Of course he is, he gets maximum efficiency out of the players he got. Deron Williams wouldn't have been the guy he is now if he had worked with Popovich all those years instead. Millsap wouldn't improve himself to a 18 8 guy, he would be another Blair maybe. Even CJ miles wouldn't have improved as much as he did with Sloan (though we can argue still how close he is to his peak)
Only thing would be Koufos maybe, because i had hopes on him but he couldn't find enough playing time in his second year. He played more even in rookie year. So maybe i think it was the player not the coach. But in general i think Sloan is a very good trainer, but Popovich is a better in game coach. He is more flexible and he is a winner. Maybe he gets maximum efficiency out of players playing positions and rotations in the game, but Sloan is a much better player developer for sure
1. I'm not convinced that Sloan's sitting out rookie Deron in favor of Milt Palacio or whoever helped his development, even though DW claimed that it did. IMHO, it only slowed DW's development. Maybe it motivated Deron, but that motivation wouldve originated better from the performance-based playing time that I described. And as the Deron departure showed, the rookie strategy didn't fully reform D-Will's punkiness, and it didn't establish Sloan as the authority. I'm not sure that we know what all of Deron's grievances were, but Deron--for better or for worse--decided to start calling his own plays in defiance of Sloan.
https://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/10/as-jerry-sloan-exits-too-early-deron-williams-better-know-what/
But that was offense. The defense was ignored, because players usually don't like to play defense, and Sloan stopped enforcing it--that is, if he ever did.
2. Millsap is Millsap primarily due to his own motivation, partly with the support of the coaching staff.
3. CJ Miles? LOL. Same Sloan pattern (in stark contrast to Popovich's). A mere 200 minutes in his rookie year--but then again, sometimes CJ deserved to be benched when he wasn't. And CJ was young. But lo and behold, CJ started producing good percentages after he had logged about 600 minutes or so, which is right in line with what my strategy prescribes for a first-year player: 10 MPG for most games (i.e., >60). Just another data point that on-court experience and minimum minutes are essential, no matter whether the player's upside is journeyman or Jordan.
But CJ's Catch-'n'Jack erratic offense was only half the story; neither Sloan nor his successor has enforced defense in Miles. In another way, CJ is a classic example of a Jazzman who got away with not defending, even under Sloan, who didn't enforce defense very well back in the early 21st century but definitely didn't in the last 3 to 5 years or so.
4. "Couldn't find enough playing time" for Koufos? How hard is it when your regular starters at the 4/5 spot could be appropriately nicknamed "Matador" and "Torero", especially when their poor defense sometimes barely compensated for their scoring on the other end, and your first "big" man off the bench was a hard-working and usually effective but often undersized Paperboy?
Backups such as KK easily could accumulate their crucial development time of a minimum of 10 minutes per game, without negatively affecting the outcome of the game, just from the times when Boozer and/or Memo weren't getting it done on the court. You sit the regulars down down for 5 minutes (scheduled or unscheduled) a couple of times per game, and they just might learn to move their feet on D. Just maybe. And you might start getting more than maintenance production out of your backup bigs, which are real centers--not yelping Alaskans or PF Turks in center's clothing.
Promising production is what you got out of Fesenko and Koufos and Araujo alike, multiple times each. However, unlike any true coach, leader, investor, or teacher, the Jazz coaching staff ignored the benefit of developing and reinforcing such success, both physically and psychologically, which could have been done feasibly with carefully selected playing time on a regular basis.
As in 10+ minutes per game.
