Betrayer

As we get better players around him, that trait will pay off. Maybe it starts this year with Ivey who will likely be a ball of aggression in every game. It could work out nicely with our Fire and Ice backcourt. High usage players are going to have a lot of turnovers - Luka averaged 4.5 last year to Cade's 3.7 - so I expect that to be something we're going to have to accept. I'm mostly concerned about the shooting. We actually got a ton of good looks in that Memphis game, but couldn't find the basket.

@boogiebunz Regardless of where the game has gone, the fact is that no other team soft switches 1-5 like we do. Did you watch opening night last night? 4 teams and none of them employ the scheme we employ. They all used a combination of switching, dropping, hedging, and scramming, and even some zone. Like I've said previously, you need to be able to switch, but even heavy switching teams don't do it all the time and they certainly don't soft switch all the time (switching before it's even necessary to do so). It's not just me saying this. There's a reason this scheme is catching so much heat in the media and on podcasts. There's a reason Casey was directly asked about this by the reporters during the preseason. And there's a reason JEIII had to write a fluff piece trying to give Casey's side of the story. It's not because this is what everyone else is doing and we're just catching up. It's because nobody else is soft switching 1-5 because nobody in their right mind would.

I think your last statement is the key to the misunderstanding we're having. What the Pistons are doing is not what other teams do. Soft switching 1-5 is doing it every time, on every play, for every position, even before it's necessary. The Pistons don't even wait for the screen to force the switch. It's almost like a zone switch. It's predictable, really bad for rebounding, gives up layups, and gives your opponent every mismatch they want, whenever they want it. Others teams switch when necessary, in certain matchups, against certain players (to limit the three ball), or only switch certain positions. Some teams rarely switch and prefer to run drop coverage or hedging. Certainly there are switch heavy teams such as Miami and Boston, but even they aren't doing what we're doing even though they might actually have the personnel to pull it off. I get that we don't have the defensive talent, but the coach doesn't have to pour gasoline on the fire either.

And when you were 24th in defensive rating, 26th in defensive rebound percentage, and 23rd in opponent points in the paint the offense is going score a lot more than "now and then", and do it a lot more efficiently because a layup is still the easiest shot in basketball. Other coaches might consider a different coverage scheme that does a better job of protecting against those shots, or the easily created mismatches that cause them.

On a more positive note, here's a nice breakdown from Bryce at Motor City Hoops of Jaden Ivey's passing and creation skills as show during preseason:

Don't judge a book by its cover and don't judge my post by the first sentence. I know I'm guilty of writing long posts, but I expanded upon my complaints after that 😄 GS won 4 titles with MVP(s), All-Stars, and a genius offensive coach. If we had 1/3rd of the offensive movement, screening, and cutting that GS has I'd be elated. Their defense was very good as well, but it's a lot easier to play defense when you get to set up in the half court every time. And, like you said, they don't soft switch everything. Being able to switch is great for this era - doing it exclusively is simply bad basketball that screws over your players. Especially when you don't have the personnel for it like Boston (long, athletic wings and the DPoY that can switch up and down). This stuff was said about him in Toronto because it's true. He's just not a good on-court coach. He didn't win Coach of the Year until Nurse came along and fixed his offense. The Raptors saw it and finally let him go. He's great for turning kids into men and keeping a happy locker room - 100% credit to him for that. But the word is that he'll be moving into a development role to do that for the team after he's done coaching anyway, so you won't lose that aspect of what he brings. That being the case, why not make that transition sooner? With something this obvious, I get impatient and just want to rip the band-aid off. If they wait any longer than this offseason to make a move, they're just wasting time (and player development years, in my opinion). At the very least, I'd love to see them bring in an assistant coach like Nurse to save us from watching this offense in its current state. "But if they fired him today I wouldn't be upset. Especially if it was to bring in someone like Atkins." Yup.

Interesting stuff, but I'll take the over. I have trouble trusting a ranking system that has the Utah Jazz that high (higher than the Bulls) with a 40% chance to make the playoffs. Pacers over the Kings and Wizards? I believe Rick Carlisle typically gets more out of his teams than you'd think he should, but I'm not buying them outside of the bottom 5.

