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WE TALK a great deal here about coaches being fired at In Play Lose. This blog is an attempt to explicate failure, of course – why it occurs, and what we do about it – and there is a universal response to failure, across all aspects of culture and society, which has come to be something of a default setting: “throw the bums out.” Obviously, this guy’s not getting the job done, so let’s go get someone else who can. An obvious sentiment, of course, and an understandable one.
But such sentiment often conveniently ignores the fact that the job in question – be it in sports or business or politics – is often inherently a bad job to begin with, thus making success even that much harder. Without that deeper understanding of the structural deficiencies which are present, success may not be possible at all. A great number of politicians have risen to great heights of power using the basic campaign slogan of “vote for us, because we’re not the other guys.” Such sentiment is great in the moment, and may capture the essence of angst and frustration prevalent in a society, but upon riding that wave of change into power, they turn out to be just as bad as their predecessors, if not worse, when it comes to actually running things. Being angry about the present doesn’t mean you have a sound vision of the future. This is precisely was so many “revolutions,” over time and across the ideological spectrum, have failed miserably and sometimes spectacularly. Failing to address those flaws inherent to an organization often leads to making the exact same mistakes, if not worse ones.
One of the things which fascinates The Lose about the world of professional sports – a world where success and failure is put on public display on a nightly basis – is that the world is the realm of rich entrepreneurs, many of whom ventured into professional sports after being wildly successful in the business world. We’re talking billionaires here, persons ranked among the wealthiest in the world who own Fortune 500 companies and the like. Clearly, you didn’t get to be so successful in the world of business by being an idiot. You must have done something right along the way. OK, sure, there are a few people who are dabbling in daddy’s money here and there – it certainly helps Stan Kroenke with his dimwitted L.A. caper that he’s married to a Wal-Mart heiress – but for the most part, professional clubs are owned by wealthy industrialists who have either built for themselves, or carried on, massively prosperous business empires, so you’d think they’d have some idea of how to become successful, but then they step into the arena of professional sports – one of the most viciously competitive enterprises in the world – and a good number of them wind up looking like buffoons. It’s the most public of business operations, one which can easily come to define you whether you want it to or not. No one who follows the NBA thinks of Robert Sarver as one of the richest men in Arizona. Everyone who follows the NBA thinks of Robert Sarver as one of the worst owners in the league.
The most public executive position and face of management in pro sports is generally that of the head coach. This has changed somewhat in recent years – between the phenomenon of Moneyball and the endless mathematical machinations mandated by negotiated salary caps and whatnot, the General Manager’s actual duties have come under much more public scrutiny in recent years. It’s easy to suggest that the coach doesn’t have to make anyone happy other than the man who signs his paycheques, and doesn’t have to please the fans – but the owner ultimately needs to please the fans, lest they stop putting their asses in the seats at his club’s games. If things go badly in terms of on-field performance, the easiest course of action, therefore, is to fire the coach and get someone else. And since these are scarce jobs high in both salary and prestige, the positions are therefore coveted – even the bad ones.
And make no mistake, there are bad coaching jobs. Really bad coaching jobs. Just take a look at the bloodletting on the day after the NFL season concluded, which saw 10 head coaching positions open. Bad jobs everywhere. Coaching the Cleveland Browns just might be the worst job in all of professional sports. Chip Kelly bungled what should have been one of the better gigs in the NFL in Philadelphia, and then took over in San Francisco, where front office meddling and incompetence has sent the 49ers from being on the cusp of winning Super Bowls to on the cusp of picking first in the NFL draft in three years’ time. Given how far the 49ers have plummeted, Kelly could scarcely do worse.
And just in the past few weeks now, two of the worst jobs in the NBA have come open – and a third job, which is even worse than the other two that have now come available, probably should be open but isn’t … yet. These three jobs are all awful, albeit for different reasons, and while these jobs are scarce, if you’re a budding NBA coach, you have to ask yourself if you’re not better off by passing on these opportunities. These three jobs constitute an Axis of Weasel, forming a Bermuda Triangle of misery in which your professional aspirations are likely to sink.
From the moment Derek Fisher got into this mess, his days coaching the New York Knicks were probably numbered. To have your coach flying off in the middle of training camp to California, and get into a spat with your girlfriend’s ex-husband, who happens to be an NBA player, is a public relations nightmare for an organization still smarting after cleaning up the slimy mess Isiah Thomas left behind. And Fisher’s reputation has been of being something of a clubhouse lawyer and politician, which may not have jibed very well with players once he had obtained a head coaching position. Having said that, it seems a little bit strange for the New York brass to have said that Fisher was going to be permitted to develop as a coach with a developing team, only to then fire him 1½ seasons into the process. The Knicks were godawful last season, and a dreadful 1-9 stretch before the All-Star break sees them at 23-32, but there did seem to appear some progress at Madison Square Garden.
