I was chatting with my brother about the whole Flip thing, and he said he wished we would have gotten Avery. He recalls sitting at a Jazz game a few years ago, RIGHT next to the opposing bench, and they were playing the Pistons. He said Flip didn’t do any coaching, the whole game. He said every huddle, he wouldn’t say anything…

I think this says two things. One, Flip might be, perhaps, a bit too passive. Two, Wilbon is wrong in assuming his assistant coaches won’t have a big impact on the team.

I like your perspective. I really do see Avery being a risky choice. Sam Cassell can do his annoying pep talks and be less obtrusive than if Avery were doing it.

I’m happy with Flip. Avery won’t solve our defensive problems. It’s foolish to think so. We have bad 1-on-1 defenders, and we’ll have to compensate for that in different ways. As Prada has said, let’s play to our strengths…

But I can’t for the life of me understand why he didn’t play last night at the last home game of the season. Wait, he didn’t even dress. I mean, he didn’t even show up! One hundred million and you don’t even show up to sit on the bench? Somebody’s got some splainin to do.

The Wizards need everyone to stay healthy. It’s obvious that Wilbon knows and likes Johnson; he even says in the article that he’s frequently on the set with him for ESPN. Of course he’d be writing about how much he wants him to coach the Wiz — he spends a lot of time with him.

Wilbon is entitled to his opinion, but Arenas’s recent problems have been off-the-court ones because he hasn’t been healthy for a while. When he’s on the floor and feeling fine, no one was complaining before.

This team can’t play one-on-one, hard-nosed defense. Avery Johnson wouldn’t be able to change that. He can’t make Jamison or Arenas a defensive force, no matter how much time he puts into a gameplan or how much practice time is devoted to it.

Prada’s previous posts on this issue are correct; with this team and roster, Saunders make a lot more sense. If the Wizards were going to reshape the roster and build around a young core that plays defense, Johnson would have been perfect.

I fully believe that Grunfeld knows what he’s doing. And I trust his opinion more than Wilbon’s.

It’s an interesting column (on the heels of the last Wizards one he wrote and my thoughts on those), I’m just not sure he makes a convincing case for Avery Johnson. He talks about Johnson’s success without mentioning the circumstances that led to his dismissal. Johnson’s his friend, so it’s understandable why he wouldn’t go into that, but it also doesn’t provide a complete picture.

That aside, though, Avery Johnson is also a different kind of coach than Phil Jackson or even Gregg Popovich, who mentored him. Those guys are both tough, but they also have a good sense of when to pull back. The impression I get of Avery Johnson is that he is/was so intense as a coach all the time, and it’s not hard to envision a scenario when Gil reacts negatively to that and does something like not shoot for an entire half in order to prove a point.

The article made me stop and think about the possibilities Avery could bring for a second but then I quickly came back to my senses and rest assured my self in the hiring of Flip. What about Avery’s collapse’s in the playoffs? What about his relationship’s with previous owners? These are all questions a more informative article would have addressed. These points aside, the main fault I take away from his article is not considering Gil’s unique personality. Wilbon can mention those great coaches but he fails to mention that they also dealt with superstars but none were of Gil’s nature. Where does he even give Gil the credit for who he is as a person and how he’s defined him self in the way the league views him? He is a one of a kind player on and off the court. For Gil it’s never been about conforming. Just face it that will never be the case and frankly I don’t have a problem with it at all because he has always been a professional. It just reminds me of how we outcast certain athlete’s for being different. Compared to the outrageous things some other athlete’s have done how disruptive is he really? Does he have a vendetta to bring down our entire organization by him self? These are the questions Wilbon ignores and I am sure will not address as he continues his love affair with Avery through out the article. My points may seem dramatic but I will defend them strongly against Wilbon and what ever other media cronies he wants to bring along!