Antoni Tells Gasol He Won't Bench Him at End of Games

Antoni has already lost control of the team, as far as I'm concerned. He's the coach. If he thinks benching Gasol will help win games, then he should be benched. The way Gasol is presenting it to the press is typical of his gentlemanly manner, I don't see this as Gasol poisoning the locker room, but that doesn't change the fact that Antoni should say to him "look, Pau, we've been struggling and I'm going to do whatever I think is right to win a game". Can you see Paul Pierce or KG or Rondo bucking Doc? To me, this is evidence of Gasol either not buying into Antoni's system OR Antoni has no system. This would not surprise me given he doesn't have the horses to implement his system right now.

Sorry, TJ, but I am not, nor have I EVER been, a fan of D-less Antoni. I think the Lakers would be better off naming Kobe Player Coach than have him. Or Bernie Bickerstaff. Or Chuck Person. Or anybody not named Antoni (including Lakers assistant coach Dan D'Antoni).

Well, Nash is expected back within days, possibly as early as Saturday. Give the Lakers a few weeks to integrate him and then we'll see...


Starting midway through the third quarter in the Lakers comeback win over the Bobcats Tuesday, Mike D’Antoni stopped playing Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard together. They subbed each other out and D’Antoni went small with a lot of Metta World Peace
at the four. It worked, by the way. When Gasol and Howard shared the
floor the Lakers were -22 for the game, the comeback started not long
after D’Antoni started just having one of his star bigs on the floor.
However, that meant one star big man had to sit the crucial last couple minutes, and that was Gasol. And he didn’t like it.
So Gasol and D’Antoni went out to dinner and tried to talk it out, reports the Los Angeles Times. One of the things to come out of it was Gasol will be playing the end of games.

Gasol said he wanted the ball in the post instead of on
the perimeter and also asked to play in crunch time, among the topics
discussed with D’Antoni at a Manhattan Beach restaurant.

‘It was to make sure we’re in the same boat,’ Gasol said. ‘We’re
trying to reach the same goal. Let’s communicate. Hopefully, we can meet
halfway on some points.”

D’Antoni told Gasol he would no longer be benched in crucial situations, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

D’Antoni is like most coaches — he’s willing to try Howard and Gasol
together, but he doesn’t want to lose games over it. The Lakers, after
their ugly start to the season, are the current 12 seed in the West and
while just 1.5 games back of the eight spot there are a lot of good
teams bunched up in there such as Utah, Denver, Dallas (which gets Dirk Nowitzki
back soon), an improving Timberwolves squad and more. The Lakers path
to the playoffs is not easy and they can’t just flip the switch after
the All-Star break. They need to win games.
If Gasol and Howard at the end of games doesn’t work in his system,
D’Antoni can’t stick with the experiment for long. And that leads to a
host of other questions for the franchise.
But for now it’s all good. It’s about communication. Right D’Antoni?

“But I wanted to make sure he knew what my vision was for
him and the team and see if that’s all good. Then we’ll tweak it or not
tweak it. I thought he was great and gave me a lot of insight into a
lot of things. It was more of a feeling-out process and what makes him
feel comfortable. He’s a very intelligent basketball player. Why
wouldn’t I get his opinion about a lot of things?”




bob


.

Hi,
I'm sticking, as before, with the opinion that something fishy in the kingdom of Den.. oops, I mean Lakers. And D'Antoni is just a symptom.

AK

bob,

This is a hard call.
I understand that Pau needs a confidence builder but is it the smartest thing to tell or guarantee to Pau that he will play at the end of games? What if D'Antoni feels that Nash, Meeks, Kobe, MWP and Howard are the best matchup at the end of a particular game? I could see Twitter going crazy the first time Pau sits at the end of a game. I think LA already knows that Pau will probably be traded after 1/15 and they just need to work on him playing better and staying healthy.

It was interesting that recently Jeff Van Gundy was speaking very highly about D'Antoni and how the new version of the NBA was copied from D'Antoni. Lots of pick and rolls, lots of 3 point shooting, quicker offense. JVG also said that the Knicks offense is still D'Antonio's offense and that Woodson only made small tweaks to the offense. If you watch the Knicks, you would most likely agree that they play extremely similar to the way D'Antoni's Suns teams played. The big difference between the two teams is Tyson Chandler. Phoenix never had a defensive stopper in the middle.