But Fisher also got in trouble with his boss, Knicks president Phil Jackson, for attempting to deviate from Phil’s One Commandment: THOU SHALT RUN THE TRIANGLE OFFENSE. Fisher did this for a pretty good reason – the offense wasn’t working. But to the Zen Master, this is an unforgivable sin. After all, he won 11 NBA Championships as a head coach with his team running the Triangle. The Triangle is the centerpiece of Phil’s entire holistic approach and ethos to the game of basketball. And when Knicks owner James Dolan gave Jackson the keys to the store, and gave him carte blanche to do with the franchise what he wished, Jackson was free to impart and impose his philosophies on the entire organization.
Of course, in none of his voluminous writings about basketball does it say anything about making sure you have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal and Pau Gasol around to run your offense and make you look good. The Triangle consisted fresh thinking in a 1990s NBA which was generally dull and uncreative, laden with isos and boring 2-man games. The pinnacle of this success, the 72-10 Bulls team of 1996, played a 6-game NBA finals against the 64-18 Sonics that year which is, in terms of possessions, the slowest NBA finals in history. What should have been a clash for the ages between two of the better teams, win-loss wise, in NBA history saw games being played in the 70s and 80s. Even as a Sonics fan, I thought that series was tiresome.
The Knicks’ triangle offense in 2016, in an era of pace-and-space, cut-and-kick-for-the-3 basketball, looks as anomalous as a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars. The Knicks take a lot of pointless mid-range shots and rank as one of the slowest teams in the NBA. Jackson found time during his lengthy offseason, after the 17-65 Knicks campaign last year, to troll the Warriors for being a “jump shooting team,” and wound up looking like a stale old fogey come June. The game has changed and evolved. As we’ve said before here on the lose, the genius of a team like the San Antonio Spurs rests in their ability to constantly shape-shift and innovate, depending on personnel and depending on what new ideas pop into Pop’s mind. It’s hard to build a future when you’re stuck in the past.
But come hell or highwater, you’re going to run the Triangle in New York. Jackson coaching flunkie/Triangle devotee Kurt Rambis is now keeping the seat warm on the Knicks bench for a while, as the coaching search commences in earnest, but there aren’t a whole lot of guys out there who want to work in a system when you’re just instilling some guy in the front office’s ideas on how to play. Golden State assistant Luke Walton’s name has inevitably come up in connection with the New York job (which is bound to happen when you win your first 24 games while an acting NBA coach, as Walton did while filling in here for Steve Kerr), but if you’re Walton, and you’re now living on the cutting edge of basketball with the most modern of NBA offenses, why on earth would you want to take this job and have Phil Jackson tell you how to do your job? Hell, if Phil thinks it’s such a good way to do things, then he ought to go downstairs and do it himself.
As undesirable a work environment as New York is right now in NBA circles – that open Brooklyn job doesn’t look so good either, in fact – Phoenix is worse. Hey, you get to work for this guy if you take the Phoenix job:
“My whole view of the millennial culture is that they have a tough time dealing with setbacks. I’m not sure if it’s the technology of the instant gratification of being online … but the other thing is, I’m not a fan of social media. I tell my kids it’s like Fantasy Land. The only thing people put online are good things that happen to them, or things they make up. And it creates unrealistic expectations.”
– Robert Sarver
Well, fortunately for Suns fans, Robert Sarver is there to run their basketball team into the ground, thus creating no reason to have any expectations at all. Later in that same interview, Sarver commented, “the reality is, there’s only a half-dozen championship-caliber organizations in the NBA over the last 25 years.”
Which is true – and the Suns were on the cusp of being one of those organizations in the early 2000s, playing one of the most exciting brands of basketball the league has seen and verging on being NBA finalists before Sarver decided to go cheap and went about messing everything up. Remember, this is a franchise which thrice traded 1st round draft picks for cash. He’s repeatedly forced out bright-minded GMs by lowballing them in contract negotiations, and seemingly no one leaves Phoenix having anything good to say about their time there. The Suns have had five GMs and five head coaches since Sarver first bought the team, the last of which being Jeff Hornacek, who was given something of a mercy kill. Bizarrely, the ever-impatient and impetuous Sarver & Co. somehow thought Hornacek would right the ship after his two assistant coaches were fired in December, which was about as public and humiliating a rebuke of Hornacek’s ways imaginable, and had the predictable effect of only lengthening the free fall.
