The Portland Trail Blazers are trying not to make a retread out of their next coach (Ball Don’t Lie)
Jason Quick, Portland Trail Blazers beat writer for the Oregonian, is reporting that the seemingly endless search for the next Blazers coach has come down to two candidates , and on the surface it’s hard to think of two more disparate potential hires than current interim head coach Kaleb Canales, and former Hawks and Bucks head man and current Dallas assistant Terry Stotts. Those are the potential picks, though, with Quick pointing out the fact that both are represented by the same agent in Warren LeGerie , who also represents new Blazers GM Neil Olshey.
Of course, in spite of the age difference (Stotts has 20 years on Canales), there really isn’t much of a distinction. Both, at this point, are serving to remind us that personnel decisions and actual players matter the most in this game. Because outside of the rarest cases (like, say, Chicago going from Vinny Del Negro to Tom Thibodeau in a year), huge upticks in wins usually don’t result from a coaching change. Despite how much praise we heap or criticism we hurl at these guys, endlessly, in these pages. It comes down to who they’re coaching, always.
Though we can (and did, on other websites) find fault with Stotts’ record (115-168, in four years with Atlanta and Milwaukee), and never understood why he couldn’t cull more of an impact from Andrew Bogut on either end of the court in his time with the Bucks, the guy really never had the horses. He had the names — from Stephen Jackson in his first big chance to be a go-to guy to Michael Redd, Glenn Robinson in his ostensible prime and Shareef Abdur-Rahim in the same — Stotts never had it all on a plate due to a series of missteps by his various GMs.