Tuesday, April 25
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Here's a handy parlor trick: The next time someone appeals to your superior sports intellect (and handy access to ESPN.com) to solve the riddle of why today's pro coaches seem so hellbent on expanding their personal power bases, answer your less-informed friend in one pithy sentence:
|  | | Lenny Wilkens and Isaiah Rider were all smiles in August. Both have since been dumped by the Hawks. |
They don't want to get Wilkensed.
You know what happened to Lenny Wilkens, the winningest coach in NBA history? Wait, you'll never believe it. Wilkens got run out of Atlanta after completing his team's first non-playoff season in seven years, and, very essentially, this occurred because Wilkens ultimately wasn't in control of the players given him to coach.
A couple of decades ago, when Wilkens first got into the coaching dodge, this was no big thing. At that time, the separation between church (the GM) and state (the guy drawing up the plays) was fairly clear, and if a man held both jobs, it was usually (not always) an indication that the organization he was working for was too cheap to do it any other way.
Today, just about every coach in the NBA with any kind of leverage is angling for the right to control his personnel, not just play it. And beyond ego, beyond money, this is about survival. It isn't enough to know how to coach anymore; you've also got to know what kind of player you are genuinely capable of reaching, and what kind of player you've got no shot with -- and you've got to be able to load your roster with the former and not the latter.
Many of the premier coaches -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Larry Brown, Jerry Sloan -- either have this ability via contract or via unwritten rule. Lenny Wilkens clearly didn't have it in Atlanta, and beyond the question of why Wilkens didn't insist upon that kind of influence in the first place, you are left with the reality that even a Hall of Fame coach isn't immune from the standard coaching dictate to keep on winning, no matter what.
You think Lenny Wilkens wanted Isaiah Rider as the Hawks' major off-season acquisition? Classy, low-key, professorial Wilkens, adding the personal detonation device that is Rider to the Atlanta mix? That wasn't a coach talking, that was the work of Hawks GM Pete Babcock and team president Stan Kasten, who dealt steady Steve Smith to Portland for Rider and Jim Jackson. Wilkens couldn't possibly have been more distressed.
Incredibly, after the Rider gamble exploded in a thousand pieces of shrapnel, after the Hawks went from 31-19 in last year's lockout-shortened run to 28-54, their worst record in more than 30 years -- after the thing cost Wilkens his job, the Atlanta brain trust maintained that the trade for Rider was the right move to make.
After all, Babcock noted, the Hawks will get at least a top-eight pick in the upcoming NBA draft as a reward for being so repulsively inept this season, they dumped Smith's pricey long-term contract, and they'll likely have more than $10 million in salary-cap room for 2001.
And whacking the NBA's all-time winningest coach after a season filled with internal strife and rampant fan apathy? Hey, just the cost of doing business. It's a classic front-office conceit fostered by people who won't be losing their jobs, and it explains why any coach with a solid track record would think three times before agreeing to any situation in which he didn't have substantial authority over signings and trades.
No one has to worry over Lenny Wilkens; he'll be fine. He's 62 years old and still in demand, and it isn't a stretch to envision him walking a sideline in a new city next season.
And there's no doubt that if you listened long enough to the people talking in Atlanta, you'd come away with a laundry list of small grievances against Wilkens as a coach. He couldn't find a way to deal with Rider. He didn't mix in his young players, Jason Terry and the others, soon enough to save the season. He was too much this, too little that -- you've heard it all a hundred times during a hundred previous coaching changes.
Coaches lose their jobs all the time. It's not an American tragedy; they get paid a lot of money, and being fired is simply an odd but standard facet of the pro sports operation, and it isn't going to be changed to save the hide of anyone in particular. Coaches move on. It's what they do.
No, the object lesson in the Lenny Wilkens case is best summed up in a line from center Dikembe Mutombo, uttered a couple of weeks ago as Mutombo attempted to explain what happened to Wilkens and the Hawks this season: "All he could do was coach who was brought here."
It may not be the whole truth, but it's close enough.
Scouting around
Wouldn't it be weird if Jason Kidd came back before Tim Duncan did?
The one thing you can be absolutely certain of, in the wake of Butch Carter filing that defamation lawsuit against Marcus Camby, is that even in the I-dis-you, you-dis-me, we-both-dis-him world of pro sports, there are still a couple of guaranteed fighting words. "Liar" is one of them. Regardless of whether Carter's suit has a snowball's chance -- in the context of Carter's whole bizarre month, this is barely a blip on the radar screen -- you still have to wonder whether Camby, with his obvious knowledge of how organizations and front offices work, really believes that his coach was able to control all that maneuvering. If Camby does, we've got a situation in Atlanta we'd like to show him.
Cool! The Lakers flayed the Kings in Game 1 of the Western Conference first round on Sunday, Sacramento coach Rick Adelman complained that Shaquille O'Neal was getting away with murder in the lane, O'Neal responded by calling Adelman "an idiot," and all we have to do to see what happens next is wait ... until ... Thursday ... night. But, hey, at least NBC gets that Game 3 on its station next weekend. That's what it's all about, right?
Over the last couple of years Bob Costas, by dint of his clear ideas and firmly established viewpoints, has been drafted into the position of baseball's designated old coot, railing against the modern state of the game and longing for an era that simply no longer exists. Increasingly, that is a mantle that Costas wears uneasily -- and that is why it's happy news to report that Costas' book on the subject, "Fair Ball," is both refreshing and perfectly accessible. When you can make a salary cap and revenue sharing look like the most reasonable concepts in the world even when applied to baseball's baron robbers, you have done a fine thing indeed. Costas has done that, and with no screeching at all. Recommended reading.
Just as we were becoming concerned over the number of 5-5-1 college football teams that would have no place to go after the season: The NCAA approves the Silicon Valley Football Classic, a bowl game to be played in San Jose on New Year's Eve for the benefit of Fox Sports Net, which wanted some programming to follow an NFL playoff game. Rest easy tonight.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.
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