Bird Watching

by Larry Bird

  I hated to see Rik miss out, because he was so much a part of what we were doing. Rik Smits is like most of the guys on this team, one of the nicest people you’d ever want to be around. Truthfully? That’s not what you really want. You want guys who are nasty, who have an edge, that killer instinct. Rik can’t give us that, but he’s very capable of scoring points and getting rebounds. He’s proven that he’ll play hurt, and play through pain. There’s only so much one guy can do. I don’t have a problem with Smits.

  Besides, it’s not like he was the only one who had trouble getting mean. Reggie is a great late-game shooter. I mean, he loves the pressure. I see how he’s progressed the last five years and I’m happy for him, because he’s a nice guy. But he’s not all that mean either.

  Believe me, it matters. All you need to do is go back to the 1984 Finals, Celtics versus Lakers, when Kevin McHale clotheslined Kurt Rambis as he was heading in for a layup. The networks show a clip of it whenever they talk about “playoff intensity.” There’s no question in my mind that Kevin didn’t mean to do it, but after he did, it turned the whole series around. The Lakers never really liked physical contact, and we got them intimidated after that.

  You need to find somebody who, if your opponent is coming in for a layup, every once in a while is willing to knock him down. That’s just the way this league is. Guys don’t like to be hit. You get a couple of them on the ground and it makes a difference, especially if you’re in the game. Hey, teams used to beat on me all the time. That’s why I had so many surgeries.

  The Pistons were very physical. The Lakers, after 1984 or 1985, were willing to hit people. Philadelphia’s teams, back when we were battling them, were always tough. They gave you a shot every once in a while. But Detroit was definitely the best. Rick Mahorn, Bill Laimbeer, and those guys, they took you right out of the game.

  We had a pretty heated rivalry with them. They were very limited, and so they had to do what they had to do. The only guy I really didn’t like from that bunch was Laimbeer. I thought he was a cheap-shot artist. There’s a difference between knocking somebody down, and letting him know, but Laimbeer was the kind of guy who got his shots in after the whistle blew. He’d be standing there with the ball in the air, and the whistle having already been blown, and he would take a crack at your knees or your back. Listen, nobody played any harder and hit people more than me. I hit people all the time. That’s part of it. But I never tried to hurt a guy. All you need to know about Laimbeer is what Robert Parish did to him during the 1987 playoffs. It takes a whole lot to get Parish riled up about anything, but he was sick and tired of Laimbeer nailing him with those sneaky cheap shots, so during the course of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals, he just leveled Laimbeer under the basket. At the time the officials didn’t call anything, because they knew all about Laim-beer too, but then the Pistons took the tape to the league, and there was Robert pummeling Laimbeer on tape, so they suspended him for Game 6 of our series. It was the first time in the history of the postseason that anyone had been suspended like that. That’s what I mean about Detroit taking you out of your game. We lost that game because we didn’t have our center. We came back and beat them in Game 7 at Boston Garden, but it never should have come to that.

  None of us made any secret about how we felt about Laimbeer. I remember one season, I got on the team bus and the writers were talking about the All-Star team, which had just been announced. I turned to one of them and said, “Did Laimbeer make it?” He said, “No, not this year.” I said, “Good. Now I won’t have to worry about him getting on the team bus and saying, ‘Good morning, Larry,’ and me saying, ‘Screw you, Bill.’”

  Chris Mullin, on the other hand, was a guy I would have loved to play with. He’s one of those guys who understands the game. You can tell by the way he passes the ball, and is always in the right spot for the rebound, and by the way he drills his shots. I remember being impressed by the way he handled himself on the Dream Team. We never really had any serious practices, but Chris was always working on something anyway. He was a real pro, just working and working.

  I was really excited when we were able to trade for him. We knew Chris was getting older. He was thirty-four years old when we traded for him. But the one thing about Chris was that he had had so many freak injuries that he hadn’t played a lot of minutes over the past couple of years, so we were thinking his legs would be fresh. Chris went through some tough stretches earlier in the season with us. We were asking an All-Star player to become a type of role-player on this team, and it took Mully a while to adjust to that. But he’s a team guy, all about winning. I wish we could have played together in our prime.

  What happened was that Mully got to where he was sort of standing around out there, not being aggressive. One thing Chris Mullin needs to be is aggressive on the offensive end, or you might as well not have him out there. He is one of the best shooters I’ve ever seen. I’ve been around a lot of great ones, and he’s right there. We needed him to be consistent for us, so we could keep defenses honest. The season before, when the Pacers didn’t have Mully, teams would double Reggie on the wing and Rik in the post, and there was no outside threat to make them pay for that.

  That’s one of the reasons I tried to get these guys in the mentality of looking for their shots. Take the Davises, Dale and Antonio (who, by the way, are not related). We would definitely like to have more scoring from each one of those guys, but we’re limited in where we get our baskets. Some games we look at our team and we wonder where the scoring is coming from, but somehow we manage to fight through it and get enough points to win.

  Dale has always thought his role is as a defensive player who will get you rebounds. I’d like to see him do more. I think he has the skills to be a low post threat, but he has to believe he can do that, and I don’t think it comes as second nature to him the way it does other players.

