So here’s your deal: there are just some dudes that get you fired.
Think of it like this … from youth to adulthood, we all have that one or two dudes we know that if we hang out with them, nothing good happens in the end. It might be the best fun you’ll have at times, but then you sleep in too late and miss class or are late to work and all hell breaks loose.
The Rockets have a lot of those dudes, but probably the only major one they’re not willing to move on from is Dwight Howard. So as a solution, they decided to fire Kevin McHale.
You knew it was going south when they had the dreaded “players only meeting” last week. That’s code for, “someone’s head is about to roll.” In the NBA, it’s code for “probably a coach.” The NBA isn’t like MLB or the NFL. Players have major power, and one or two really good ones on your team tilts the balance of your franchise.
If those dudes aren’t on your side, you may as well send the janitor in to eavesdrop and find out how long you’ve got to clean out your office.
McHale wasn’t Gregg Popovich by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t terrible, either. I mean, the dude did preside over a team that went to the Western Conference Finals last year right after getting an extension, right?
Management was sort of forced into a box last year. Ownership gave him a new shiny contract in December, which people are going to piss and moan about now while not understanding one thing: had they not given him that contract back then, they’d be out more money now.
You’re not getting rid of a coach that gets to the Western Conference Finals and his contract was up. Firing him 11 games into this season probably means you have a bunch of guys on a team that aren’t in it to win it. Sorry.
Howard has gotten heads rolling everywhere he’s been. You can’t forget his spats of on-again, off-again romantic weekend getaways with Orlando where on the road there, he managed to back over then coach Stan Van Gundy a time or two.
He then moved onto L.A., where basically nobody got along with him, most damning of them all, Kobe Bryant, the franchise’s favorite son and one overly competitive son of a gun. Now, Howard is a centerpiece in Houston, with another coach left by the road having to deal with Howard’s oversized personality, and talent everyone wants him to have versus what he actually has.
Making things even more combustible, they brought in Ty Lawson at point guard, another guy with a checkered locker room past. Throw them together with James Harden, who isn’t a leader of men either, and you have a team with a ton of we’ll say “interesting” personalities in the locker room that may not seem as though they wake up every morning thinking first about winning NBA titles.
McHale was a weird fit for Houston anyway. General Manager Daryl Morey is a religious stats freak. There were stories of McHale getting these Mathlete sheets from Morey and just trashing them right then and there, because McHale is not a stats guy.
It’s good to have people who don’t agree with you on your side to help see things a different way, but philosophically having such a drastic difference in how you like to get from Point A to Point B eventually catches up to you. For the record, McHale makes a little more sense, but whatever.
Basketball and coaching is about personalities more than it is X’s and O’s. The great coaches are great coaches more because they can motivate and blend personalities than anything to do with figuring out how to run players around screens or switching to zone at the right time.
When it comes to professional players, the line is thin, and they can be lost easily. In some cases, they have no shot, mostly because you put guys like Howard as leaders of a team, and your ceiling is “Western Conference Finals if you play a team with a rotation of basically seven guys the previous round.”
Houston won’t win any titles until that core is adjusted. Not with McHale. Not with Tom Thibodeau, who might actually blend even worse with this bunch.
It appears to be a lot of guys out for themselves, and making the coach the scapegoat only works for so long. Even if they all rallied around McHale as the problem in that “players only” meeting, you’d have to think that’s just a band-aid on a gash made by an ax.
When in times of struggle, people are often bonded by rallying around dislike for one particular person.
In this case, it was the guy with the best post moves on the team. The only problem is, he wore a suit to games. The other big guy, the one with the uniform? He just gets you fired.
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