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Do you have to play sports to understand them?
It’s a question at the center of too many bad internet debates. “I bet you don’t even play ball.”
Does that matter?
Where is the line? Is the worth of an opinion weighed by the level of basketball? A D1 rec league player is allowed to comment on the NBA, but D3 is out?
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It’s an ad hominem. The opinion is independent of the opinion holder. Still, we plebeians ought to remember that we don’t always know. There’s something strange, optically, about a high school social studies teacher publicly declaring that an NBA head coach ought to have one more season to prove his worth. Yet, here goes:
Houston Rockets head coach Ime Udoka should only have one more season to prove his worth.
Rockets’ Ime Udoka has been a strong coach
It won’t be an unpopular opinion in these quarters!
You guys really, really don’t like Udoka. Opinions vary, yes, but the consensus leans heavily in one direction.
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Perhaps my eyes don’t work so well. I’m not as low on Udoka. I think he’s, at a minimum, a top-15 coach in the NBA:
But creeping into the upper half isn’t a sound approach to job security as an NBA head coach.
We should all agree that Udoka is a strong defensive coach. There’s been some dispute over the extent to which he relies on lineups to bolster that defense. It’s been argued that if he can’t scheme around Alperen Sengun and Reed Sheppard, his defensive success is less about acumen and more about putting good defenders on the floor.
It could also be argued that God his -or-her self could not design a scheme that protects Sengun and Sheppard at the same time. Udoka has proven his ability to maximize Sengun on that end of the floor. His inability to draw blood from a stone should not discredit his ability to smelt iron from one.
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It’s Udoka’s offensive know-how that’s rightly questioned; however, the numbers do not support that line of questioning. In Udoka’s two seasons at the helm, the Rockets ranked twelfth (114.9) and eighth (117.5) in Offensive Rating.
So, on paper, the question becomes “What are we even talking about?” Udoka has hovered around a top-ten…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/2026-2027-nba-season-break-095601682.html
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Publish date : 2026-09-24 09:56:00
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