Rivers won COY for coaching a team whose best player was Darrell Armstrong to a .500 record. Hell, the Clippers are the best team that he hasn't gotten to the conference finals. Thibodeau led an unproven team to the ECF, in his first crack at it, and last year he got Joakim Noah and a bunch of guys to the second round. Carlisle is the only active coach to lead three different teams to the conference finals; he might be the only coach ever to have done that.
I did call Stotts a terrible coach, but
- He proved me wrong.
- He's gotten more out of less than Spoelstra has.
COY doesn't register with me. doesn't mean anything other than that the team someone coached has had a surprisingly good season. Thibs has always had a fairly strong team talent-wise and has had the advantage of coaching in the East (and yes, Spoelstra has benefitted from the same advantage). he's also pretty much killed his major minute guys season after season, usually leading to many of them missing significant time, especially late season. last year's effort to rally to the 4th seed, though it was an incredibly weak conference, was commendable, but they were still summarily dismissed in the first round. Carlisle, as I said, I'll happily acknowledge as the superior coach. he's gotten a lot out of seemingly inferior teams time and again, and has actually won a ring doing so.
as far as Stotts, he's managed to win one playoff round with that roster and I'm not sure that the talent gap between those two teams was all that large last season. that Heat team, outside of LeBron, was pretty weak.
He can't. He's already proven he can't. Spoelstra has not gotten out of the first round with fewer than two Hall of Famers on his team. There's nothing remotely "revolutionary" about his schemes; there's nothing remotely "near-revolutionary" about his schemes. His "schemes" resemble Paul Westhead's "schemes" from the early eighties: give the ball to Magic LeBron. Some scheme.
he has proven he can't? are you kidding me? four out of six years he has made the Finals and the two times he didn't, he has lead a roster that featured Dwyane Wade and really nobody else to the playoffs. the '09 roster had 42 games of post-Suns and not really caring all that much Shawn Marion and an (at that point) fairly decrepit Jermaine O'Neal, those were their biggest names outside of Wade. hell, '10 Michael Beasley was their second leading scorer. they still made the playoffs. that doesn't exactly scream evidence of failure to me.
as far as the revolutionary-ness is concerned: the Heat relied on the low-post game of their SG and SF with pretty much only jump-shooters surrounding them. they had one big guy rim protector during their runs and that guy came off the bench. their whole defense was all trapping and doubling and swarming like hell. they won multiple championships playing small ball. when before has that ever worked? and yeah, I consider that revolutionary, what else is?
and saying their offense is only throwing the ball to LeBron and watch what happens is not correct, imo. yeah, most of their offense ran through him, sure, as it should. but once the ball got moving, everybody knew what to do, where to pass, when to cut, how to attack, and so on. that was no stagnant OKC offense that had no idea what to once their second option was eliminated.