  Dale is a real good guy. You love having someone like him. My guess is basketball isn’t the most important thing in the world to him. He’ll do everything you’ll ask him to do. He just won’t do more. You look at that body, pure muscle, and you wonder about the possibilities. What I said to him at the beginning of the season was, “Dale, if you get yourself in perfect shape, where you can run, you’re going to pick up rebounds, and you’re going to get fouled, or you’re going to get easy baskets. So just run. I’ll get you the ball, and when we throw it down to you I want you to take it right at them.” But he just never did, until the end of the year. He had some spurts in the playoffs where he was really kicking butt. If we could ever get him to do it all season long, look out.

  Antonio is the more passionate of the two. I love it when he gets mad. He can be so good, but sometimes even he can’t believe it. He’s one of those guys, when he’s running up the court in practice, that I have to holler to, “Hey, Antonio, pick it up.” I shouldn’t have to tell the guys that. I’m a firm believer that, if he started, Antonio could average 18 points a night. He has unlimited ability.

  When Smits went out with foot problems, Antonio took his spot in the middle and played really well. When Rik was getting ready to come back, everyone was wondering if I’d still start Antonio. I went to him and said, “Antonio, what do you think is best for the team? You starting, or Rik starting?” He goes, “Rik starting.” So that was that. Antonio was right. We were a better team with Rik as a starter, because Antonio could come off the bench for either him or Dale Davis. Either way, Antonio was always going to play a lot of minutes. He often ends up playing more minutes than anyone I’ve got. But I thought it was great that he put aside what he wanted for himself for what he knew would help us win more games.

  I know that starting is an issue with Antonio. I can’t say I blame him. I fully expected him to come in ready to steal Dale’s job away if he could. My dilemma is that I really don’t have anyone else to back up Rik.

  The guy I had the toughest time figuring out, I guess, was Derrick McKey. I’d see him and say hi here and there, but
I knew I hadn’t really connected with this guy. So I called him in one time and said, “Derrick, I played against you. I know how you play. I’m not bringing you in here to get fifteen points and ten rebounds a night. I just want you to play. If I put you in the game, don’t worry about numbers. Just play.” He said, “I like that. That’s the way I prefer to play basketball.” I said, “If any of our coaches come up and say, ‘We need ten from you tonight, Derrick,’ you tell them you talked to me.” Then I asked him if it was important to him to start. He said no.

  There are times when Derrick will really frustrate you. He’s got so much talent, but what can you do? He has to want to get the most out of it. I can’t talk him into that. But I always appreciated how he responded when I asked him to. We were playing Boston, and Antoine Walker was having a good night, so I went to Derrick in the fourth quarter and said, “Derrick, all I care about is that you put the stops to Walker.” He went out there and was all over the kid. He shut him down, and we won the game.

  A guy like Derrick McKey has been around long enough to know not to get too high or too low. With younger players, that becomes more of a challenge.

  Take a kid like Travis Best. There’s a guy who got a taste of success. Travis did a great job of breaking down Chicago’s defense in the playoffs. We were all happy that he got some recognition. He became a free agent that summer, and we knew other teams would be after him. I was hoping to re-sign him, but if he made a decision to go somewhere else, we certainly knew we’d be familiar with his moves and be able to defend them.

  I wanted Travis to stay, and I was glad we were able to re-sign him. First of all, Travis Best is a great kid. He is going to do whatever you tell him, no questions asked. The problem Travis has is that he’s still developing an ability to feel where everyone is on the court. He’s not really a true point guard. I considered making a change halfway through the season, and having Jalen Rose handle the ball so Travis could come off screens, where he’d have more opportunities to score. The problem with Jalen is that he sees too much sometimes. He gets all excited, and he sees something that’s closing up, and he tries to make the difficult pass anyway. Jalen wants to be a point guard, and I don’t blame him. That’s his dream, and I think he can do it. I feel bad for both Jalen and Travis that there was a lockout last summer, because we could have worked out with them, and I think they really would have benefited from it.

  Jalen Rose is very, very talented. I love that kid. He does make me frustrated, though. We were playing Orlando in late February after the All-Star break, and we’re up about 16 points. We were playing pretty good while Jalen was in there, so after a break I put him back in. He started throwing the ball all over the place. Next thing you know, our lead is gone and we end up in a real dogfight. We won the game, but Jalen knew I was disappointed with him. I chewed him out right in front of the team. I told him, “You got careless and reckless, and we could have lost this game.” He says, “You’re right, Coach,” and then he jumped up and hugged me! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what the heck to do.

  One thing about Jalen, though. You can talk to him. I remember a game midway through the season when Jalen played really well. I took him out for a breather, and Chris Mullin got really hot, so I went with him the rest of the way. After the game, I could tell Jalen was mad, so I called him in. I said, “Jalen, you played well, there’s no question about that. I took you out for a break, and Chris played great. So let me ask you. What if I took Chris out for a break, and it was you that got really hot in the fourth quarter? Should I jerk you out of the game and tell Chris to go back in there?” He said, “No, I guess not.” So I said, “Then what are you upset about?” He looked right at me and said, “It won’t happen again.”

