by Jalen Rose
Boston had Auerbach, who ran that organization forever, and brought in everyone from Bill Russell to John Havlicek to Larry Bird and Kevin McHale.
The Lakers had Dr. Jerry Buss, who as chairman, a position less involved in basketball than Red’s, brought in a couple of different brilliant “basketball CEOs,” if you will—Riley, and later Jackson—to nurture superstars like Magic and Kobe.
The Spurs have been one of the NBA’s very best teams for almost two decades, with Popovich at the helm and some very smart people in the front office alongside him. Do you realize the Spurs have won at least fifty games (or, in shortened seasons, would have) in every one of Pop’s nineteen seasons as coach? Yes, players like Tim Duncan are critical—the Spurs wouldn’t have won five titles without him—but Duncan has stayed in San Antonio because he loves Pop. Now, don’t forget the Spurs were fortunate to have the top pick the year Duncan was coming out. It was a season when David Robinson got hurt, and so San Antonio fell into the lottery. Pop never hesitates to remind people of that good fate. Regardless, fate doesn’t explain the smart focus on international talent before the rest of the league, and also a progressive, forward-thinking mentality that led to the hiring of Becky Hammon as the NBA’s first full-time female assistant coach.
I’m a huge fan of the best players I’ve rooted for, played against, and covered. But in basketball, great leadership and guidance can make all the difference. Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant didn’t win a title until Phil Jackson came along, and LeBron won his titles when he went to Miami to play for Pat Riley and his protégé, Erik Spoelstra. Even if you have a Hall of Fame superstar on your team, the coach needs to be the leader of a locker room. It’s his personality, his dynamic, his way of going about the business of winning, that sets the tone.
So, what’s more important—the superstar player or the superstar coach? To me, the evidence points to the coach.
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LARRY BROWN wasn’t the kind of leader I’m talking about when I was with the Pacers. He couldn’t have been if he was taking it personally when Donnie Walsh made a legitimate basketball trade to get me and spent his time trying to mess with my head. Players from the Pistons won’t admit it because they won a title with him, and players from the Pacers probably don’t want to admit it, but the locker room wasn’t devoted to Larry Brown—it was united against him. In the locker room, even his most “loyal” guys, including Reggie Miller, would be saying things like “Hey, we hate this guy. Let’s take our energy out on winning the game—not for him, but for us.” That was the underlying theme of that team, and a basis of the success that it had.
Let me make one more point about Larry Brown: The guy coached eighteen straight seasons in the NBA for six different teams, not once taking a year off. First off, if you’re a player with that kind of record, then you’re not a Hall of Famer, you’re a journeyman. Second, in coaching, you don’t do that by luck. You plan it. Donnie Walsh knew Larry was done at the end of the 1996–97 season because Larry was already talking to the 76ers about coming to Philly. Larry got in trouble in Detroit because they found out he was talking to Cleveland during the NBA Finals. If a coach gets a new job right after the season ends, he’s been working on it during the season. Those rumors find their way into the locker room even before they find their way into the media. Players know when their coach isn’t totally devoted to them, when he isn’t being straight with them. Peter Vecsey was right to call him “Next Town Brown.” Keep getting those checks, Larry.
Coaches like Phil Jackson, Pat Riley, and Gregg Popovich aren’t like that. They build organizations, win championships, and then work to maintain their excellence. They get great players to buy into their ideas.
I never played for those three guys, but playing for Larry Bird was its own lesson in tremendous leadership. He was the overseer who didn’t say too much, who didn’t jump into the fray all that often. If there were ten seconds left and we had the ball down by one, Larry might say something in the huddle, but it would be Carlisle, the offensive coordinator, drawing up the play. But because of how we knew he led the team in every other way—both emotionally all season long, and in plenty of other ways on the bench during games—there was never a doubt that he was in charge.
