Gaddabout, "I don't get why Danny Ainge retired to be with his family, then takes one of the most stressful, demanding jobs in sports, in the most drop-dead serious sports town in the world."
I never believed that hokey reason but, except for the fact that Skiles replaced him, I wasn't unhappy to see him depart.
I rather liked Ainge as a player when he was with the Suns. He wasn't a bad defender - certainly not in the way Ceballos and Chapman were - but he did try to do too much. Along the lines of Casey Jacobson in that regard.
I always said he'd probably make a good coach if he'd have paid his dues as an assistant under some good coaches but as it was I thought he was pretty poor. He was the worst sideline coach I've ever seen with his constant antics distracting his players and he tried to micromanage the game with flurries of substitutions. If a coach does a good job of preparing his team in practice he has no reason to be frantically coaching them from the sideline all during the games as Danny did. Watch any good coach and he'll be sitting there paying attention to what is happening on the floor.
Ainge also experimented with defensive gimmicks that he didn't thoroughly understand - we've seen the same from FJ and D'Antoni. All the gimmicks were failures - about what you'd expect, in other words. He also tried using a motion offense which he didn't understand and while the team wasn't as ill-suited as the one FJ tried the MO with, it wasn't a rousing success either. At times when Luc wasn't on the floor it did okay but a normal offense would probably have been better.
The last straw for me was his handling of McDyess, in particular having him sitting on the bench during critical stretches in fourth quarters. (In case you weren't around to witness the mess.) I always thought McDyess would have stayed here if Ainge had played him like he trusted him.
