Philadelphia, PA - As the NBA editor here at The Sports Network, I was all set to pen a piece explaining that there would be no phony things-to-be-thankful-for-Thanksgiving columns coming from this department.
Then it hit me, despite my salty reputation I am actually thankful for a few things this Turkey Day.
I am giddy that I have to work on Thanksgiving, so I don't have to act like I'm riveted by the kid stories emanating from pseudo-relatives and "friends" that inevitably keep me from drinking beer and watching football. Meanwhile, I'm really jacked up that I am not going to be forced to wake by at 4 a.m. on Friday so I can save a couple hundred dollars at Best Buy's doorbuster sale.
It all falls apart Friday night, however. I'll still be a safe distance away from the holiday nonsense that doubles as the bane of my existence, but I will be at the Wachovia Center in south Philadelphia, taking in a Sixers' game.
If you haven't been subjected to it, Sixers' basketball has been virtually unwatchable this season.
New coach Eddie Jordan is a "system guy" that brought his Princeton offense to the City of Brotherly Love, with no intention of tweaking anything for anybody. He's not alone. In professional sports, "system coaches" are becoming more of a pandemic than the swine flu.
To me, great coaches in any sport slowly add talent that fits into what they want to accomplish (the system), while maximizing the strengths of their current players and masking as many of the deficiencies as possible. Coaches like that are virtually extinct these days.
It's all "my way or the highway" thinking and Jordan is the poster child for the "system coach."
Before Philadelphia played Jordan's former team, the Washington Wizards, on Tuesday, former All-Star guard Gilbert Arenas took the time to speak with reporters about Jordan's offense.
"You need five passers, five shooters," Arenas said. "Athletes don't work in that offense, to be honest."
Of course, the Sixers have one upper-echelon shooter, Jason Kapono, and a host of superlative athletes in Andre Iguodala, Lou Williams, Thaddeus Young, Rodney Carney and Jrue Holiday.
But, instead of playing transition basketball, Jordan keeps hammering the square peg into the round hole.
"I call it the thinking man's offense. If you don't have a very high IQ, you're always going to be lost," Arenas added.
Some might call that an indictment of players like Iguodala, Young, Samuel Dalembert and Elton Brand, who have all taken a step back in Jordan's system.
I'll call it an indictment of a coach who doesn't have the IQ to figure out his players are better suited for something else.
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