Blake Murphy Sports Writing

Title: The Case for a Sam Mitchell Contract Extension
Date: March 22, 2007
Original Source: The On Deck Circle
Synopsis: This one certainly doesn’t look great in retrospect, but at the time Sam was getting some love as a potential Coach of the Year despite being a lame duck.

There has been a lot of speculation all season about Sam Mitchell’s lame duck status with the Toronto Raptors. For those who don’t know, a lame duck coach is one who is in the final year of his contract. Mitchell’s lame duck status was heightened significantly at the end of last season when the Raptors hired Bryan Colangelo to be the new General Manager.

Rumors ran rampant that Mitchell’s time with the Raps was done, as Colangelo would soon bring over Phoenix Suns’ assistant Marc Iavaroni. The logic here was that Colangelo wanted to turn the Raptors into a Suns-style team with an up-tempo offense, and nobody would know how to operate that type of team better than Iavaroni, an assistant on the model team of such a style.With Mitchell’s contract up at the end of this season, combined with the lack of contract negotiations thus far, the general feeling is that Colangelo may still be looking at bringing in his boy to general this up-and-coming crew. This is all despite the Raptors’ 36-31 record and first place standing atop the Atlantic Division. I plan to layout five sound reasons that Mitchell should be given an extension of at least two-years to really see what he can do as he flourishes and matures in his role.

1. Marked Improvement as a Team
The most obvious point to make is that the Raptors are one of the NBA’s most improved teams this season, a season in which most experts picked the Raptors to contend in the Durant-Oden Sweepstakes. Although a lot of the improvement can be attributed to the moves made by GM Colangelo, a lot can be said about Mitchell’s role in team improvement (keep in mind we started out 2-8 and have gone 34-23 since).

Foremost, Mitchell recognized immediately that we did not have the personnel for a Phoenix Suns style team. While we do have good athletes, big men like Rasho and Garbo are half-court style players, and we lack the lights-out 3-point shooter necessary to spread the floor for that tempo and hit transition threes. Mitchell’s goal at the start of the season was 100 field goal attempts per game, but he recognized the err of his ways early and righted the ship, giving the team a new identity as a scrappy, well-balanced, hard-nosed team, an identity much more fitting of the roster.

While we can’t establish whether Mitchell is solely responsible for team improvement year-to-year, we can look at some returning players to get an idea. Mitchell quickly got veteran Morris Peterson to buy in to a system that would see him back on the bench. While recently Mo-Pete has seemed perturbed, Sam has done a great job managing egos in his balanced rotation. We can also look to Chris Bosh, who has shown even further steady improvement, which he himself attributes to Mitchell’s tough love and constant challenging. The only other significant returnees are Joey graham and Jose Calderon, one of whom has played too limited to judge, and the other who is widely considered the most improved point guard in the NBA this season.

I just don’t see letting Mitchell go to be good business; the team is improving and getting fans back, and letting Mitchell go sends a message to fickel Raptor fans that winning is not the bottom line for this franchise. This is also Mitchell’s first year where the season has not been marred by turmoil of the Rafael Araujo, Vince Carter, or Rob Babcock variety and is really his first chance to handle a team his way.

2. Marked Improvement as a Coach
Very similar to the previous point, Sam Mitchell himself has improved a great deal. In his rookie coaching season, technical fouls, poor timeout calls, and a lack of adjustments plagued the team. Physical and verbal confrontations with players, officials, and media were frequent and made fans everywhere groan that the team had bought another lemon like “KO” Kevin O’Neill.

This season, though, Mitchell has given his team’s defensive style an overhaul and has showed incredible strides with making in-game defensive advjustments when opponents get hot. Mitchell’s offensive adjustments have also become more frequent and accurate, although the Raptors still have some trouble against the zone without Bosh on the floor.

The important point here is that this is Mitchell’s first season to have free reign over his team, he’s ironed out the personality factors that inhibited his performance in the past, and he’s even become as media saavy as it gets for a tell-it-like-it-is black man from the ATL. Mitchell is only a third year coach with tonnes of upside potential, and at the age of 43 is one of the younger coaches in the league. Now that personality and inexperience have been eliminated from the equation, there is good reason to believe Mitchell will continue to improve given the chance.

3. The Ability to Mesh
10 games is all it took. An entire roster of new players, and 10 games into the season the team was hot and cohesive already. The 2-8 start scared some, but aside from the Bosh/Peterson/Calderon/Graham core, only Calderon and Garbajosa had played together extensively. Mitchell quickly acclimated all the new players and plethora of heritages to create a cohesive team that is there for each other on and off the floor. Not many teams could have 2/3 of their roster change and come out of the gate playing like they’ve been together for years, but Mitchell fostered buy-in from all the players and created a system of on-and-off the floor basketball that fostered the team’s diversity.

Further proof of this is the Juan Dixon trade, as Mitchell immediately substituted a career malcontent into his rotation and has managed to get the best output of his career from him through his first dozen games with the team.

4. Turmoil Has Troubled This Team
This franchise has been unstable forever, ever the rocking boat. A coaching change following a winning season can only be bad for the basketball side of things. After an offseason of overhaul, it would have made sense to make the coaching change then. Now that the team has meshed and is playing well for Sam, it’s a step backwards to bring in a new coach. This team has always had ownership, general manager, coaching, or star player issues and has never had an off-season not mirred by controversy. We have the opportunity for this for the first time ever this year, and a coaching change is exactly the wrong thing to do to right the ship.

5. The Players Love Him
This is probably more of a subjective category, but I wanted a nice round number (five), and this genuinely seems to be the truth. I normally brush off player quotes about the coach as political correctness or an organization-wide front of brand enhancement. Something recently caught my attention though. For about the 10th time this season, I saw a video interview with a Raptor who was genuinely laughing and smiling when talking about their coach.

This time it was TJ Ford, laughing at a memory of Sam Mitchell hustling him for money in their Milwaukee days by goading him into a shooting competition. This was, of course, after Mitchell got newcomer Juan Dixon with the exact same ploy after practice. While this is an isolated example, all season it’s felt like the team really likes playing for Sam and really like him as their coach. The respect factor has gone through the roof as well, both as he ages over players and players get familiar with him (Ford, Rasho, Bosh).

Chris Bosh has spoke at length about how much Mitchell is to credit for his improvement. Yeah, sounds familiar. Kevin Garnett said the same thing. Compliments for Sam have come pouring in from players (check the SlamSports Raptors’ archive if you don’t believe me), and it hasn’t stopped there. Other players in the league have supported Sam, from The Big Ticket to Stephon Marbury to former sparring partner Rafer Alston.

It is not clear whether the team’s success and improvement this season is because of Mitchell, Colangelo, the players, or a lot of luck. What is clear, however, is that Mitchell possesses the tools, the respect, and the buy-in from players to continue guiding the Raptors down the path to respectability and playoff basketball.

One last thing. There is a Cialis ad on the Raptors.com main page. Thought you should know.