Fire Sam and bench TJ.

Scott over at RaptorBlog has an article entitled "Commence the Sam Mitchell Deathwatch". Essentially, he saved me the time and effort of having to write a story about why exactly Sam's time is coming to an end. However, if you are even remotely interested in the Raps you probably have had most of these thoughts yourself at some point in time, such as the poor distribution of minutes and poor coaching during crunch time.

I also agree wholeheartedly that Sam would make a fantastic assistant coach who would be respected by the players and who would bring a lot to the table in terms of reinforcing what the head coach is trying to do. Being an assistant would also allow him to hide his biggest weaknesses, namely in-game adjustments to the opposing coaches' decisions and strategies. As others have pointed out, Sam's strengths ain't the X's & O's. The line that caught my attention most, though, was this:

Another coach might have run some plays late in the fourth instead of trusting T.J. Ford to make a smart crunch-time decision (on a related note, Ford's charge-and-chuck combo late in the fourth are exactly why I don't trust him – I don't care what the numbers say, he has poor court vision and game management skills).

In the name of full disclosure I should tell you, before making my next point, that I am a huge TJ-hater. I seriously considered calling this blog www.tjsucks.blogspot.com, before deciding that he sucks so much people probably wouldn't even know what I was referencing. I stared in shock at my computer for a solid hour in pure disbelief when news of the TJ-CV Smooth trade broke. I was like Steven A. Smith during the draft right after Villanueva was chosen. I had come to expect such soul-crushing, mind-numbing, franchise-killing decisions from all the prior regimes, but Colangelo? How could he possibly be so stupid! It was like your buddy, against your advice, got drunk in Vegas and married the stripper he'd just met that night, only to wake up the next morning to the realization that she's really a donkey covered in makeup who stuffs her bra, and that you just wasted a perfectly great relationship with a low-maintenance, high upside girl who was just beginning to come into her own.

The fact that he's gotten off to such a shitty start has left me with mixed emotions, to say the least. On the one had, I am happy because I get to feel like the guy who warned his buddy not to go marry said donkey, no matter how much it "filled a need", and as such I'm able to say "I told you so, jackass". On the other hand, it's like my buddy made a drunken mistake, caught some type of STD, the ex-girlfriend eventually becomes an actress on Baywatch, and he's stuck being married to the stripper. You can't help but feel sorry for your buddy, and you know he'll move on at some point, but he's definitely never going to be the same, and he'll be paying for his mistakes for years to come. The fact that he's your buddy also means that his shitty life can't help but rub off on yours. That's pretty much how I feel about TJ.

In conclusion, RaptorBlog sums up why I feel this way about TJ far more succinclty than I ever could: he has terrible court vision and game management skills. These glaring weaknesses are even more obvious when he's compared to Calderon, whose main strengths are those two skills. Watch them when they drive. Jose has his head up, on a swivel, reading the play, deciding whether to take the drive all the way or dish. TJ, on the other hand, puts his head down when he drives and as such misses what's going on around him. The fact that Jose does everything else better than TJ as well, such as the pick-and-pop, makes the decision an easy one. Bench TJ.