AbeVigodaLive wrote:thedoper wrote:AbeVigodaLive wrote:thedoper wrote:I think part of the reason Thibs was under scrutiny so much was because he had both roles. It was always a bad idea to have the person with the critical eye on talent also be the person trying to get the most out of that talent.
Yeah. I gotta take the hit for this one.
At the time, I was saying the Coach + GM coupling was the carrot needed to lure a legit coaching talent like Thibs. And that was right before (or even during) the NBA's drive away from that... for obvious reasons.
I was wrong. Dammit.
[Note: I won't be wrong again. Ever.]
Well I think you were right in that was the landscape at the time to lure a top tier talent to Minnesota at that point. I suspect we still could have gotten a good coach to match our young talent at that point without selling the farm though. Ultimately, it really didn't seem like there was much negotiation on it at the time.
Well... the thing we should expect from this organization eventually is ... instead of being in at the tail end of such things... be a trendsetter. Be out front. Be a leader.
Other teams were figuring out that it doesn't work... right when Taylor gave Thibs the universal keys.
It's easy to forget that Flip Saunders died what like 6-7 months before they decided they needed to get a new coach and then decided to give Thibs the keys to everything. I'm usually the guy that when it comes to grief I move on and do whatever as part of my grief process. I had some loses in my life in the past few years that affected me in a way they hadn't before. Honestly Flip's passing was a little piece of those loses for me. I didn't have anything super horrible maybe in comparison to other people Have faced but I feel like I get grief of losses a lot more now than I ever have. I can't imagine what the people in the organization was going through from Glen to Ryan to Milt to Sam Mitchell to current players to scouts and other less known people in the organization etc that knew a Flip for years. Glen is a billionaire owner but the guy is a human being too. We can blame him and others for making a mistake but it's fair to recognize the context of what they were in at the time. I believe it was Jon K that reported In a piece that came out around the start of the season Ryan said he was considering giving up coaching the NBA completely and just loving in a small town in MN somewhere and just coach HS basketball. It was a pretty unique situation and they got a guy like Thibs who had plenty of merits.
FWIW Jon K or maybe it was Souhan on their podcast this offseason mentioned that when the David Kahn hire and that GM search happened Glen Taylor was actually going through some medical issues that made it difficult for him to be very involved in the process. I hadn't heard about that before. It's still on Glen for that decision but it's some worthwhile context. The Kahn gore was an abject failure, udder disaster and yet through all that we ended up with some real hope when Flip took over and we finally had some good luck getting Towns plus some other seemingly legit promise...then Flip died. Even I Flip wasn't the genius basketball guy to take this team to a championship level it was a tough blow.
Everyone is actually a person. That's true of athletes or people on this forum or whoever. One thing I realized I a few weeks ago while attending a church study class where we were discussing The story of Job was how many times are people just grieving and we come along and judge them for things sometimes even their grief or try and solve the problem. All the person may need is someone to acknowledge their grief and be there for them. Maybe it's as simple as being nostalgic of the loss of a previous cell phone or maybe something even more trivial or maybe a much bigger loss. I realized I need to do a better job of realizing when people are communicating about a loss and reacting appropriately which sometimes means pretty much keeping my mouth shut or fingers off some keys. I'm working on it but I got a LOOOOOOOOONG way to go.
