1.    Nets-Raptors:    The Raptors held on for dear life the other night as the Nets nearly came all the way back from a 20-point deficit.  If you're a Toronto-optimist, you have to think that all they have to do is steal Game 6 in New Jersey to be in the driver's seat.  All the indicators, however, are not positive for the Raptors.  The Nets have outscored the Raptors by 31 this series and the Raps have barely won their two games (by a collective 8 points in two home games) and even Game 7 wouldn't be a foregone conclusion for the Raptors, especially if T.J. Ford and Jose Calderon are hobbled.

 

Some other notes on the series:

 

-Just when you think Jason Collins is completely useless, he shows some of his value.  Collins has done a great job on Chris Bosh.  Collins is such a weak scorer, rebounder, shot blocker, and pass catcher that you tend to think he has no reason to be in the NBA.  Collins is not an asset to the Nets in most contexts but Lawrence Frank has used him quite well this series.

-Anthony Parker has had a very solid series, upping his minutes to 40 per game.  His shooting percentages are down a bit but he has hit some absolutely huge shots to keep this series respectable.

-Vince Carter has played pretty well but has the weird stat line of shooting a poor 22-37 (.595%) from the foul line (he was 80% in the regular season).

-I assume that Sam Mitchell is gone if he loses this series.  Bryan Colangelo clearly wants to bring in his own man eventually and Mitchell's marketability can only go down from here, so he may as well take a big contract from someone else. 

 

2.    Warriors-Mavericks:  What a crazy Game 5.  Like the Nets, the Warriors rallied from double digits to almost steal a game from the home team.  I don't necessarily believe in momentum but if I did, I'm not sure which time has it right now.  On the one hand, the Mavs blew a huge lead at home and needed a heroic finish to survive.  On the other hand, the Warriors were up nine with three minutes to go and completely imploded, failing to run a single sane offensive set, opting to chuck up hasty shots instead.

 

At the time of this huge lead, Reggie Miller was prophetic when he stated that he didn't believe that the Warriors could shift gears and slow it down and milk the clock.  Indeed, the Warriors should've slowed it down and isolated for Baron Davis to drive on every possession.  Instead, the team took a bunch of quick jumpers and let the Mavs get fast breaks the other way.  I know that the Warriors got back in the game by hitting tons of crazy threes but you can't assume that these shots were going to continue to fall and Don Nelson did a poor job of settling the team down at the end.

 

Game Six in Golden State is a huge game.  The Mavs are coming off a nice end to Game 5 but they've had serious problems in Golden State the last few years.  While Dallas is the better team, the Warriors are not playing like a fringe playoff team.  If they can hold down Dirk with forward like Stephen Jackson, they will win the series.

 

A few more notes:

 

-Matt Barnes played out of his mind in Game 5, boarding, hitting threes, and finishing strong in traffic.  I'm not sure that Barnes can keep this play up long term (his comparable players at the same age are Harold Pressley, Reggie Williams, Buck Johnson, and Devean George).  Indeed, Nellie has a history of getting a lot out of athletic swingmen. Remember Jeff Grayer, who played well off the bench in 1993-94 and Ryan Lorthridge in 1994-95?  Both players gave Nelson quality minutes at small forward only to fade away quickly.  Hopefully, Barnes might turn out a bit better but this type of emergence is not unprecedented for Nellie.

-As well as the Warriors shot from three as a team last night, the damage has been limited to Barnes, Baron Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Jason Richardson (to a lesser extent).  Here's a list of Golden State's three-point shooting:

 

Player       3A/3M

Davis          12-23

Jackson      12-32

Richardson 12-37

Barnes         7-18

Ellis              0-4

Pietrus         4-16

Harrington   1-8

 

-Josh Howard has been, by far, the Mavs' best player but Devin Harris has been huge (13.2 ppg, .500 FG%, 4.2 apg).  He made Baron Davis work on defense and contributed to ultimately fouling Davis out of the game. 

-Expect the Mavs to try to counter the Warriors small lineup with Austin Croshere again.  He's not the player he was but he is bigger than most of the Warriors and is not the liability on transition defense that Erick Dampier has been.