Bird also wasn’t afraid to admit his mistakes. In the 1998 conference finals, we took the Bulls to seven games, one of two teams to do that in their championship years (the Knicks did it in ’92 as well). We were up real big in the first half of Game 7. At one point, while we were humming, I hit two straight jumpers, they called timeout, and Larry took me out. We lost that big lead in three minutes, and I barely played the rest of the game. Afterwards, as I was getting on the bus for the airport, Larry came up to me and apologized. He said, “You know what, I’m sorry. I blew it. We tried to go defense. I should have left you in there. We needed another ball handler, and you were making shots. I love you. You’re my guy.”
Can’t ask for more honesty from a coach than that.
A lot of Larry’s “guys” have been like me, guys who were perceived as projects or rough around the edges, but with tremendous potential. Lance Stephenson is a recent example—he has a different personality from mine, a different game from mine, but Larry saw his potential, and he went from a fringe player to one of the Pacers’ key pieces before he decided to leave for Charlotte. There are even more extreme examples from other coaches. Phil Jackson with Dennis Rodman. Pat Riley with all the crazy guys from junior colleges and the bargain bin he’s had on the Knicks and the Heat. Pop with practically dozens of players he’s brought to San Antonio. All players with tremendous talent who have thrived under strong leaders.
The same thing, by the way, applies to my favorite coaches in other sports, like Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick in football. Whether it was Lawrence Taylor or Randy Moss, those legends always found ways to get the best out of incredible talents who were different from everyone else.
I played for only one guy in the pros who was on that level. I would have run through a brick wall for Larry Bird. Still would. In the playoffs against the Knicks, he decided I was going for too many of my own buckets and not incorporating the team as much as I could on the second unit. In an interview with a newspaper, he called me “selfish.” My response? I cut out the article and put it up on my locker. If the Legend thought I was selfish, I was going to make sure I didn’t forget it.
That’s one more thing that great coaches have. The aura. Bird earned it as a player. Some of the other greats built it on the sidelines. But it’s critical for gaining the respect of all the players in the locker room and getting them to follow you to the promised land.
Getting all the way there is about the hardest thing to do in the NBA.
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LARRY BIRD’S three short seasons as Pacers coach were each very different. The first year, he revived a team that Larry Brown had driven into the ground and brought us to within one game of the NBA Finals. The second year, he had to deal with the strangeness of the lockout-shortened fifty-game season and, again, got us to the conference finals. The third year, having decided that the current team wasn’t ever going further than that, he changed things up.
Namely, he turned the car keys over to me.
The team had gotten a little bit stagnant, a little bit too predictable, a little bit old. Reggie Miller is one of the greatest shooters in the history of basketball, Rik Smits was a massive center who could dominate a game in spurts, but beyond those players there weren’t enough options to provide variety on offense. So Larry, Rick Carlisle, and the staff came up with the idea to move me to the starting lineup to play small forward. Then, when the second unit came out, they’d keep me on the court as the point guard.
As the season started, everything felt fresh, including our court. It was the Pacers’ first year in Conseco Fieldhouse after leaving Market Square Arena. We started out 7-7, but then got hot, particularly at home, at one point reeling off a twenty-five-game home-winning streak
at our new house. Everyone we played knew we weren’t the same old Pacers, and that was cool with me. On offense, Reggie didn’t have the pressure of carrying the load by himself every night. During the season he and I were both averaging around thirty-seven minutes a game, with eighteen points per game each. As one of the youngest members of the team, my game matured as I played alongside veterans like Reggie, Mark Jackson, and the guy I called “Throwback,” Chris Mullin. I improved my competitive edge—knowing how to play smart and win the head games—by combining what came naturally with tricks learned from these veterans.
Meanwhile, it was the first time in my NBA career that I was a focus of the offense. All that work I’d put in with Rick Carlisle, and the patience I’d shown, was paying dividends for me on one of the best teams in the league. True, there are a lot of guys in the league who can put up eighteen points a game, but to do it on a great team shows that you’re a complete player. It also shuts up people like Larry Brown, who later claimed that he didn’t put me in because I wouldn’t play defense. If a team wins fifty-six games and gets the top seed in the conference, a guy playing thirty-seven minutes a game has to be playing some defense, don’t you think? In the end, players and coaches around the league agreed. In 2000, I was named the NBA’s Most Improved Player.
