To be a successful coach in the NBA, it's essential to have a good relationship with the superstars on the team. Paul Westhead learned this lesson the hard way. He coached the Los Angeles Lakers to a championship, and a year later he was fired. He had an alleged disagreement with Magic Johnson about how the game should be played, and Magic won. This should not detract from Westhead's ability as a coach. He's been successful throughout his career and went from the Lakers to little-known Loyola Marymount, which he turned into a national power.
If you don't get along with your best player, you don't survive. You have to give up some self-esteem, and maybe some ego, to pacify him, but it must be done or your chances for success are zero. I knew immediately I could never win in Detroit unless Isiah Thomas was in my camp. It has nothing to do with him or me -- just the way things are in the NBA. It happens on all teams. Coaches handle it in different ways.
I've never been good at holding onto my anger, but Vic Bubas at Duke taught me to bite my tongue. There are a lot of things I'd love to say at times, but it's better to be quiet. I'd get hot and want to tell my players a thing or two on the bench, but instead, I put my hands in my mouth or lower my head or simply turn away and look at something else. This form of self-discipline is very hard to acquire, but it's necessary if you're going to win in the NBA.
Some coaches try to be dictatorial, but I avoid that approach. You might get away with it in high school, and sometimes in college, but as you move up the ladder, you've got to let the players have some say in running the show. The players must be involved in the decision-making process, because you will get more out of them, and you'll be more successful. This isn't always easy to do because it goes against the grain of coaching. We all want to be authoritarian; we all want to dominate. It takes great discipline to go the other way.
I look at the other coaches in our league. The older ones seem to have the most success lately, with some exceptions, and I think that's because they've learned to listen to the players. They've learned they can't have two-hour film sessions every day, because it will bore the players to death and take away their desire to play. The freshness of the mind, the desire to play -- these are important things. We play a kids' game. We can't make it too simple, but we can make it so complex that the fun goes out of it. Players love to play this game, and we can't take that joy away from them.
I guess I'm a so-called "player's coach." That doesn't mean I'm easy on them -- just that I try to understand them. I try to understand their mentality and I try to understand them on and off the floor. I don't have a doghouse. If a player has a bad game, it's over at midnight. Then it's a new day, and we go on from there.
In coaching, you go with the players you can trust -- the ones who know all parts of their job and play both ends of the court, the ones who know how to rotate, how to box out, how to get to the free-throw line. That's how you're going to win, and that's whom you trust. But you can also get too comfortable trusting the same players; you have to keep reevaluating yourself and everyone on the roster.
Defense wins championships. Every team, from high school to the pros, tries to play good defense. But how do you do it? How do you get guys to play defense when all the glory is on offense?
If you study the game by reading, listening, watching, and learning from others, you realize that defense is the only common denominator to winning. I've learned that if a team's defense is consistent, the team will win more than it loses, even if it has only average players.
I believe that 90 percent of the coaches in our profession want to be known as defensive-minded coaches. The problem is convincing the players. Even though they know the best way to become a macho player is to play tough defense, it's still a hard sell. A player's mentality is always geared toward scoring. When you score a basket, you are a success, and players who want to be basketball players develop an appreciation for offense long before they know anything else about the game. As these young players develop, their coaches have to battle them constantly to work on the more difficult parts of the game. They have to teach them to chase their man around a screen, be in position to rebound, and dive for loose balls.
When you go into coaching, you must decide what philosophy to follow. There are successful coaches who are defensive-minded, some who are offensive-minded, and some who balance both. In my own case, believed from the start that defense was the answer to winning. My conclusion seemed logical because defense was the one thing that could be consistent every night.
Maybe the most important factor in playing defense is defensive rebounding. There's a basic philosophy that goes back to the invention of the game that all coaches spout but don't necessarily believe. I probably say it a thousand times a year: "If you don't give them a second shot, you'll never lose a game." You can't possibly lose if you them to one shot on every possession. They can't shoot well enough to score enough points to win.
Boxing out and not letting your man get a second shot is the single most difficult thing to sell your players. It drives you insane as a coach. I never stop saying it, even though I know they hate to hear it. I hate to say it, but in the biggest games of the year, I say it even more... and a lot louder than during the season.
After we won our second consecutive NBA title, Detroit held a celebration at The Palace. As I sat on the stage, I thought of all the things I wanted to say about this team. I wanted to tell the fans about the sacrifices these players had made to win. They gave up personal glory, points, assists, rebounds, minutes played. All the things most players live for. Our players gave up these things so we could develop other players and become a team. We won because our players were secure enough within themselves and unselfish enough to give up their personal stats and glory.
We also won because we were willing to change. I see our team as a kind of an amoeba, a form that has no nucleus but is always changing. We have twelve players on our roster, and we keep trying to improve each position.
Having coached at all the levels, I know one thing: teams win championships, not individuals. The players must have ability, but it's essential that they perform as a team. They have to be unselfish, and it's hard to find unselfish players. |
