Real Nice Pitino Retrospective

[Way Of The Ray <wayray@ix.netcom.com>]

http://www.ctnow.com

Pitino's A Builder By Trade 
By ALAN GREENBERG 
The Hartford Courant 
March 22, 2000 

BOSTON - At the end of each of the last two seasons, as he and his 
teammates dispersed to their off-season homes to watch the playoffs 
on television, a weary Antoine Walker said he hoped that the Celtics 
would not continue to make major personnel changes. The constant turnover, 
Walker said, made it hard for teammates to get to know each other. Without 
that familiarity, Walker said, it's hard to develop the chemistry a 
successful NBA team needs.

 When Walker made his plea for stability, he didn't even know about the 
coach's house. Perhaps even more than his personnel moves, the house 
epitomizes the restless nature of Rick Pitino, a man who sleeps three 
to four hours a night and micromanages his players' on-court moves as 
if they were paints and he were wielding the brush. Unlike his players, 
imperfect human beings, Pitino could make his family's new home everything 
he wanted it to be. He had it built right after his May 1997 coronation as 
the Celtics' coach/president/CEO. 

Unlike many men faced with plunging into a new job while getting settled 
in a strange big city, Pitino didn't need a map. He already loved the 
Boston area and knew it intimately. He lived in Boston from 1978-83 while 
coaching at Boston University. He visited regularly for R & R weekends 
while at Providence from 1985-87 and at Kentucky from 1989-97. He had a 
son attending Milton Academy, on Boston's South Shore. So when Pitino 
returned, as a multimillionaire with five children, he looked over the 
familiar landscape and built an 11-room, seven-bath Colonial, with a 
grand piano in the foyer and a cedar-lined sauna in the enormous finished 
basement. He built on 3.7 acres in Sherborn, an affluent suburb 30 minutes
west of Boston. 

Last October, two years after the Pitinos moved in, a front page article in 
the Boston Globe's Sunday real estate section announced the property, its 
``Home of the Week,'' was for sale for $2.45 million. Having built his dream
house, Pitino had fallen out of love with it. The Pitinos have since moved 
into a Commonwealth Avenue brownstone in Boston's fashionable Back Bay. 
Pitino had changed his mind - again. 

At 6 feet 7, 260 pounds, Danny Fortson often has been likened to a house. 
Despite giving away 5 inches to the NBA's resident skyscrapers, Fortson was 
the NBA's second-leading rebounder last season (11.6), a fact that had 
Pitino turning verbal cartwheels after acquiring him last summer to bulk up 
the Celtics' inside game. What the coach didn't seem to take into account 
was that Fortson also led the league in fouls per minute, and that rule 
changes the NBA had just adopted, limiting contact, would only make matters 
worse. 

When Fortson sustained a stress fracture in training camp and missed the 
season's first two months, Pitino soured on the likable Fortson like month-
old milk. On Feb. 9, six weeks after Fortson returned to the active roster, 
Pitino traded him to the Raptors, but voided the deal when Alvin Williams, 
the benchwarmer the Celtics were to receive, failed his physical. 

``The ship was sinking pretty fast,'' Fortson said of his brief Celtics 
experience before learning he was being returned to Pitinoland. 

The ship seems to have righted itself. Led by the surging Walker, who 
averaged 24.1 points, 10.5 rebounds and 5.5 assists during the span, 
the Celtics (30-37) have won seven of their last nine and are 1 1/2 games 
behind the Magic for the Eastern Conference's eighth - and last - playoff 
spot. And Pitino, who promised before this season, his third, that this 
Celtics team would make the playoffs, now says that he will not be 
disappointed if the Celtics fail to make it, as long as they are still 
in the playoff hunt with five or six games left. 

Why are the Celtics, flops for much of the season, suddenly playing better? 
Ignoring that the Fortson trade fell through, Walker said the best thing 
that has happened to the Celtics this season is that they didn't make any 
midseason trades. Knowing Pitino, it wasn't for lack of trying. 