We got closer as a team, too. Travis Best was my best friend on the squad. I hung out a lot with the Davis “Brothers,” Dale and Antonio. Mark Jackson, “Jax,” was the kind of leader who got along with everyone and brought everyone closer together. Reggie and I got closer. I always appreciated that two years earlier, when I was coming off the bench, he had taken me on the plane with him to New York to the All-Star Game in appreciation for helping him, as an important teammate, play at a high level and get that honor. And in 2000, we clicked as a true two-man attack.
Despite all that, fans will remember that our playoff run that year almost ended before it started, when we played the Bucks the first round of the playoffs. The Bucks had a good thing going with George Karl coaching, and Glenn Robinson, Ray Allen, and Sam Cassell leading the way. They knew us well. They were in the same division and played us the year before in the playoffs. We swept them in ’99, but in 2000, they stretched us to the full five games before my boy Travis Best drilled a three with sixteen seconds left in Game 5 to win it for us.
Larry Brown and the Sixers were next. We had also beaten them in the playoffs the year before, but I was still out for more vengeance. In Game 1, Reggie and I made NBA history, joining an elite group by each scoring forty points in the same playoff game. A few nights later, though, Matt Geiger and Reggie got into it, leaving Reggie suspended. The series went to six before we closed them out.
Next up were the conference finals and the Knicks, who the Pacers had battled in the playoffs since my college days. This was Patrick Ewing’s last stand, and New York wasn’t going to go down easy. I actually lost a tooth in one of the early games, and it was tooth-and-nail the whole way with Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston and Jeff Van Gundy. Reggie, true to form, scored seventeen in the fourth quarter of Game 6. I know he wanted to win it at Madison Square Garden in front of Spike Lee and all the New York fans, and he got it done.
In three years, Larry Bird had taken us from the wilderness to the promised land. But in the NBA Finals, there wasn’t just a coach as good as him on the other side of the court.
There were two superstars in purple and gold.
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GROWING UP I had a lot of favorite athletes.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, when I first got into basketball, Dr. J was one of the superstars who drew me to the sport with the Afro, the grace, the style, all the things he accomplished. A few years later, when I started thinking I was a big shot, I actually used to sign my autographs “Dr. J” You know—J as in Jalen. Maybe a little bold, but you know by now that I wasn’t shy!
I also had a poster of the Iceman, George Gervin, on my wall. The Iceman was from Detroit, and had played at St. Cecilia’s and Martin Luther King High School. He had a camp in the city I went to as a kid. Before the camp he would practice, which meant if you got there early you could see him finish his workout. And get this: At the end of his workout he worked on his patented shot, the finger roll—from the free throw line. I used to watch him make twenty-five in a row. That shot, one that looked improvised in midair, was worked on for hours at a time.
Dr. J and the Iceman were two players I was enamored with before I zeroed in on my biggest hero: Magic Johnson. Guy from Michigan, big point guard, made it big in Hollywood, he was pretty much the blueprint for me. Years later, Larry Brown would be quoted as criticizing me because I “wanted to be Magic Johnson.” To which my response was “What in the world is wrong with that?”
Superstars like Magic and Larry and Michael and A.I. and the Big Ticket and LeBron and Steph are what make the NBA exciting. When players like that are at the peak of their powers, dominating play, the league is at its best. Nobody’s been better at marketing their superstars than the NBA, which is what made David Stern such a great commissioner, probably the best commissioner in the history of sports. But a big part of marketing is dumbing things down, telling stories and creating images that fans can recognize and support. Magic versus Bird. Air Jordan. And so on. Most of the media discussion is on the same level. Today, more than ever, it’s about simple, big questions that can be debated. Who’s better—LeBron or Steph? Who was better—Jordan and the Bulls, or Magic and the Lakers? If you really know basketball, those questions don’t even make any sense.
