Brooklyn Nets: The Folly of Chasing ‘Elite’ Coaches
By Phil Watson
Would Phil Jackson be winning to bring his 11 rings to Brooklyn? Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov sure hopes so. (Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr.com)
What many of us expected became a reality on Sunday, May 5, when Brooklyn Nets general manager Billy King announced that interim coach P.J. Carlesimo would not be retained.
Carlesimo was frank about the situation on “The Dan Patrick Show” the day after his firing, per ESPNNewYork.com.
“I think short of winning a championship, it wouldn’t have made any difference,” Carlesimo said on Monday, May 6. “I mean, Billy (King) was pretty candid. Had we won Saturday and advanced and were getting ready to play the Heat tonight, I think anything short of winning a championship wasn’t going to change his mind or (ownership’s) mind.”
Carlesimo led the Nets to a 35-19 record before losing a seven-game series to the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. He replaced Avery Johnson on Dec. 27 when the Nets were 14-14.
“They felt I wasn’t the guy, so they gotta get the guy in here they want,” Carlesimo said on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd.” “It was a great opportunity, it was a nice job. This franchise is in great shape right now in terms of the move to Brooklyn and Barclays Center and everything is on the uptick right now.”
King said he would be calling former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson to gauge Jackson’s interest in the Nets gig.
It’s the worst-kept secret in the tri-state area that Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is willing to drop a huge chunk of his Russian organized crime oil money to hire a coach that would enable New York’s second NBA franchise to make a splash on the back pages of the tabloids.
No coach would make a bigger such splash than Jackson, who was a member of two NBA championship teams with the New York Knicks in the 1970s before winning 11 titles while coaching the Bulls and Lakers.
But let’s say Jackson isn’t interested in the Nets. There are some pretty overwhelming reasons why the Zen Master might not be all that keen on coming to Brooklyn.
His 11 title teams in Chicago and Los Angeles look very different at first glance. In Chicago, the triangle offense featured Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. With his first three championship squads in L.A., Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant were the featured pieces. It’s hard to get much different from the days of centers Bill Cartwright, Bill Wennington, Luc Longley and Will Perdue with the Bulls to the Diesel with the Lakers. Later, Jackson put together two more title teams with Bryant and a finesse center in Pau Gasol.
So the triangle works with anything, right?
Ummmmm … let’s not be hasty.
There is a common link that binds the Chicago teams that hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy and those who hung banners in Los Angeles. In Jordan and Bryant, you have two of the best four or five shooting guards to ever play the game.
No matter how ardently one defends Joe Johnson, no one can make a case for Johnson being at that level … or anywhere even close to it.
Phil Jackson won titles with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant as his shooting guards. Joe Johnson is not in that class. Photo Credit: Mark Runyan, Basketball Schedule
Here’s the other problem with a Phil Jackson-Brooklyn Nets marriage: Consider the point guards for Jackson’s championship teams. John Paxson started 161 games in 1990-91 and 1991-92 for the Bulls. B.J. Armstrong was the primary point guard for the 1992-93 squad. For the Chicago title teams from 1996-98, there really wasn’t a starting point guard, per se; Pippen and Toni Kukoc handled the bulk of the play-making responsibilities.
Fast forward to the Los Angeles days and who do you find? Derek Fisher, a guy who is a household name among elite point guards … at least within the confines of the Fisher household.
Could the triangle work with an elite point guard such as Deron Williams? We don’t really know. The closest an elite point guard came to running the triangle was when the Dallas Mavericks with a very young Jason Kidd were coached by former Jackson assistant Jim Cleamons in 1996-97 and (very briefly) in 1997-98. Dallas was 28-70 under Cleamons and the coach actively campaigned to have Kidd shipped out to the Phoenix Suns. The grade would be an incomplete, at best.
But the fact remains that there are very, very few coaches who could be considered elite and that’s in the entire history of the NBA. And most of those guys are either employed, very old or coaching in the big association in the sky.
Let’s see … truly elite NBA coaches: There’s Phil Jackson. You have Pat Riley. Don’t forget Red Auerbach. You gotta have Gregg Popovich on the list … annnnnd … that’s about it.
I’m not talking about good coaches; I’m talking about truly elite ones.
Riley’s perfectly content running the Miami Heat, so he’s out as a contender for the Brooklyn gig. Popovich isn’t leaving San Antonio. Auerbach, yeah, not so much.
So that leaves Jackson.
A quick scan of the available pool of assistant coaches looking for a move to or back to the big chair doesn’t find much out there that would make a ripple, much less a splash, in the notoriously tough New York press. David Joerger of the Memphis Grizzlies is a highly respected basketball man, but I’d be shocked if one in 10,000 Brooklynites could pick him out of a police lineup.
Then there are the Van Gundys. Jeff Van Gundy coached the Knicks from 1995-96 through 19 games into the 2001-02 season and had the Houston Rockets for four seasons from 2003-04 through 2006-07. He’s got 430 wins, a .575 winning percentage and took New York to the 1999 NBA Finals as a No. 8 seed.
But he’s also doing well as an ESPN’s lead NBA color man and hasn’t seemed to be in a terrible hurry to return to the bench. On the other hand, you could do worse than to hire a coach willing to do this:
Stan Van Gundy coached the Miami Heat before he was thrown under the bus by Riley quit to spend more time with his family early in the Heat’s 2006 NBA championship campaign. He later got to be the lion tamer in the circus that was Dwight Howard’s late days in Orlando. Stan’s got an even more impressive winning mark than his brother, 371-208 (a .641 winning percentage) and he took the Magic to the Finals in 2009.
Van Gundy also experienced one of the most awkward moments in recent NBA annals when Howard helped create this little scene:
Either one of those guys would be a splashy hire, the type that Prokhorov wants.
Would either Van Gundy brother or Jackson be the right fit with the Nets, a team that has little salary flexibility for the foreseeable future after mortgaging the future to put together Williams, Johnson and Brook Lopez?
Maybe, maybe not. But short of luring Mike Kryzyzewski away from Duke, Prokhorov is going to be like a rabid dog in pursuit of one of the “big three” of unemployed coaches. And, hey, if Coach K couldn’t be tempted by Kobe Bryant and the sunshine of southern California, I’ve gotta think that Joe Johnson and the Brooklyn Bridge ain’t gonna do it, either.
Therein lies the problem with having an owner more concerned of keeping up with the Joneses (or in this case, the Dolans at Madison Square Garden) than with actually putting together a winning basketball club.