
Celtics 23.0 assists, 12.7 turnovers

ASSISTS PER GAME STANDARDS
Gold Standard: 23.7
Average Standard 21.1
Horrible Standard 18.7

TURNOVERS PER GAME STANDARDS
Gold Standard: 11.5
Average Standard 13.8
Horrible Standard 15.0

THE BEST AND THE WORST QUALITY OF OFFENSE IN ONE SERIES
Remember, seemingly small differences in the most important basketball performance measures mean the difference between winning and losing. Actually, the difference between the Cavaliers and the Celtics on assists and turnovers is not very small in this case: it’s huge relatively speaking. You will very, very seldom see such a big difference between two pro basketball teams in a series on assists and turnovers.

In fact, Cleveland doesn’t look a professional basketball team here. It’s actually an understatement to say that Cleveland’s offense was badly organized. It was horribly organized, which is about the only way you can average more than 15 turnovers per game. Your team needs a new coach if you ever average more than 15 turnovers per game in a playoff series.

Even George Karl’s mostly unorganized teams are not this badly organized! Unorganized is better than badly organized, laugh out loud.

With respect to assists, Cleveland was between bad and horrible. All in all, Cleveland’s offense was a total disaster and Boston did everyone a favor by eliminating this very badly coached team from the playoffs before they could stink up any more televised games.

Look at Rondo and those Celtics though; they were exactly half way between the gold and the silver standard on assisting. On turnovers, the Celtics were also between the gold and the silver standard, closer to the silver. All in all, the Celtics’ offense was almost perfectly organized and executed well using all the advantages that organization gave them, all of which doomed Cleveland with their very badly organized offense.

In game six, the Cavaliers’ offense disintegrated to the point where they made more turnovers than assists, something which is very rare and which is smoking gun evidence that Cleveland’s offense was not even close to being organized for playoff success.

WHAT THE CAVALIERS SHOULD HAVE DONE OFFENSIVELY
They should have told LeBron James a long time ago to let the point guard worry about the assisting and the passing game. They should have told him he’s making too many assists and too many passes because his position is not designed for being the team assist leader. They should have told him to make sure he wins the League scoring Championship, which was instead won by Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma Thunder. LeBron James should have and could have easily beaten Durant in the race for top scorer. LeBron James scored a little fewer than 30 points a game in 2009-10. He should have been scoring 32-34 points a game for this team which lacks a truly great scoring forward or center and which is confused as to whom to play at the 2-guard position and confused about other player rotations.

Michael Jordan scored more than 30 points a game in four of the six years he won the Quest with Chicago. The peak was in 1993, when Michael Jordan scored 32.6 points a game in one of his Championship years. Also, for his entire career Jordan averaged 30.1 points per game, but in playoff games he averaged 33.4 points per game. The dominant, historically great scorers generally become even greater scorers in the playoffs, whereas in this series LeBron James could not possibly do this because the Cavaliers were not organized enough in general, and specifically because they were refusing to clearly designate a true point guard and to tell LeBron to back off the assisting and passing enough to get his scoring up into the stratosphere where it would have to be if the Cavaliers wanted to win the Ring.

To put it a little differently but simply: LeBron James has much better things to be doing than sharing point guard duties. The Cavaliers either learn this from this series or they are never going to win a Championship doing what they are doing, just as Denver will never win a Championship doing what they do.

The difference between LeBron’s points per game and Jordan’s points per game in the majority of Jordan’s Championship years, and also the difference between Michael Jordan’s regular season scoring and his playoff scoring might seem small to you, but they mean the difference between an offense which is organized correctly to maximize scoring of the best scorer (and everyone else) and one which is not organized correctly. If your offense is organized correctly you can win playoff games but if it is not organized correctly you will not be winning many playoff games even if you have the best player in the League on your team.

