It’s not shocking. For as bad as our shooting and offense was with Rubio, Crowder and Favors, we were still shooting way below our numbers. We’d go on lulls that were like 20-2 runs. It was just completely mental. We got Conley and Bojan and kept talking about “imagine Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdonavic shooting all of Rubio and Crowder’s shots.” Mike started ice, ice cold in a very historically bad fashion. Despite better shooting, we had all the same offensive flaws as we did previously. Everyone kept saying not to worry about the offense and that it was just defense, but the problem wasn’t really just defense alone — that was only a part of the equation. The bigger issue is psychological, and we’ve watched Quin drive this same thing down the stretch of games and in the playoffs for quite some time now where we somehow defy statistical odds in the most bizarre fashion. He can’t adjust to this because he fundamentally doesn’t see this game psychologically — he sees it as numbers and probabilities but fails to take into account changing psychological dynamics that make up those numbers, and when they’ll be relevant and when they won’t. He can’t captain this because he hasn’t given his team any kind of psychological lift and it’s to the point where they don’t expect it and have no faith. But there’s no meteoric for “mentally defeated” that Quin understands and he ends up being the ultimate NPC. He’s literally the coach in the video game that sits there on the sideline as a programming function. He’s allowed too many of these situations to happen that it’s impossible to un-ingrain these beliefs out of players’ heads, so they’ll play out the same things with anxiety, and he’ll watch along thinking we’re just seeing more outliers.
