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Ron Borges (MSNBC) On The Trials And Tribulations Of Rick Pitino...
MSNBC - 4/7/99
Ron Borges
Celtics head coach Rick Pitino’s trials all about
Pitino believes in clash of college, pros
old-fashioned coaching
values and a work ethic Millionaire athletes don’t
-- which may be why he's mesh with older virtues
having trouble
succeeding in the NBA.
April 7 — Chuck Daly once described what it takes to
survive as a coach in the NBA: “The most important asset
for an NBA coach is bad hearing,” Daly said, meaning that
what your players have to say is often best ignored.
IGNORING YOUR PLAYERS seems the surest
road to the NBA Finals these days, a point
Daly is making with an Orlando Magic team no
one expected anything from this year.
Daly’s team was 26-10 as of April 7,
leading the NBA’s Atlantic Division by three
games over favored Miami and holding a
remarkable 23-7 conference record. Daly has
done this in a way that would cause big-time
college coaches like Gary Williams or Nolan
Richardson or Bobby Knight or John Chaney to
turn apoplectic: the Orlando Magic often win
but seldom practice.
In the NBA, they play a game where the
kind of defense coaches devise after hours of
watching videotape is all but outlawed and
offense is about getting the ball to your
best player as often as humanly possible
within a 24-second span, so what’s to
practice anyway?
In the NBA, coaches don’t run the
four-corner offense, don’t coach zone
defense, don’t work the weave or the
pick-and-roll and, if they’re smart, don’t
often try to coach the players.
Instead, NBA coaches run from four
agents on every corner, just try to remember
what time zone they’re in, don’t work much
except on game night and try never to forget
they are no longer in charge of their
employees.
A FULL-COURT MESS
Into this world walked a workaholic
college coach named Rick Pitino two years
ago, a coach who has always believed that
basketball is about precise plans, rapid
adjustments and practice, practice, practice.
He also believes it’s about the full-court
press, the kind of defense most NBA veterans
feel a coach should be taken to court over
for even suggesting.
[Image]
[Image] NBC video: Rick Pitino tells it as it
is[Image]
What this has led to is a lousy team
and a growing belief that Pitino can still
coach basketball but may not be able to coach
the hybrid known as NBA basketball.
For the first time in his career, a
Pitino team has not shown significant
progress in the second year of his program.
In fact, his Boston Celtics have regressed to
the point that they bear more of a
resemblance to the worst of M.L. Carr’s days
than the best of Red Auerbach’s.
Boston is 10-22 at the moment, 3-15 on
the road and losers of eight of its last 10,
including four straight going into a home
game at the Defeat Center Wednesday night
against the Washington Wizards. Pitino has
been in public battles with his all-star
forward, Antoine Walker, and point guard
Kenny Anderson, who he refused to take a
flight to Orlando after Anderson argued with
him over being removed from a game with the
Nets last Sunday.
Told to sit down, Anderson said: “I
want to play” — give or take a few
expletives. Pitino later explained that his
team had been warned he would no longer
tolerate what he called “unprofessional
behavior.” And then he did something no
longtime Celtic observer had ever seen: He
didn’t put a healthy starter on the traveling
squad.
Anderson was back the next day,
though, fresh and rested, because this is not
college. You can’t make an $8 million-a-year
guard transfer and you can’t cut him. All you
can do is what Pitino tried to do, which was
to say ‘It’s no big deal” and insist all is
well. But when you’re 10-22, telling starters
to go home and showing no signs of
improvement, nothing is well — including,
most likely, Pitino’s mental health.
THE LITTERED PATH
In college, basketball success is all
about the coach. Players come and players go
but good coaches are forever (or at least for
as long as they keep getting into the NCAA
tournament). In the NBA, basketball success
is about the players, not the coach.
That is not to say a good coach is not
preferable over a bad one, but remember, this
is about NBA coaching: K.C. Jones took five
teams to NBA finals (and won twice) without
ever being considered an X’s and O’s guy,
while no college coach has come into the NBA
successfully since Dick Motta left Weber
State and led a team to an NBA title.
The reasons why are fundamental. In
college, coaches run everything. In the NBA,
they run for the bus.
There has been a long, sad history of
successful college coaches who came into the
NBA like Pitino and were broken by the way
the game is played when the paychecks are
delivered over the table instead of under it.
He may end up being the latest, but he’s not
the first.
Jerry Tarkanian seldom lost at UNLV
and seldom won in San Antonio. Larry Brown
has come and gone three times and appears
headed out the door again if he can’t figure
out a way to get along with Allan Iverson,
his moody superstar.
P.J. Carlesimo rebuilt a non-existent
Seton Hall program into a Final Four team,
but has failed miserably at two NBA stops,
and his leather-lunged approach to dialogue
inspired Latrell Sprewell to do
hand-strengthening exercises around his neck
last year.
Pitino’s clone, former University of
Massachusetts coach John Calipari, became a
huge personality on the college scene when he
transformed the long-dormant UMass program
into a Final Four participant. But the
millions he took to coach the New Jersey Nets
stopped coming in just over a year after he
started earning them when he was summarily
dismissed this season after even jovial
All-Pro Jayson Williams decided Calipari’s
Way was the wrong way for the NBA.
THE MADDENING 4 PERCENT
Which brings us back to Pitino,
rebuilder of programs at Boston University,
Providence College and Kentucky. Pitino took
Providence and Kentucky to the Final Four and
brought a national championship back to
Lexington, but could not pass up the millions
offered him by the most legendary franchise
in NBA history. So he came back to a league
awash with millionaires who couldn’t care
less about their coach’s opinion on anything
except, maybe, playing time. Some, like the
Celtics’ long-absent but still-on-the-payroll
Pervis Ellison, apparently don’t even care
about that.
This has baffled, bothered and
bewildered Pitino. It has led to long
soliloques this season about how disappointed
he is, about how embarassed he has become at
the often-lackadaisical play of his
millionaires, about how talk-radio negativism
comes “from the 4 percent of callers who
don’t have a job and don’t live in the real
world.”
Recently, it also led him to publicly
state he would never resign. That is usually
the statement that comes just before the one
about pursuing other professional
opportunities isn’t it?
If, in the end, the NBA breaks Rick
Pitino the way it has so many other college
coaches, it won’t be because he couldn’t
coach basketball. It will be because he
couldn’t live in the NBA’s version of the
world, a world that isn’t even as real as the
one inhabited by the 4 percent of talk-show
callers driving Rick Pitino as crazy right
now as Kenny Anderson is.
----------------------------------------------
Ron Borges writes regularly for MSNBC on the
Internet and covers the NFL and boxing for
the Boston Globe.
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