The Suns have been imploding for months now, sinking to 14-40 with a never-ending string of embarrassing results: giving up an NBA-high 46 pts. to Golden State in a single quarter; being swept by the 76ers; and a remarkably inept back-to-back which saw them give up 142 to Sacramento one night, then score 22 in the first half against the Lakers the next. They’ve had no luck with injuries – their top four scorers this season are all injured – and about the best player left on the roster is Markieff Morris, who has acted like a petulant, spoiled brat and sulked most of the season after his twin brother was traded to Detroit, who threw a towel at the coach and got himself suspended, and then who got into an altercation on the bench with Archie Goodwin in the image above. (Oh yeah, and there is also that pesky assault charge hanging over his head.)
Reports are now surfacing that the Suns are holding out for a better return on Morris as the trade deadline nears, an act tantamount to asking for $1,000,000 on your house when the building’s on fire. This on the heels of last year’s trade deadline foibles, when the Suns curiously shipped out Isaiah Thomas (that would be now Celtic All-Star Isaiah Thomas, and not the asscan in New York I mentioned earlier) and Goran Dragic and a really bad Laker team’s 1st Round pick in this year’s draft and wound up with Brandon Knight, who they really didn’t need and who they then foolishly overpaid and who promptly got hurt.
Somehow, all of this must have been Hornacek’s fault. All Hornacek did was take a team two years ago that looked really awful on paper and have them playing near to a playoff level for most of that season. They have regressed since, which was probably inevitable, since the talent was not all that good to begin with, and no one entrusted with either acquiring that talent, or paying for that talent to stick around, has come through. Franchise icon Steve Nash was willing to partner with Sarver on buying a Spanish football club, but not even he wants anything to do with the operations of the Suns. The Suns are a complete mess, and nothing about this organization makes sense.
But the Suns are downright functional compared to the Sacramento Kings, whose president and acting GM Vlade Divac did an about-face last week and, after much speculation, decided to keep head coach George Karl on the payroll after all. The best way to get a sense the state of the Kings is to listen to this podcast by ESPN’s Zac Lowe with Sacramento reporter Sam Amick. The bottom line with Sacramento is this is what you get for making a deal with the devil. In his last significant act as the NBA’s emperor, the little Napoleon himself, David Stern, cobbled together this nonsensical ownership group headed by whackaloon Vivek Ranadivé, who his minority partners are now trying to unseat and whose stewardship has led the franchise into being even more of a league-wide laughingstock.
The new owners are in a particularly bad spot financially, as they await their supposed panacea of a new arena to open, in that as part of their deal for acquiring the Kings, they agreed to give up revenue sharing money. (The Seattle group was more than willing to do this, since they had more money than God.) The Kings really needed to make the playoffs this year and make themselves somehow relevant. Seriously, no team would so happily be the 8th seed and get stomped by the Warriors as much as the Kings. They’re 4½ games out of that the 8th spot in the west after basically sleepwalking their way through the past couple of weeks, during which time the players have become so indifferent that all of three players turn up for a voluntary shoot around. I love me some George Karl, of course, he being the mastermind of the great Sonics teams in the 1990s, but I always knew taking this Sacramento job was a 1-way ticket to disaster. The Kings have had eight head coaches since 2007. I suspect his age and health situation – Karl has battled with cancer recently – hastened his impulses to get back in the game, but surely he could’ve waited a little while until a better job opened up, right?
Then again, maybe not. I mean, this is the NBA here, a bizarro league where they talk contract extensions in Philadelphia, even though Brett Brown has a .226 winning percentage in 2½ seasons, yet playoff coaches got axed in New Orleans and Chicago after power struggles within their organizations. In an organization that conducts business as strangely as the NBA does, nothing is assured. The NBA is part opera and part soap opera, with enormous egos all around, be it the players, the coaches, the GMs, the referees (yes, I’m serious), the broadcasters and even the owners. In all three cases mentioned above, remarkably successful people have contrived to create NBA workplace which run the gamut from awful to hopeless.
The Knicks fans at least have a hip 7’3” Latvian kid to attach all of their hopes to for a few years, whereas the other two franchises’ most noteworthy qualities are malaise and incompetence. (Yeah, sure, the Kings have Boogie Cousins on the roster, who’s terrific, but he also falls under the “malaise” category.) And all three clubs have shown varying degrees of panic and impatience this season, when it was obvious pretty early on that the teams just simply lacked the talent to compete. Firing coaches doesn’t change that fact. You’d best be in the rental market if you take one of those three jobs, since you’re not likely to be employed for very long, and quite honestly, you’ll probably breathe a sigh of relief if and when you get canned.
