Sidenote: Media Larry

I should probably add to the below- one of the reasons I think Lawrence Frank will eventually make a great college coach is that he’s also a very skilled media manipulator, as the reactions to his firing should indicate. I am willing to wager that the majority of those defending him, if not all, have not watched 10 Nets games in the last 3 years and could not tell you the relative league performances of his offenses and defenses over the course of his head coaching tenure. There’s a reason people are still citing his first 13 games 5 years ago in his defense. Moreover, I am also willing to bet that the majority of the people defending him simply don’t care about any of those things either- they see a stand-up guy who’s being fired by a salary-dumping penny-pinching ownership, and they feel the need to get their digs in partly because they think it’s the right thing to do, partly because they want to be seen to be doing the right thing. You’ll notice we’re no longer talking about basketball or the specifics of what Frank’s coaching was like.

The thing about it is, by all accounts Frank really is a nice, likable guy; but he’s also at pains to be a very publicly nice and likable guy, and that is not an accident. He’s built a specific image of himself for public consumption, and in one of the most media and personality-driven sports that’s been a canny business practice. In the past it’s served to keep him in his job longer than performances would indicate he should have been on merit alone; now, it’s covering for the fact that he was fired very much for cause and for failing at the two duties a coach of a team like the Nets must succeed at: maintaining motivation and getting the most out of limited talent with an appropriate system. Lost amidst the hand-wringing will be the fact that Larry will not miss one paycheck as a result of this, and that his time up on the cross of the Nets’ awfulness is if anything a great marketing gimmick for him: more people are talking about him than ever before, and instead of being the guy who helped contribute to one of the worst seasons of all time, he’s now the guy who was “unfairly” fired despite trying to stop the rot where he could. The story is total bullshit, but it’s going to get him hired in Oklahoma or Minnesota or somewhere like that when he probably would have been a complete afterthought under other circumstances. That’s the great thing about having discussions untethered to specifics- if you’re into reading everything in the sports world as a morality tale, it makes it a lot easier to do.

For the record, Lawrence Frank’s teams’ rank in offensive and defensive rating, year by year:

Offense: 26th, 25th, 16th, 25th, 16th, and dead last this year when he was fired.

Defense: 7th, 4th, 15th, 21st, 24th and 13th when he was fired, I believe.

No, those numbers aren’t the whole story. But when a coach has produced that over 5 seasons plus and is currently in charge of an 0-16 outfit, I would say the burden of proof is on those saying he should be retained, not those saying it’s time for a change. Especially so when the people who want to keep him manifestly don’t give a fuck about the team in question except insofar as it provides a useful soapbox to mount.

We all (don’t, sadly) live in a Perry Groves world…

There’s a wonderful Arsenal terrace song that is dedicated to an old midfielder of ours called Perry Groves. I of course never saw him play as he was comfortably before my time, but he was a limited player skill-wise who more than made up for it with determination and grit…he was the type that harried opponents up and down the pitch and become quite the cult figure for it. Anyway, the song goes: “At number 1, it’s Perry Groves…at number 2, it’s Perry Groves, at number 3, it’s Perry Groves” all the way up until 12, with the exception of Liam Brady at number 7 (Twelve because there was only one sub in those days).

My point is, Arsene with his latest quotes must think that Andre Marriner was, besides serving as the match referee, also playing all 11 positions for his side as well.  As mentioned before, his nullification of our goal was disgraceful and absolute shite refereeing. But, Wenger’s bonkers if he thinks that it would have changed anything besides making the final 1-3 instead of 0-3.

I mean, Marriner sure did a poor job of closing down Ashley Cole’s cross, and on the same play did a hideous job of marking Drogba in the penalty area. Marriner is a silly boy who doesn’t learn from his mistakes, as he didn’t close down Cole AGAIN for the second one, and then his clumsy clearing attempt was hooked into our own net. Amazingly, Andre Marriner also did a poor job of setting up his wall, which allowed Drogba to power in the third from a free kick.

The worst thing though was that our front three of Andre Marriner, Andre Marriner and Andre Marriner proved to be as toothless as a nursing-home resident against the Chelsea backline. Seriously, that was fucking awful forward play from the Marriner connection yesterday.

MARRINER OUT.

Lakers 106, Nets 87: How Low Can It Sink? Sky’s The Limit

I believe Michael Ray Richardson was a Knick when he provided our titular quote, but he was a Net too for a while and it’s the Jersey side of the local equation to which his wisdom best applies these days. This loss sucked of course; as an individual game it was the ordinary sort of suck, given importance beyond that only by virtue of being 17th in a line of such games and thus a record-equaling performance in its badness, if not quite unique. In its specifics it stands out only as being the sort of loss which happens to teams which have given up: despite the firing of their long-time coach earlier in the day the Nets came out flat and scored a grand total of 12 points in the first quarter- which ended with them down by 15- and never made a game of it thereafter. The deficit was 30 and change at various points; Adam Morrison, one of the worst players in the league, was on court for the Lakers by the third quarter and the game was more or less a garbage-time joke before halftime. As a contest there’s not much more to say about it on its own.

All I can add is this: Frank had to go, but replacing him with Kiki or a no-name is a major, major risk. With perhaps a few honorable exceptions this Nets team has given up; they have the talent to win, say, 20 games this season, but they do not have the talent to get away with half-assing even one game if they expect to reach even that modest goal. Put another way, if the Nets bring in the coaching equivalent of a substitute teacher who runs the same dysfunctional offense and never builds the rapport with the players to get them to give a real effort, we could be looking at a 15 wins or fewer outfit. This is now, officially, not just a bad team but a historically bad team; and unlike most bad teams where you can pretty much guess the range their final record will fall in, it’s very difficult to determine what the floor is for the 2009-2010 NJ Nets. Having seen the early 90’s Mavericks which I contend were the worst teams to come after the 72-73 Sixers, I can’t say this Nets team is worse; I also can’t definitively say they’re better. If anything they’ve deteriorated as the season has gone along, and the longer this streak continues the more of the season it’s going to chew up with low confidence, sloppy play, bad habits, apathy and other issues which make it hard for the Nets to even give a reasonable effort. This team is looking into the abyss right now, and the longer they gaze the harder it’s going to be to back away from it.

EDIT: Side note on Lawrence Frank-

I’ve never been a fan as a coach at the NBA level, yet it’s unquestionable that the man always gave his best effort and conducted himself with dignity and respect for the team, his players and the game. I wish him well. I fully expect that he’ll be an outstanding college coach at some point. He’s usually been excellent at getting players to play well at the fundamental level, to pay attention to detail, to give forth a solid professional effort. Where he lacks is the tendency of his teams to run atrociously bad offenses in the half court; you get the sense that Frank runs very conventional schemes a lot of the time and doesn’t take advantages of mismatches, the opportunities afforded by extraordinary athleticism, the ins and outs of NBA officiating, or his own players’ idiosyncrasies. Everything is very standard, cookie-cutter, basic; the sort of things which, correctly executed, are winning plays in college but at the pro level are overwhelmed by the speed of the game and the greater skill and experience of the players. This does not make him a bad coach, per se; but it does seem to make him one not ideally suited to the situation in which he’s found himself in recent years. This was the best time to part ways for both parties, I think.