When it rains, it pours; and then you find out you have a leak and your roof guy is taking offers from the house down the street.
Tom Thibodeau has been an integral part of the Boston resurgence. Thibodeau is considered a defensive genius, and the Celtics' defense has been dominant, even in the face of aging superstars and injuries. Doc Rivers is great at finding cool phrases and inpsiring his team to play hard all the time, but if you want defensive Xs and Os, it's Thibodeau that may be the man behind the curtain.
After the Celtics got worked over Sunday night in Game 7 by the Magic, they probably weren't expecting more bad news this soon.
Well, while it's not catastrophic (that was the Garnett injury), it's still raining.
My colleague Matt Steinmetz made a compelling case over the weekend that the Lakers are at a crossroads. If this team falls short of reaching the NBA Finals, should Mitch Kupchak do everything in his power to bring back the current core? Will retaining free agents like Lamar Odom, Trevor Ariza and Shannon Brown result in a roster with a championship ceiling? It's too early to say, especially after the Lakers averted disaster with a Game 7 win over the Rockets.
But after watching the Celtics fall to the Magic in Game 7 at home, I can't help but think Boston's GM Danny Ainge now faces the same dilemma. Did the Celtics lose because they were unlucky victims of the injury bug, or did they lose because the roster is inherently flawed?
The Rotation is a weekly study on the NBA by one of our All-Star voices. In rotation this week is Tom Ziller.
An annual tradition regular as daybreak, as the season ends a pack of coaches are mercilessly hacked to pieces by fans, media and often their own bosses. A parade of potential replacements jumps aboard the carousel. They dance, they preen ... one of them wins. A year or two or (fingers crossed) three later, said doll gets torn apart. The cycle continues.
There was a switch this season, though: the bloodletting happened during the season, as a record eight coaches met the iron maiden between opening night and Valentine's Day. Is there anyone left to execute at season's end?
Well ... yes. Of course there is. After the jump, we tell you whom and guess their replacements.
The spat between Mike D'Antoni and Phoenix's current management has flared back up. In this morning's New York Post, D'Antoni told Peter Vescey that owner Robert Sarver and GM Steve Kerr tried to force in a defensive assistant coach after the first-round blow-up against the Spurs and basically tinkered too much for his taste. D'Antoni also asserts that in his first meeting with Shawn Marion, Kerr told the forward he wasn't worth a max contract.
Via BSotS, Sarver jumped on Phoenix sports radio today to answer the charges. Here's his basic assessment of what led to D'Antoni's departure.
"At the end of the day, I think that while Mike didn't really want to be the GM, he also didn't want a boss. Mike's a pretty stubborn guy and probably felt that a little bit of the suggestions were maybe undermining him, even though that wasn't our intent. [...] Steve walked on eggshells all year and basically didn't tell Mike to do anything."
There's better gossip in there, though: Sarver said D'Antoni agreed before the 2007-08 season that he'd consider adding a defensive coordinator to the bench once Marc Iavaroni left for Memphis. Kerr brought then-free agent Tom Thibodeau to town. (Thibodeau was a long-time Jeff Van Gundy assistant and had been interviewed for a few head coach jobs that summer.) Sarver said D'Antoni rejected Thibodeau and instead promoted his brother Dan D'Antoni to lead assistant. Thibodeau, of course, eventually landed in Boston, where he implemented what became the league's highest-rated defense.
Did D'Antoni feel threatened by the Thibodeau suggestion? If Sarver and Kerr knew he was stubborn and didn't like having a boss, why did they think he'd approve of having the boss' hand-picked #2 on his staff? Of course, I imagine Suns fans will be less than ecstatic that D'Antoni put his own autonomy in higher regard than the team's plight. With Thibodeau's specific expertise, the team could have won a title.
The rumors are light right now, but Eddie Jordan's sacking and the resultant ascension of exec-level Wizards man Ed Tapscott to the head coaching job seem more like an intermediate procedure than a final decision on who will run this team for the rest of 2008-09. Tapscott has a coaching career behind him, but he left the sidelines in 1990 and has been on the management side since.
The Washington Post's Ivan Carter describes Tapscott's most recent role as being considered an extra assistant coach who traveled with the team, but nothing in Tapscott's accordion file indicates he wants to be back on the sidelines for good. The interim role seems more like Ernie Grunfeld filling a hole with a trusted deputy.
That said, will the Wizards try to pull a big-name free agent coach?
Earlier, today I posted on the Lakers trying to develop a defense similar to the one the Boston Celtics utilized to defeat the them in the 2008 NBA Finals. So what exactly was Boston's defense all about? How was it so successful? The answer may have been disclosed by this Lakers fan's breakdown of the defense the Celtics played against the Lakers in the NBA Finals.
