Why didn't your team execute? "Because we don't care enough right now. ...We don't care enough to do the things that are necessary."
I'm not going to engage in "misery loves company" downplaying. I am NOT excusing any of this. This is to say, as I wrote the other night, the physical, mental and emotional demands of an NBA season are impossible for an outsider like me to truly understand. What happened to the "Heat" in the last nine games? Spo said that although his guys care, they don't care enough. What happened to Cleveland from last season to this? Kenny Atkinson said that there were "mental lapses" specifically in rebounding today. Others up there have written about the lack of an "identity", of a "malaise" this season. This is not unique. To the young person who says, "Nobody knows how I feel!", if you've lived life for awhile, you know exactly how somebody feels when 1) they break up with their sig oth 2) when their boss is a prick 3) when a loved one dies--lived experience informs us and we can assure the other person that their crisis is not the first in human history, in fact it is common in a lived life. Maybe that doesn't make them feel better, but it should talk them off the emotional edge. "They got on the other side of it, I can too."
How can you improve when you can't practice enough? "We practice them all the time. It goes back to what I said the other night, it's a matter of making that choice and too often we have guys who don't want to make that choice. And it's pretty consistent who those guys are."
There was a question right about here, Your team went through a similar thing last year (I am paraphrasing, not quoting, because I couldn't hear well). However your team got out of it last season, is there something replicable to get your mojo back this season? I mention that not because of Redick's answer, which was essentially "no", but because, as I wrote in a previous post today, I have a pretty clear memory that they did go through something very similar at about the same time last season.
"...I'm not doing another 53 games like this."
JJ, they'll change, they will change on their own time schedule, no coach can make LeBron James or Luka Doncic "care more". Keep them close. Don't give up.
