Huh? Stevens problem is that his teams overachieve during the regular season.
You can't have it both ways though.
Overachieve in the regular season = Brad Stevens is a great coach!
Look overmatched in the playoffs = The players just aren't good enough!
Yeah, no. Doesn't work like that. Either he makes the team better than their talent or he doesn't.
Exactly!
Stevens made two really disingenuous statements about the roster the season. The most recent one was that the team is not as good as it's record. That's a really weasel comment for two reasons one, if the team doesn't do well in the playoffs they weren't that good, so it's not on him, and two because they did so well in the regular season because he was such a great coach.
Second comment he made was when someone was questioning him about the lack of rebounding, which she has time and again said that it wasn't that important. And then the comment he made was that he plays with the roster that was given to him. That's a bunch of crap.
I have no doubt that Ainge purposely did not go after certain guys because Stevens didn't want them, because they weren't Proto typical for his system, for example Bigs that could shoot and stretch the floor like little Kelly.
We reportedly had opportunities for Cousins, Ibaka, Vucevic and Nurkic - and I am pretty confident we would have had a good shot at Monroe as well if we really made a push for him, since the Bucks don't seem all thatt high on him.
All of those guys would have helped us in this series, by a significant margin. Cousins obviously would have been a major game changer, but even adding Ibaka or Vucevic (alongside Horford) would have completely changed the look of this series.
But everybody was so big on maintaining max cap space...now they have announced that the Salary cap is going to be $6m lower then initially predicted, so after all that probably will not be capable of signing a max free agent without giving up half of our team anyway. So now all of those "cap flexibility" secessionists suddenly aren't looking so bright.
That's why I always say, when a great opportunity comes up, then you take it. You don't pass it up for the sake of keeping your options open later down the track, because you never know what is going to happen later down the track - any opportunities you have been holding out for may disappear, and then you've given up good opportunities for nothing.
The ONLY good things to come out of this past season are the Brooklyn pick, and the explosion of Isaiah Thomas.
Even holding the #1 seed (which I hoped would help with recruiting) might prove a moot point, since a lot of guys will be hesitant to join a team that seems incapable of winning a playoff series, and we may not have the cap space anyway.