Not at all what I'm saying, and I'm pretty sure you know it. Look around the league. Even teams that switch heavily aren't running a Soft Switching scheme 100% of the time. 5 minutes in and everyone - including the opposing broadcast team - knows how to get the mismatch they want on every play for the rest of the game. Pretty sure the rest of the league isn't living in 1987, but they certainly aren't running the same simplistic scheme as Casey, so clearly there are other options. I'm also pretty sure from the discussions we've had over the years that your BBall IQ is high enough to see this and also see how bad this offensive scheme is as well. Knowing that, it would impossible to think that it doesn't affect player development in a negative way. Keep him on board for the off-court stuff that he's good at, but we need a better coach on the court both to make these games more competitive and also for the sake of continued player development.

When I watch Duren and Stew get dragged away from the paint on defense every play because opponents figure out they can get whatever mismatch they want all night, it doesn't make me feel good about their development. I want to see Duren in the paint, learning to box out big men and swat shots. Hard to do in a soft switching scheme when your big men are constantly on the perimeter. The same could be said in reverse for the guards having to guard out of position and stop Velanciunas from getting rebounds rather than being able to hit the gas in transition after the big man secures the board. Being able to switch is one thing, but doing it 100% of the time before the screen even arrives is a terrible system that puts every player at a constant disadvantage. That's not playing to your strengths and maximizing your team's potential, and when you're playing to your weaknesses and constantly putting your players at a disadvantage it affects both confidence and development. Same can be said on the offensive side of the ball. The lineups and offensive schemes aren't designed to play the strengths of the players we have. Running DHOs that don't shift the defense doesn't work and it forces guys to play hero ball, but we don't have a team built around one-on-one heroic players. We should be running action to get guys open with more movement and more off ball screens/cuts to free us up from defenses that overplay with tight perimeter coverage. This stagnant offense is forcing them into bad plays, bad habits, and ultimately impacting both confidence and development. Killian's confidence issues and their affect on his development are a well known fact at this point. I don't think Cade has been put in a position to succeed at all. He's just good enough that he still put up numbers regardless. Bey is a fan favorite, but look at his efficiency and some of the things he was asked to do last year to try to salvage plays rather than playing the game the right way and playing to his strength. These kids are being forced to play a lot of Casey Hero Ball rather than learning to play the game "the right way", move the ball, find open cutters, and so on. Bottom line, I feel that when you're putting your players at a disadvantage on both ends of the court rather than playing to their strengths, you're negatively impacting their development. Obviously this isn't quantitative, because we have no way of knowing how they would develop under LB or Carlisle or whomever. But I just don't see how being trained wrong and constantly put at a disadvantage can help your confidence or development. These players are developing despite Casey's on court strategy (and I'm sure partially because he's good off the court), not because of it.

There goes everyone's dream of signing Wiggins with all that money we have in the offseason. 😄

Casey teams will never be better than their best star's ability to play hero ball. His teams will never be more than the sum of their parts. That said, the team is really young, so the W/L record is probably only slightly shifted with a better coach although the game to game competitiveness and watch-ability would be better. More importantly, while I think Casey is great for development off the court, I think he's actually impeding development on the court. You have to put players in a position to succeed and he's not doing that. The defensive scheme, the platoon lineups, and the offensive system are all impacting the on-court development of these players by constantly putting them behind the 8-ball.

His job is to write stories. In order to get quotes and interviews for those stories he needs to have a good relationship with the team and coach. You don't have a good relationship with the team and coach if you flame them all the time. So, it's in his best interest to be a source of positivity rather than publicly calling out the horrendous on court coaching strategy. He's not a fan of this team (the Pistons, nothing to do with this iteration of the team). He's said it numerous time on his podcast. This is a job to him and he's going to do what's best for his career.

This podcast is up and down, but here's a really good episode backed up with some facts and stats in the second segment of the show. Worth a listen if you want to understand why Soft Switching is a terrible scheme, especially for this team, despite Casey's arguments and JEIII's Athletic article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adrLoAY755s&t=143s

Looking at the schedule, it's going to be a pretty rough start to the season. That combined with a bunch of new (and young) pieces means that the record will be terrible come the holidays. I can't argue with your logic, but I get the feeling that there's a little pressure (maybe from Gores, not sure) to win and be more competitive this year, so I can't see them shutting it down. I'd also question what "shutting it down" means when you're already running a roster of mostly 19-23 year olds. Maybe you could move Bojan and Burks, but I don't think you want to hold Cade and Ivey out of any significant number of games in such crucial development years. But don't worry, just having Casey at the helm will keep us in the running for a good draft spot.