Always Scrambling
If Pitino were an NFL quarterback, he would be a scrambler. Not a Joe 
Montana type, the kind that killed you with pinpoint passing and ran only 
as a last resort. No, Pitino would be the kind of quarterback who 
would spend about two seconds looking for an open receiver, then high-tail 
it out of there. Haste makes waste, the old proverb warns us. If Pitino 
heeded that, he and the Celtics might have made real progress. 

``I think this game just shows that we're young and patience is a virtue,'' 
Pitino said after the Celtics beat the 76ers 93-77 March 12. ``It's very 
easy - and I'll put myself at the head of the class - to be impatient. 
But patience is coming. You see Antoine Walker evolving. You see Kenny 
[Anderson] evolving into a leader. You see Tony Battie coming on. So I
think with young players, if you're impatient in this league, all you do 
is you keep rebuilding. You keep rebuilding. I think if we stay with our 
play, stay with our nucleus, these guys will be young veterans and a very 
good basketball team.'' 

That's as close as Pitino will come to suggesting, however indirectly, why 
his Celtics have been flops. They've flopped because Pitino has changed the 
team's personnel the way most people change their underwear. Because, in his
haste, he has clogged the roster with second-rate players being paid first-rate salaries, giving the Celtics no room to maneuver under the NBA's salary cap. 

Pitino preaches patience but rarely practices it. This, after all, is a man 
so impatient that he accepted the Celtics job nine days before finding out 
if they were going to land the No. 1 choice - and Tim Duncan - in the 1997 
draft lottery. When they didn't, despite having the best mathematical chance 
(36.3 percent) to do so, Pitino spent much of his first two years lamenting 
how much easier it would have been to rebuild the Celtics if they had landed
the franchise center.

Passing Them By
After a last-second home loss to the Raptors on March 1, a once-woeful 
expansion team that has cruised past the Celtics during his tenure, Pitino 
ranted at his postgame press conference, accusing some fans and media members
 of not being sufficiently supportive of his struggling team, saying, ``the 
negativity in this town sucks.'' 

Pitino, who recently claimed his outburst was a calculated move to put the 
focus on him, and relieve the pressure on his young team, later denied rumors
 that he had told his assistants to start looking for new jobs because he 
intended to soon limit his duties to the Celtics front office or return to 
college coaching. 

As Pitino says befits a young team, the Celtics are one of the league's worst
 defensive teams (ranking 18th of 29 teams) and one of its worst road teams 
(8-26). The Celtics' pressing defenses, effective in Pitino's first season, 
particularly at the FleetCenter against opponents tired from a long trip, 
have largely been shelved, because double-teamed opponents have learned to 
make the right pass for the easy basket. 

The Celtics have yet to reach .500 under Pitino (they were 36-46 and 19-31 
in his first two seasons) and have no money available to spend on this summer's
free agents (Duncan, Grant Hill). 

Not that they would want to play for the Celtics. Pitino, who has never 
signed a marquee free agent, has a reputation for verbally abusing his 
players, which veteran players don't go for. That's one reason Pitino likes, 
whenever possible, to sign young players or guys who played for him at
 Kentucky. Young players are more malleable and less prone to ask why. 
And guys who played for Pitino at Kentucky have faith in him because they 
won with him there. Plus, they have learned not to take his verbal excesses 
personally. 

Pitino came to Boston with a well-deserved reputation as a turnaround artist.
He turned around BU, Providence and Kentucky, because with 18- and 19-year-
olds, he was an excellent coach and a great recruiter. But in his only other 
NBA coaching job, two seasons with the Knicks (1987-89) and a young Patrick
Ewing, Pitino bolted, blaming many of his problems on general manager Al 
Bianchi. 

In Boston, where Pitino has control over all personnel matters, Pitino has 
no one to blame but himself. Teams like the Raptors (39-26) and 76ers (38-28)
have rebuilt themsleves and are now superior to Pitino's Celtics. Even the 
Magic, who got rid of four veteran starters in the off-season and warned 
their fans that this would be a hold-your-nose-season, have a younger team, 
better record (32-36), a popular young coach in Doc Rivers and millions of 
dollars to spend on marquee free agents this summer. 