 

2.    Coaching Thoughts:     The other story of the last few weeks was the firing of several NBA coaches.  Usually I address these moves in the transaction column but the NBA no longer posts coaching firings as part of its transactions list and the moves fall through the cracks.  As such, I thought we could use this opportunity to talk about that coaches who were recently fired and whether they deserved the axe while the moves are fresh in our minds.

 

 -Rick Carlisle, Indiana:  Carlisle's firing was not nearly as punitive as such moves usually.  Larry Bird talked about keeping Carlisle in the organization, the ultimate expression of gratitude to an ex-coach.  Did Carlisle earn a firing, albeit a nice one?  If you look merely at Carlisle's won-loss record in Indiana, you see a steady regression each year.  This, of course, ignores the brawl that got his whole team suspended in 2004-05, the Ron Artest suspension in 2005-06, and the team's quasi-rebuilding season this year.  The point was there was always something beyond Carlisle's control that limited success after Carlisle's great 2003-04 debut. 

 

Still, there were some indications that Carlisle's intense style grated on the players.  We don't know the particulars of the player complaints but you have to believe that Bird (Carlisle's good friend) wouldn't have made a change unless there was no way to salvage Carlisle's relationship with the players.  As for Carlisle's future, he has shown enough to win prove he can win with veteran teams.  Still, he has a rap as abrasive from his time with Detroit and Indiana.  He'll get another gig but Carlisle will occupy that same place as Mike Fratello, a solid coach who is probably not your first choice to coach the team but rather a solid alternative.

 

-Bob Hill, Seattle:  Like Carlisle, Hill occupies a retread status and has a reputation for rubbing his players the wrong way.  Unlike Carlisle, Hill is not known as an above-average coach but rather a filler candidate.  In fairness to Hill, the team wasn't very good and Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen missed much time with injuries (though Hill didn't do much better with Allen and Lewis healthy in 2005-06).  In addition, the Sonics are in complete flux as an organization.  Hill's worst problem is that he didn't really develop the young players very well.  He didn't commit the cardinal sin of benching the youngsters for mediocre vets but Luke Ridnour, in particular, regressed at a time when they needed him to improve. 

 

In short, Hill was in a no-win situation but there's always been a sense that he wasn't a fun coach to play for.  To highlight this point, a few days ago Rik Smits, who Hill coached on the Pacers in early 1990s obliquely noted Hill wasn't loved by those Pacers.  In this article from the Indy Star, Smits praised coach Larry Brown and noted that "[t]he thing I liked about [Brown] was he treated everybody equal.  That wasn't always the case [under previous coach Bob Hill]. Guys were getting preferential treatment, but Brown wasn't that way at all."  I expect Hill to find a gig as an assistant somewhere but he is unlikely to be a head coach again unless an interim opportunity pops up.

 

-Eric Musselman, Sacramento:   It was a rough year for Musselman.  He had done a solid job previously with Golden State, only to be fired, but the Sacramento experience was not a good resume builder.  Mussleman started the year getting busted for a DUI.  On the court, the Kings were a fringe playoff team at best.  The fact that they didn't quite get there shouldn't have been a reason to can a coach one year into his contract. 

 

So what happened?  There were whispers of feuding between Mike Bibby and Ron Artest about shots and between Kenny Thomas and Shareef Abdur-Rahim about the starting power forward job.  It was clear that Musselman had problems keeping Artest from taking crappy shots (though Artest ultimately shot much better for Musselman than he did for Rick Adelman the previous year).

 

Given all this, you have to think that something behind the scenes was seriously amiss or the Kings' management had ridiculous expectations.  Sactown Royalty did a nice feature on the axing and pointed out that the players were not happy with Musselman, and that the team was "dysfunctional."  I take these player comments with a bit of a grain of salt.  Most of these guys needed to be traded released before the Kings can clear cap room and get younger (with the notable exception of Kevin Martin).  Whatever the truth, Musselman's tenure does leave him with a bit of a cloud and it's not clear he'll get another shot as an NBA head coach.