Sportsguy nails it, again. In his brilliant “Rounders Appreciation/NBA Season’s End Awards” column, he calls out Isiah Thomas, Pacers “coach.”

To Isiah Thomas … it was tough for you to top last year’s abominable coaching performance, but you actually managed to pull it off. How could the Pacers possibly miss the playoffs in the watered-down East with that much talent? How could a team with this many quality players play so listlessly and ineffectively together? How could a team blow this many big leads? It’s almost impossible. Keep changing the players, Isiah — it must be their fault.

(My favorite Isiah moment: When they blew an 18-point second-half lead against the Celts two weeks ago, Isiah kept Brad Miller on the bench for the entire fourth quarter, even though Miller kills the C’s and Boston was playing Rodney Rogers at center. You would have thought Isiah had money on the C’s. How does he not get fired this summer? How? What more does he have to do? He even did a better job running the CBA, and the league went bankrupt.)

I said it when my Pacers hired him. I’ll say it again. Isiah Thomas has a great smile. He wears nice suits. He looks good on camera. But he’s not worth his weight in sawdust as a coach. The guy’s always been dumb as a sack of hammers. Basketball is life, and vice-versa, in Indiana. So it’s understandable that the Pacers might give a shot to a Hoosier legend like Thomas (he won the NCAA championship with IU in ’81). He’s had his shot. He failed. Fire him.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 11th, 2002 at 4:02 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.