Handcuffing Himself
When Pitino ranted after the Toronto loss, he reiterated that the Celtics 
are handcuffed by the salary cap. But mostly, Pitino has handcuffed himself.
He gave Tony Battie, who averages 19 minutes a game, a six-year, $25 million
contract. He gave bench warmer Walter McCarty (one of his former Kentucky 
players) a three-year, $8.4 million deal. He traded for reserve forward Eric
Williams, who is averaging 6.8 points and 19 minutes, but whose contract - 
$3.9 million next season - is definitely prime time. 

He traded for Vitaly Potapenko, whose six- year, $33 million contract the 
Celtics assumed when Pitino traded Andrew DeClercq - and the Celtics' No. 1 
pick in the 1999 draft - to the Cavaliers a year ago. Not only isn't 
Potapenko much of a scorer (9.6), rebounder (6.5) or defender, by giving up 
their No. 1 pick in a draft heavy with quality point guards, the Celtics 
missed out on Utah point guard Andre Miller, whom the Cavaliers selected 
with that pick. Miller is proving to be a lot of things that the ball-
pounding, injury-prone Anderson isn't. 

In that first draft with the Celtics, Pitino chose Colorado guard Chauncey 
Billups with the third pick in the first round and Ron Mercer, his Kentucky 
star, with the sixth. ``Our backcourt of the future,'' he called them. 

The backcourt's future was brief. Less than four months into Billups' 
rookie season, Pitino traded him to the Raptors in the deal that brought 
Anderson - and his seven-year, $50 million contract. 

Pitino needed Billups, then Anderson, because he never bothered to make an 
offer to keep David Wesley, who is now the Hornets' starting point guard. 
Pitino now calls his failure to make Wesley an offer his biggest regret. 

After paying all that money to his reserves, no wonder Pitino couldn't 
afford to pay Mercer, whom he reluctantly traded to the Nuggets. 

But for sheer about-faces, nothing tops Pitino's Sept. 1997 signing of 
Cavaliers free agent forward Chris Mills to a seven-year, $33.6 million 
contract. Pitino hailed Mills as the guy who would give his team, then the 
NBA's youngest, the veteran leadership it needed. Four weeks later, after 
determining that Mills didn't run well enough to fit into the Celtics' up-
tempo style, Pitino canned him before the season had even begun, sending him 
to the Knicks for three players - John Thomas, Dontae Jones and McCarty - who
had sat on the Knicks' bench as rookies. When the season ended, only McCarty
was still a Celtic. 

Remember Bruce Bowen? Not only did the Heat free agent come cheap - a one-
year, $400,000 deal - Pitino said he loved Bowen's defense, hustle and 
attitude so much that ``I'll kill myself before I trade him.'' 

After last season, Pitino let Bowen go. The coach, at last report, was still
 very much alive. 

For the Celtics' Connecticut fans, no incident better illustrates Pitino's 
inability to evaluate talent than his desperate courtship of Travis Knight. 

After clearing cap room in July 1997 by renouncing the contract of team 
captain Rick Fox and six others, Pitino signed the former UConn center to a 
seven-year, $22 million deal, hailing the former Lakers rookie reserve as an 
NBA center capable of getting 18 points and 12 rebounds a game, while still 
being quick enough to be effective in the Celtics' pressing defenses. Six 
months later, when he was in the coach's doghouse for the crime of playing 
like the Travis Knight that he was, instead of the Dave Cowens clone Pitino 
hallucinated he could be, a sad Knight said, ``I sold my soul to the devil -
for money.'' 

Money is why Celtics owner Paul Gaston won't be firing Pitino. Pitino, who 
signed a 10- year, $50 million contract, still has seven years and about $29
million left on his deal. And Gaston, who prides himself on being fiscally 
prudent, would have 10 days to pay Pitino the whole $29 million if he fired 
him. 

Yep, the only way Pitino hits the road is if his ego can't stand the losing 
and people blaming him for big promises and no payoff. Except, of course, 
for himself.