Outside of the obvious Lakers/Kobe bias displayed by this fan, the video does a great job of showing how potent the Celtics defense was last season. Basically Tom Thibodeau is the Dark Lord. The question for the Celtics this season is are they hungry enough to keep that swarming D going for another championship run.
The same day news broke about Mo Cheeks' extension in Philadelphia, Yahoo! Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski penned word about a two-year extension for reigning O'Brien winner Doc Rivers of Boston. Woj puts the value at $5.5 million per year, but with incentive clauses in place to push it to $7 million.
You may remember last summer, when Rivers had come off the most pitiful of his four bad seasons in Boston, finishing with the second worst record in the league. With a contract for only 2007-08 left, Celtics executive Danny Ainge gave Doc a one-year extension to avoid all the lame duck talk heading into this season of newly high expectations with Kevin Garnett in town.
It worked beautifully for Rivers, and pretty well for the Celtics, if you're of the mind Rivers is a plus on this team. As recently as the NBA Finals, though, there have been valid complaints about Rivers' style. But obviously, these players love Rivers and it has worked out well (I'd say). No harm in this decision -- even if Garnett or Paul Pierce fall apart physically and the team needs to reboot, Boston's owners can afford to pay two head coaches.
Speaking of two head coaches: one of the more important signings Boston still needs to make: re-sign Tom Thibodeau, the defensive ace which helped make the Celtics one of the best defensive teams of the decade. He didn't get a head coaching sniff, partially due to Boston's long run and partially due to the fact he makes Stan Van Gundy look sane by comparison. I have little doubt Boston desperately wants to keep Thibodeau.
In the long-form tradition of The Rotation, Tom Ziller considers the action the morning after each game of the NBA Finals.
Proper perspective for the absurdity of Game 6 does not exist. The NBA can call this one weird season on infinite counts, but the sum of all other nonsensical haps in the league really cannot compare to what the Celtics franchise provoked on its way to the championship.
Boston's series win isn't a surprise: as Brett Edwards wrote last night, everyone knew it was coming after that mystical Game 4 win in L.A. But this? A complete blowout from the start of the second quarter? Garbage time?! Eddie House alley-oops to a 180in' Tony Allen?!? GATORADE ON THE HARDWOOD!!!!
Simply and utterly absurd ... but just real enough to change the entire face of the league.
Celtics assistant coach Tom Thibodeau has been credited for installing Boston's tenacious defense, so it's not a surprise at all to see his name linked to several vacant head coaching jobs. (If you remember, he was linked to the Celtics job before the season even began.) That said, it seems the rumor mill might be wrong on this one. From Mark Spears of the Boston Globe:
It seems more and more likely that Celtics assistant coach Tom Thibodeau will be back in Boston next season. The Knicks, Mavericks, and Bobcats didn't ask for permission to speak to him before hiring their new coaches, and the Suns and Bulls have yet to ask for permission, as well.
It's possible everyone is waiting for Boston's playoff run to end, but that didn't stop the Suns from requesting (and receiving) permission to interview Terry Porter. Even if the Suns and Bulls think they'll be denied permission, at least going through the motions of checking sends the signal that they're interested. And considering the Bulls have interviewed just about everybody else, there's no reason not to call dibs on Thibodeau, as well.
The Bulls are taking their time with this whole "finding a coach" thing, interviewing just about anyone with a shred of interest in the job. According to Brian Hanley of the Chicago Sun-Times, John Paxson has already talked with ...deep breath ... Lakers assistants Brian Shaw and Kurt Rambis, current Jazz assistant Tyrone Corbin and former T'Wolves coach Dwane Casey -- and that's just this week!
Paxson was also scheduled to meet with Jeff Hornacek today and Kings assistant Chuck Person sometime this weekend, as well as John Lucas and Eric Snow sometime in the yet to be determined future. And, of course, don't forget about Celtics assistant Tom Thibodeau, who won't get permission from his current employer until Boston completes their playoff run.
Count 'em up: that's 10 names, and that doesn't include Mark Jackson, who already interviewed, nor Pistons assistants Terry Porter and Michael Curry, who have been suggested as candidates in the past. Do you notice a recurring theme with all these names? With the exception of Thibodeau and Casey, they're all former players, which makes you wonder if a career coach who never had the chance to rub elbows with Paxson as a player stands much of a chance.
When it rains, it pours; and then you find out you have a leak and your roof guy is taking offers from the house down the street. 
Cherry Picking
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The Bulls are taking their time with this whole "finding a coach" thing, interviewing just about anyone with a shred of interest in the job. According to 