All teams that want to win the Quest need to do everything possible to get a point guard who can get as close to 10 assists per game as possible. 7 assists per game is the recommended minimum for the starting point guard of a Championship team that wants to win more with offense than with defense. Mo Williams was on the road to 7 assists per game, with 6.3 a game for Milwaukee in 2007-08. But when he went to the Cavaliers the next year, his assisting went to hell for the reasons we have discussed. So were the Cavaliers to get serious about reforming their badly organized offense, it is possible that Mo Williams could straighten out and be a true point guard and get very close to or exceed 7 assists per game.

Are there other options currently on the roster? Daniel Gibson is young but shows no signs that he could ever be a power point guard, so scratch him. Sebastian Telfair is possibly good enough, but again, only if the Cavaliers really get serious about respecting the point guard position and about organizing it correctly.

HOW THE LAKERS GET AWAY WITH VIOLATING THE ONE POINT GUARD RULE
The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant at 2-guard (shooting guard) shares point guard production with the designated point guard Derek Fisher. First of all, it is much better to have a superstar 2-guard encroaching on the point guard than a superstar “three” (a small forward). For one thing, the court spacing works out much better. For another thing, the 2-guard or shooting guard is the weakest position in basketball on average, and if you are going to share point guard because you have a superstar at 2-guard, at least you won’t be losing much on the 2-guard front because there isn’t a lot to lose. And you won’t be losing much of anything if you have a player at 2-guard who knows when he has the hot scoring hand and when he does not and he adjusts accordingly.

By contrast LeBron James may be too young to tell whether he has the hot shooting hand or not in a given first half. Or he may not be the relatively streaky type of shooter that Kobe Bryant is, in which case it is irrelevant what night it is and LeBron James should NEVER take over point guard duties. When LeBron James makes a lot of assists he doesn’t score and he doesn’t rebound as much and since his position is “three” or small forward rather than shooting guard this hurts the Cavaliers because for one thing, every team wants their small forward to do as much as possible in scoring, rebounding, and getting to the free throw line.

The Lakers have and do everything needed to be the successful exception to the one point guard rule. They have an historical superstar two guard in Kobe Bryant and they have two very smart starting guards (Bryant and Fisher) who understand exactly what the situation is and who understand that both of them are responsible for assisting and for keeping the passing game going. They communicate, they understand one another, and they have good “chemistry” in the backcourt. Derek Fisher technically has ultimate responsibility for assisting and passing for the Lakers whereas Mo Williams did not for Cleveland because LeBron was ultimately responsible, let’s be realistic about that Cavaliers’ coaching error.

Kobe knows whether or not he has the hot shooting touch in a game no later than half time. In the games when Kobe does have the hot shooting touch, in the second half Derek Fisher will revert to being much more of a true point. When Kobe does not have the hot shooting touch he partly and occasionally mostly takes over the point from Fisher for the whole game long, in which case Fisher’s role is to be sort of a “decoy point guard,” which sounds useless but actually works for the Lakers because Fisher is often left unguarded out beyond the 3-point line and he loves to make threes when he is lightly guarded or unguarded. And Coach Phil Jackson knows that making a few threes, at least six of them and preferably eight of them, is crucial for winning playoff games when the paint is in lock down mode.

Both Bryant and Fisher started their careers with the Lakers in 1996-97. Bryant has been playing for the Lakers every single year since then, whereas Fisher has been a Laker for every year except for the three years 2004-07 when he played for the Warriors and the Jazz. In his first three years Derek Fisher showed he could be a true point guard, but he morphed into combo guard starting in his fourth year, 1999-2000 when, you guessed it, Kobe Bryant started to make many more assists than he did in his first three years.

And was it a coincidence that 1999-2000 was also Phil Jackson’s first year coaching the Lakers? Almost certainly not: Phil Jackson is known to have been worried at the time that Kobe Bryant would become the ultimate ball hog, so he himself probably persuaded Kobe to make more assists, and persuaded Derek Fisher to become less of a point guard and more of a shooting guard so that the Lakers could avoid the poison of in effect having two point guards on the floor at the same time.

You see, when you are a great coach, you both know the rules and you know when and how to break them. Whereas Mike Brown still has to learn what the rules are.