You were probably joking but in case you weren't the league does not allow for a player to be a player-coach.

TJ,

Do you have a substantiating reference concerning your player-coach claim? It's my impression that a player can also be a coach in name, but any salary for coaching duties must count toward the player salary cap.

I'd be interested in what an official regulation might say.

Sam

sam wrote:TJ,

Do you have a substantiating reference concerning your player-coach claim? It's my impression that a player can also be a coach in name, but any salary for coaching duties must count toward the player salary cap.

I'd be interested in what an official regulation might say.

Sam

sam,

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:


The player-coach was, for many decades, a long-time fixture in professional basketball. Many notable coaches in the NBA served as player-coaches, including Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkens.
This was especially true up through the 1970s, when the league was not
as financially successful as it is today, and player-coaches were often
used to save money. The practice fell out of favor in the 1980s (though Mike Dunleavy Sr., while an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, once came out of retirement and played several games when a rash of injuries decimated the team). Today, the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the players' union prohibits the use of player-coaches, in order to avoid circumventing the league's salary cap,
as coaches' salaries are not counted under the cap. Therefore, if a
player is to serve as a coach, he would have to receive commission from
his contract as a player. The player, then, is not technically an
official coach of his team but instead simply a coach in name. One
example of a player in recent years who was groomed for eventual
official coaching duties using this practice was Avery Johnson.



bob


.

sam wrote:TJ,

Do you have a substantiating reference concerning your player-coach claim? It's my impression that a player can also be a coach in name, but any salary for coaching duties must count toward the player salary cap.

I'd be interested in what an official regulation might say.

Sam

Sam,

This is from the CBA FAQ:

29. Can a team circumvent the salary cap by paying a player less but arranging for an affiliated company to also pay him, perhaps by way of an endorsement contract?

I suppose it could happen, but the NBA will investigate if it suspects that an outside person or organization is paying a player on behalf or at the request of a team. If they find out that such an event has occurred, they will penalize the team. For the first offense by a team, the fine can be up to $3 million, forfeiture of a first round draft pick, and/or voiding the player's contract. The penalties increase for subsequent violations.

Whenever a contract is signed, extended, renegotiated or otherwise amended, the team, player, and player's agent must certify, under penalty of perjury, that there are no side agreements or understandings of any kind relating to:
•Any future contract, or future extension, renegotiation or amendment of the player's current contract.
•Any outside compensation, investment, business opportunity or anything else of value furnished to the player or any other person or entity controlled by, related to, or acting on behalf of the player.

Incidentally, players are no longer allowed to become player-coaches. This is because it would be possible to circumvent the cap by signing a player as a player-coach, and paying him less as a player but overpaying him as a coach.

http://www.cbafaq.com/salarycap.htm

TJ,

Thanks. I had seen the Wikipedia blurb but was looking for something more official. I inferred from the wording of that passage that a player could become a "coach in name" rather than an official coach but that his total salary for both jobs would become part of the team's salary cap nut.

The bolded part of the CAP seems unambiguous, although I still wonder what would happen if a player agreed to assume coaching duties for no additional payment and with the understanding that his entire salary from the club would be subject to salary cap restrictions. The key would be whether "player-coach" meant "player and official coach" rather than "coach in name." For example, suppose KG were still playing 25-30 minutes per game for the Celtics but also routinely spent two hours a day tutoring Melo without accepting any pay. (Forget about whether two hours a day might not scratch the surface with Melo.) Could KG then claim the credentials of being a coach in name but not officially and without pay?

Sam

Sam,

My understanding is that a player on the active roster can't be a coach at all but I can't find anything that supports that other than the CBA FAQ that I posted above. I would expect that the language would be in the actual legal CBA. I believe the CBA is available for the public to see.

TJ,

Well, since I'm probably not planning to be either an NBA player or coach in the near-future, I'm happy to let it be a mini-mystery. Thanks for doing the research.

Sam