Curry Can't Create Consistency

In coaching, there is a fine line between successfully making adjustments and maintaining consistency. If a coach is too rigid, that coach will fail to make the changes a team needs. When a coach is inflexible with rotations, there is less incentive for players to work to either maintain or expand their roles.

On the other hand, a coach has to maintain some level of stability. There is a middle ground between keeping pressure on a player to earn his minutes and forcing a player to look over his shoulder at every turn. A player needs the freedom to play aggressively without the fear that a few missteps will lead to a reduction in minutes.

All season long, players have been talking about the “transitions” and “adjustments” that accompany roster and coaching changes. Thanks to Michael Curry’s constant tinkering, players have had the added duty of adjusting to different minutes and rotation patterns on almost a game-by-game basis. A player has no chance to find a rhythm if his minutes are yo-yoing and he is forced to play alongside a different group of teammates almost every game.

Michael Curry has come nowhere to achieving balance between flexibility and stability this season. The first lineup change – Iverson replacing Billups – was out of Curry’s control. Since then, Curry had changed the starting lineup four times. After the trade, he first started Iverson, Hamilton, Prince, Wallace, and Johnson. He then inserted Kwame Brown in place of Johnson in order to add muscle to the team’s interior. When Brown failed to produce, he was replaced by Rodney Stuckey in hopes of starting the team’s five best players. Small ball was a disaster, so Curry re-inserted Amir Johnson, this time in place of RIP Hamilton. Today, Curry will be implementing his latest change: starting Antonio McDyess in place of Johnson.

So much for preserving credibility. Less than a month ago, Curry had this to say about the team’s starting lineup:

"This is it for the rest of the season," Curry said.
--The Grand Rapids Press

The players sound resigned to the constant tinkering.

"At this point, we've had so many different lineup changes, it really doesn't matter," Tayshaun Prince said. "We just have to start playing together and try to get some wins. Dyess will help us defensively and rebounding and he will make some shots. But the key to it all now is, who's going to be that big coming off the bench for us? There's good ways and bad ways to look at it.”
-- The Detroit News

The move also flies in the face of everything Curry has said about developing the young players and trying to stagger the minutes of Wallace and McDyess. Curry likes to have one his veteran big men on the court at all times because they are the only two Piston big men with reliable outside shots. When any combination of Johnson, Jason Maxiell, and Kwame Brown are on the floor together, opposing big men can sag into the paint and clog the middle. With Wallace and McDyess starting and finishing games together, Curry will struggle to find minutes for both Johnson and Maxiell – the two Piston big men who are actually a part of this team’s future. Also, while Johnson has not played as well as many had hoped, he is second on the team in net +/-. This implies that even though Johnson is not filling up the stat sheet, the team performs much better when he is on the court.

The man being promoted, Antonio McDyess, is currently saying all the right things, but past comments indicate he is not a fan of the switch.

"I can't see that happening," McDyess said Friday after practice. "Where I'm at mentally, I don't know if starting would be good for me. I think I work better coming off the bench.”
-- Detroit Free Press

This is another example of what Chris McCosky described as overcoaching. The players have already expressed plenty of frustration with Curry. Maybe he will learn from his mistakes and improve as a coach. Unless that happens, Curry’s constant experimenting and the associated poor results can lead to only one conclusion: he is failing as a head coach.