Been a rough couple of preseason games. Ivey is legit. He's going to make a bunch of mistakes (turnovers), but he adds something we desperately need and will likely lead this team in free throw attempts. Sad to see Bagley go down in preseason, but when has he ever been healthy for more than a minute? We knew this was coming at some point. Hopefully Duren can continue to gobble up rebounds in his absence and stake a claim to that starting Center role where he'll eventually belong anyway. 3 games into preseason and Casey is already driving me nuts. Soft Switching is bad: It's good to be a team that can switch, or even a team that switches fairly often (Boston, Miami), but "Soft Switching" (switching everything, even before the screen is set) is a very bad scheme. It literally took 5 minutes for the Pelicans broadcast team (Antonio Daniels) to start talking about how easy it would be to expose this defense. Opponent knows they can get whatever mismatch they want, whenever they want it. Rebounding suffers because you have Corey Joseph trying to box out Jonas Valanciunas constantly. You wind up having to double far too much. You put a lot of wear and tear on your guards trying to guard and box out people the size of Zion. And you constantly pull your rim protection far away from the basket leaving them in a bad position to guard the paint and contest shots. Offensive Scheme is still trash: The offensive is so vanilla and does nothing to shift the defense. Three DHOs that don't move the defense at all, then a simple pick and roll at the end of the clock to try to salvage something from the play. It's funny (and sad) to see them run the play and then look up confused like they expected it to create something. Maybe it works in practice against our own bad defense since we're switching everything, but this offense isn't working at all in games. Zero creativity. Zero use of individual player strengths. Rotations are the same garbage as last year: Should we get into his 5 man bench units with no staggering? One of Cade and Ivey should be on the court at all times, but that might require Casey to actually come up with a slightly more complex rotation scheme like every other team in the league. Right now, he's doing like I would in a video game. This team isn't getting anywhere with Casey at the helm and they'll constantly underperform. I get that he's good at developing young players, but get him into a development role then. We need an actual coach or my 35 win prediction is going to be way off - and that's what really matters 😄

Maybe, but I don't see any of these teams looking to drop into a tank unless one of their stars suffers a major injury: Milwaukee, Philly, Boston, Miami, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, Atlanta, NY, Washington That's 11 teams and only 10 make it. I think it just means that the bottom 4 or 5 in each conference are going to be sitting players or trading away assets to tank harder.

Well, there ya go. Apparently Draymond thinks it's a cage match and the winner takes the contract. I'm sure sucker punching his smaller teammates makes up for his age and basketball shortcomings, while putting him in high demand all around the league. The Warriors are probably clamoring to make sure they give him an extra-lucrative contract as soon as possible

No matter what JP was saying, the physical portion of this was all on Draymond. Walked into his face, bumped him with his body, JP pushes him away, and then Draymond escalates it again to the extreme. I hope this shuts up the people in Detroit who think we should go after him this offseason. I don't need that in the in my locker room. Behind Pat Bev, there are few players I dislike more in the league.

Means about as much as the G-League play of Victor and Scoot, but it doesn't mean we aren't going to talk about it 🙄

I love Stew, but the starters need a player in Duren's mold who can be a vertical threat, grab rebounds, and add some size to that unit. Conversely, the bench could use Stew to help space the floor with Bagley in there rather than having both Duren and Bagley clogging the paint. -- Stewart with 1 rebound in 22 minutes. -- Duren with 14 in 24 minutes. Not to be left out of this preseason discussion is Casey. No matter what roster we have we're still going to contend with: -- All 5 starters coming out for a 5-man bench unit that will play for 6 minutes straight in both halves. -- Soft switching everything so the other team can get any mismatch they want anytime they want it. -- Terrible offense - 3 DHO's and a couple passes around the perimeter...defense doesn't shift at all...5 seconds left to chuck up a shot.

Supposed to be a pretty talented draft. I'd be happy with 3rd, because it means the lottery balls fell in our favor. Despite last night's game, this is not going to be a bottom 5 team this year.

Turnovers killing this team. That’ll be an issue all year but vets are as guilty as the young guys. Stew doesn’t fit with the starters. Too small, no lob threat, no weak side shot blocking, rebounds are a struggle. I’d rather see Duren in there with the starters, young or not.

1st quarter in the books. Casey already doing his 5 in, 5 out lineup garbage. Stew with a clean looking three. Cade looking rough. Ivey with a three and a bucket in transition. Also got rejected hard. Bey struggling.

Let’s talk about the meaningless games!