Reporters on Pitino

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

http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/story.pl/celtics/04602462.htm

11.26.2000 00:12
Bill Reynolds
The motivator mired in mediocrity
Sometimes you simply cannot be successful at the present time.

-- Rick Pitino in Lead to Succeed.

He said that last year, in a book I helped him write.

He said that, sometimes, when you're the leader of a group, it doesn't
matter how hard you work or what your ideas are; that the traditional
markers of success are simply not there, and that, sometimes, there's
little you can do about it at the time.

This is one of those times.

The question is why?

What's happened since that spring day in 1997 when Rick Pitino was
unveiled as the new Celtics' coach on the floor of the FleetCenter in
what seemed almost like a coronation? How has it come to this last week,
Pitino in a press conference, saying if his team doesn't begin to show
marked improvement he will not be the coach next year?

Is Pitino simply the wrong man at the wrong time with the Celtics, or do
the problems transcend him?

That's the other important question.

It's hard to imagine anyone being any hotter than Pitino was on that day
in 1997 when he became the basketball boss of the Celtics. His Kentucky
team had just lost in the NCAA final, after winning the national title
the year before. He had a motivational book on the best-seller list. He
was in national television commercials, and did motivational speeches to
some of the biggest companies in the country.

Then he came to the Celtics.

But Rick Pitino didn't come to the Celtics to be battling to get into
the playoffs in his fourth year. He came here to resurrect this
franchise's glory days, to revive the cheers, to get the Celtics back to
where they could make a serious run at another NBA title. Not to be just
another young team wrapped in NBA mediocrity, no different than the
Denver Nuggets or the New Jersey Nets.

That's why everyone seems so frustrated, Pitino included.

Would it have been different if the Celtics had gotten Tim Duncan in
that '97 draft, Pitino's first with the Celtics?

No doubt. Duncan could have been the anchor in the middle this team now
so desperately lacks, what Pitino had in New York with Patrick Ewing.

Would it have been different if Pitino had made some better personnel
moves?

Maybe. There's no question he signed some players to long-term contracts
who have done little to justify them, notably Tony Battie and Walter
McCarty. He made some questionable trades, notably the one for Kenny
Anderson, an aging point guard with a big contract. As if he felt the
pressure to turn things aronud quickly, live up to his own mystique.

But there's also the fact it's so very difficult to transcend mediocrity
in the NBA, unless you get very lucky. Some franchises never do it.
Truth is, most of the NBA teams are mediocre. Some are on the high end
of mediocrity; some are on the low end. But mediocre they are.

The Celtics included.

There's no question the team is appreciably better than it was when
Pitino arrived. He inherited a team that had won 15 games, the worst
team in the league, and got them to 36 wins the following year, rignt in
the middle of mediocre. That's a significant jump, the Pitino of legend.
It's been trying to transcend that mediocrity that's been so difficult.

The warning signs started his second year, the Celtics finishing 19-31
in the strike-shortened year.

What was going on here? Hadn't Pitino's second year always been a
significant improvement every place he'd ever coached? So why the step
backward?

This was when the honeymoon ended for Pitino in Boston.

After that, his every decision has been placed under a microscope. His
personnel moves were questioned, especially his propensity to use the
roster as a turnstile. His declaration on draft night in '97 that picks
Chauncey Billups and Ron Mercer were going to be the Celtic backcourt of
the future came back to haunt him, for they both have been traded away;
Billups because Pitino had come to believe he couldn't be an NBA point
guard., Mercer over money.

His pressing and trapping style -- the core of his coaching vision --
has been more and more questioned. No matter that he'd been successful
with it in his two years in New York a decade earlier. Today's players
want no part of it, the thinking goes. They simply don't want to work
that hard.

More and more the perception grew that Pitino was a college coach in an
NBA that's a players' league; that it's increasingly difficult to
motivate NBA athletes with huge guaranteed contracts, even for someone
who wrote a book on motivation.

So last year, when we sat down to write Lead to Succeed , was the worst
time in his coaching life, the first time he hadn't been successful in
the way he'd envisioned.

What comes through in that book is how Pitino believes his team is too
young, and that young players have to be taught how to win, and that
takes time. He believes that young players are too concerned with
individual goals at the expense of team ones, and in that sense the
Celtics are no different than the Nuggets, or the Grizzlies, or any of
the NBA teams with young talent that doesn't know how to win.

And yet they are very different.

And that's Pitino's other problem.

Those banners that hang from the FleetCenter have become accusers. No
matter that there are 29 teams now, and a salary cap, and there's no
guarantee the Celtics ever are going to get back to the NBA Finals,
never mind hang another banner.

The Celtics' storied tradition has spoiled us all. The bar has been
raised so high that simply making the playoffs is not enough. Not when
you've had Bill Russell and Larry Bird and playoff games for the ages.
Not when those banners are a testimony to what used to be. There's a fan
base that yearns for the Celtics they remember, and they have little
patience for anything less.

"I am the leader of this team," Pitino said during Wednesday's press
conference. "I am the one accountable."

He knows.

He knows that when you were brought in here to resurrect the glory days
and now it's the fourth season and that hasn't happened you are very
vulnerable, regardless of the reasons.

He also has come to know that, sometimes, it doesn't matter who you are,
or how hard you work, or how much you want it, or what your r sum says.
Sometimes, you find yourself in a situation where you cannot be as
successful as you want to be at the present time, that it's out of your
control, and that's just the way it is.

What's left unsaid is that this is one of those times. The Celtics are
6-6, the classic example of mediocre, not what Rick Pitino envisioned
that spring day in 1997 when he arrived here with so much promise. They
are mediocre and there might not be anything he can do about it.

But I suspect he knows.

He wrote the book.



http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/columnists/detail/0,1556,winderman!36000000000133011,00.html

Talk of the town for wrong reasons
November 26, 2000
      On three NBA fronts last week, silence would have been golden.
     Instead, Rick Pitino, Gary Payton and Mark Cuban vented.
     We’re still wondering why.
     We’ll start with Pitino, the Celtics coach. For some reason, Pitino
insists on the need to offer constant reminders of how he’s thisclose to
quitting.
     Fact is, if any coach continually is thisclose to quitting, perhaps
he should. Instead, Pitino incessantly sees fit to offer unremitting
updates of how angst-ridden he has become in his failure to revive the
franchise.
     “I’m definitely finishing out the season. No question about that,”
Pitino offered, as if extending some sort of gift to a confused roster.
     But if a coach is even thinking about quitting, what type of
message is that sending to his players?
     “If I don’t see a major difference in our ball club and we’re still
struggling,” Pitino said. “I think enough’s enough. What I will do is
just go on and try my next job and wish everybody well.”
     And leave everything a mess? Great, less than a month into the
season and Pitino’s players already are being filled with thoughts of
uncertainty.