  You wish you had time to spend a couple hours alone in the gym with each of these guys, but there’s no time during an NBA season. Once we get into the thick of it, you have very few days off, which means fewer days of practice, and you are traveling all over the country. That’s why when guys get hurt they get behind so quickly, first because their conditioning goes, and second because they don’t have enough practice time to catch up with everyone else.

  I felt very badly about how things went for our young forward Austin Croshere in his rookie season. I thought when we drafted him—and still I think this—that he can be a very good pro. He played for our summer league in Atlanta and he got dinged up a little bit, and then he broke his hand early in the season, and that was that.

  I didn’t say a whole lot to him. I felt he had to figure it out for himself. I will say this: he handled it as well as he possibly could. At home, I bet he was a bear. I bet he had no clue what was going on, but he is going to be a good player. He just had some lousy luck. He was finally coming along when he broke a bone in his foot. Bad enough that he broke his hand, but then this other thing on top of it, it was just unreal. The poor kid was devastated. All he wants to do is play basketball.

  He didn’t know. He thought he could come back from the broken hand and everything would be fine, but he was so far behind. When he came back, he struggled quite a bit over the next month. I said a couple of things to him, especially when he started playing better. I told him, “Hey, you’re getting a groove now. You’re starting to do the things we’ve been trying to implement all year.” You don’t need to sit him down and talk to him all the time. He doesn’t need to hear from me that injuries ruined his rookie year. He’s a smart kid. He knows that.

  Of course you develop relationships with certain guys. Coaches are lying if they tell you that they don’t. But you have to remember that it’s a business. I played some golf with Fred Hoiberg last summer. He’s a top-notch kid. You wish your own children would grow up like him. I think he’s a good player, and there’s a place for him in this league. He was a free agent last summer, and I wanted to re-sign him, but I also understood that we might have to spend our money other places. That’s the business part of the job. Still, I was glad when we were able to keep him.

  The hardest part for me last season was putting a guy like Mark West on the team, then not being able to find him much time. He worked hard in practice. He’s a veteran, he’s been around a long time, he’s paid his dues. You don’t find guys like him anymore, who will do whatever you ask, even though it might mean he won’t play for a month. He’s a true professional that way. I loved having him on our team. He knows his career is winding down, and you hate to see it finish up that way. We did not re-sign Mark in 1999.

  Guys like Mark West helped develop this league, not because he was a star but because he worked his tail off and made his team better. We had a guy like that on the Celtics, Terry Duerod. He only played four years (one and a half in Boston), for a total of 143 games, but he was so valuable to us. I always said he was one of the toughest players to guard, because he was quick and relentless. He just never quit. He made our practices worthwhile, because he was always pushing us. A guy like that, you just want the best for him, but the truth was he didn’t have enough talent to extend his career. Then you see all these players with natural talent and you want to kick them in the rear because they are wasting it.

  Hard work does make a difference, which is why you can be happy for a guy like Mark Pope, who is really going for it. Let me tell you something: he is a lot better than people think. We drafted Mark in the second round, out of Kentucky, and he got teased a lot at the beginning because the guys thought he and Austin were both a little bit in awe that Larry Bird was their coach. After the first couple of practices, when I was running them into the ground, they got over it real fast.

  I know it helps me that some of these guys played against me, and the younger guys know all about my career. It won’t always be that way, if I stay in it. But if there’s a guy that comes along five years from now that doesn’t remember me playing, it will be all right with me. I never saw Cousy or Russell play. I just knew they were special by the way other people treated them.

  I pick my spots when I talk
about my career with these guys. And I try not to lecture them too much. Most of them are veterans. They’ve been around. But once in a while I remind them to look around and appreciate all that they’ve got. I tell them, “Check it out. You’ve got nice wives, or pretty girlfriends. You’ve got fancy cars, and you live in expensive homes, and you travel all over the country in luxury jets. Just think about that, because in a few years you’ll be out of the league and you aren’t going to have this lifestyle anymore.” They nod their heads, but the truth is they all think they’re going to play forever. I knew better. I always knew what I had. Once in a while I’d look at the nice house I was living in and I’d say to myself, “Here I am in Boston, playing basketball in a city where they love us. What would I be doing if I wasn’t playing ball?” And that would bring me right back down to earth.

  But sometimes professional athletes forget how good they have it. I know they do. They’re used to first-class hotels and corporate jets. We flew commercial most of my career. We had to get up early, get to the airport, and fly on a regular plane with everybody else. That’s just how it was. We might have chartered a half dozen times, but it was a regular plane, like USAir, which didn’t have any first-class seats. We could move around and all, because it was just us, but those seats were so small. They just killed my back. The other thing was, the hotels we stayed in were usually like a Holiday Inn. All these players I have now, they want to look at the list of hotels we’re staying at. I don’t care where we stay. We’re not going to be there that long. All you have to do is lay down for a while, then get up and play. But Donnie feels we should stay in the best hotels. That’s fine, but I don’t want it. I never stayed in a fancy hotel until I came to the Pacers. Why do we need to stay there?