Suns fire Head Coach Igor Kokoskov

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Indy
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Re: Suns fire Head Coach Igor Kokoskov

Post by Indy »

In2ition wrote:
Sat May 04, 2019 11:25 am
carey wrote:
Sat May 04, 2019 11:19 am
Indy wrote: We only know that somebody said a couple anonymous players said, off the record, that they didn't know what he wanted.
I think it is coming from multiple sources now and Ashley Nevel said she heard it from multiple players after games during the season. I've been saying it since the first week that it was glaringly obvious but that's from what I was seeing on the court from Louisiana, so...
You're absolutely right. I think a lot of us were saying it and hoping it was wrong since it was so early in the year let alone his tenure.
The guy coached the Slovenian national team to a EuroBasket title coaching in English. I find it hard to believe people on this team couldn't understand him (if they wanted to).

People also complain that he didn't speak up enough to the refs, but he was about middle of the pack when it comes to Techs this season.

The one stretch of the year where he had a competent starting PG to go along with a healthy Book and no more Ariza/Ryno, we went +.500.

And this is after the boss that hired him was fired at the start of the season, we didn't take the guy that was at our biggest position of need in the draft, and we don't bother to replace any of the FO during the year, and we have the worst training facility in the league.

We set the guy up for failure. Maybe he would have failed anyway, but this was just another example of this FO being a shit-show.

Let's hope that James Jones is giving the freedom to do what he wants, and that he turns out being good at the job (since he has no experience). And good luck to Monty. I hope we stand behind him as a coach and give him a competent roster for at least 20 games this year. That would be a huge step up from what we gave the last coach.

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Split T
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Re: Suns fire Head Coach Igor Kokoskov

Post by Split T »

We did set him up to fail, which was why I was in favor of bringing him back...but some of those quotes about not understanding him or knowing what was expected of them, were hard to ignore. Hard to evaluate him under the circumstances, but hard to fault Jones on the switch as well.

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Mori Chu
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Re: Suns fire Head Coach Igor Kokoskov

Post by Mori Chu »

Maybe both things are true. Kokoskov didn't get a 100% fair shake, but maybe he was mediocre and had some flaws. Maybe Monty is more of the coach this young team needs right now. Everybody around the league is really highly praising us for hiring him, and while that doesn't inherently mean he's the right coach for us, I do want us to try to do some things that buy us goodwill with players around the league. I worry that our reputation as a franchise is for being non-player-friendly, for having a perennial losing team and revolving door of coaching and front office staff, and players talk about things like that. I want players to want to play here, and maybe having Monty as our coach is a step toward that.

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Indy
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Re: Suns fire Head Coach Igor Kokoskov

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Igor had plenty of flaws. That is one of the things you get when you hire a first time HC. And as much good publicity around the league as we are getting, we got plenty when we hired Igor. Even Pop said good things about it and preached patience.

But that is all water under the bridge. Let's hope Jones can establish himself as one of the better GMs and Monty has a good coach and we give him the team he needs to be successful (unlike the last 5 years of this team's history).

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