Personally, I think complicated questions are more interesting. How can Michael Jordan be both the greatest player ever…and a guy who had a thing for gambling that got him in who-knows-what-kind-of-trouble more than once or twice? Or take my idol, Magic Johnson, one of the most marketable and appealing athletes ever…who had to retire because he got a sexually transmitted disease. Kobe was both a basketball prodigy, one of the hardest-working players ever…and a figure who could be a villain on the court and a man who had controversy off the court. Jason Kidd was a pass-first player who made the team game look beautiful, and made every teammate he ever played with better…but would himself admit he’s not as perfect a human being as he was a point guard.
The basketball-only stuff can be complex, too. So Shaq was a guy who couldn’t win a title…then he was a champion when he won three with the Lakers? He may have won four titles total…he also was swept out of the playoffs five times. Dwyane Wade led Miami to a title, and won Finals MVP…he was also their top player in a season when they won fifteen games. Then we get to LeBron, the kind of player who’s a cut above. Okay, so you’re going to tell me he wasn’t a champion when he was with the Cavs the first time…but he was with the Heat, when he was on a better team? Look, I was under the hoop, in attendance at the Palace at Auburn Hills, when he basically beat the Pistons by himself, scoring twenty-nine of the Cavs’ last thirty points against a team that was playing in the conference finals for the fourth straight season. LeBron won two MVPs in his first stint in Cleveland. He was the best player in the league in those years. He dragged the Cavs to the Finals, the conference finals, and the playoffs every year. Just because he couldn’t drag them all the way to the top was never going to take away one bit from what I thought of him.
When I was growing up, I didn’t love the players everyone else did. In Detroit, the explanation wasn’t just that I liked the bad guys—the Bad Boys were my team! For a few years in the middle of Magic and Bird and Michael, that Pistons team made Detroit feel like the center of the basketball world. Back in one of the golden eras of the NBA, they were champions—and they were the villains. They were another influence on my worldview at Southwestern, and on the way we approached things at Michigan.
My favorite player was the leader and the point guard of that squad, Isiah Thomas. Isiah was misunderstood for a simple reason: He went up against the guys who everyone liked. How can you beat Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson and
be beloved? Everybody’s gonna hate you. In Detroit, we didn’t benefit from the East Coast or the West Coast media bias. It became “Who are these thugs? These bad boys?”
If you’re going to argue that Isiah stoked the fires with his actions—saying that Larry Bird would have been just another player if he weren’t white, and walking off the court against the Bulls before the game was over—I’ll defend him forever. These guys were his rivals. He was trying to beat them. He’s not supposed to like them. He’s supposed to resent them. Isiah was an important model for me in that regard. Later, I’d get to know him better when he took over for Bird as Pacers head coach. I’ve watched him continue to be ostracized by the media and the basketball public in the years since. All I have to say is that when you take the time to look at it from his perspective, and can peel away your biases, it makes a lot more sense. Try it sometime.
The NBA superstar who was the heir to Isiah’s throne as “the outcast” was Allen Iverson. But these days, Iverson is already overlooked when people talk about the greatest NBA players. He was absolutely one of the four best players who got drafted in his era, along with Kobe, Duncan, and Garnett, yet it feels sometimes like he never played. In a lot of ways he was more influential than those guys with respect to his style, with the tattoos and the cornrows and the do-rag that were rare when he started but then became commonplace. The guy won an MVP wearing a do-rag when no one else was. When we crossed paths, A.I. would actually talk to me about how much he loved the Fab Five. If we transcended some things in college basketball, he transcended what was happening in pro basketball. The irony is the coach who got the best out of him was none other than Larry Brown, who, for at least a few years, was able to connect with Iverson and ride him to challenge the Lakers in the 2001 NBA Finals. But like Isiah and the Pistons, the Sixers in 2001 were the black hats. They were the “other guys” against the Lakers, against Kobe and Shaq, the superstar superheroes.