Like brother Magary, I have been re-energized as a fan by this year’s NBA playoffs, although I do admit that watching Jayson Tatum take one of Paris’s arrows harshed my mellow considerably—classical allusion courtesy of the Society of Jesus, circa 1974. It was partly un-harshed by the emergence of Luke Kornet, Force of Nature. But otherwise, it has been a voyage of discovery. I knew Anthony Edwards because my friend Tom Crean had recruited him at Georgia, but Jaden McDaniels was a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t keep Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic straight for the longest time. Tyrese Haliburton might have been the lead singer for the Spinners, for all I knew.
When did Shai Gilgeous-Alexander get this good?
When did Stephen A. Smith’s radio get stuck on scan?
Clearly, I had some work to do here.
My most intensive days around the NBA took place in the 1980s. I was a columnist for the Boston Herald—Hi, Rupert! You married again?—and my assignment every spring was to write off the opponent’s locker room during the playoffs, which in those days generally ran into June. I became more familiar with the Dominique Wilkins Hawks, the Isiah Thomas Pistons and, of course, the Magic-Kareem Lakers than I did with the Celtics. And the coaches were a study all their own. Ball of fire Mike Fratello in Atlanta. The impeccably coiffed Chuck Daly in Detroit. And, of course, the lordly Pat Riley with the Lakers, who used to hold court in first class on the long flights between Boston and L.A. On one trip, he spent a half-hour talking about how his Kentucky team lost the 1966 NCAA championship to Texas Western in the game called the “Brown v. Board of Education of college basketball.”
“I looked in their eyes before tipoff,” Riley said. “And I saw that they were playing for something different than we were playing for.”
I mean, even K.C. Jones in Boston, the lowest-profile of these championship coaches, would go out to supper clubs after games and croon a few tunes with the piano players. These were interesting people who said interesting things in interesting ways, and they felt connected to the NBA coaches of the league’s wilder days, especially, in many cases, the buccaneer environment that was the basketball culture in places like Philadelphia and New York.
So, I looked around during these most interesting NBA playoffs, and I thought to myself, Who are these guys? They all look like Amway salesmen. OK, Rich Carlisle and Steve Kerr have some championship cred as players, and Tom Thibodeau can explode in many colorful fireballs, and Joe Mazzulla is a very odd duck, and, god love him, Coach Spo grinds on in Miami. But honestly, Mark Daigneault? Chris Finch? David Adelman? Who are these guys? I’m not talking about their CV’s. But I know more about David’s father Rick than I ever will about him. And he replaced Michael Malone, whom I also would not recognize if he sat in my lap. Hell, the Nuggets could’ve announced the switch, then faked it, and I wouldn’t have been any the wiser.
It turns out that Daigneault and I come from the same part of central Massachusetts, although he came from Leominster, that part of Worcester County that the rest of us like to call “up by New Hampshire.” He didn’t coach anywhere except the G-League before taking over at Oklahoma City, just at the moment when the blessings of all the gods descended on SGA. He won Coach of the Year last year, and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. And then there’s Chris Finch in Minnesota. His résumé includes stints on two continents.
Finch started with the Sheffield Sharks of the British Basketball League. His success there landed him a gig with the Gießen 46ers of the Bundesliga in Germany, where things did not go well. He was canned after one season and moved along to a Belgian team called Euphony Bree which, if it isn’t also the name of an exotic dancer in Brussels, I will die disappointed. He got the Bree the only Belgian championship it ever won. He then moved to another Belgian team, hauling most of the Brees with him. His success there got him back to this side of the Atlantic, where he bounced from the old D-League through a few assistant coaching gigs until he landed in Minnesota, just at the moment when the blessings of all the gods descended on Anthony Edwards.
All of which is not to say Daigneault and Finch were merely lucky that two transcendent talents hit high tide just when they arrived to coach them. Nor is it to discredit their résumés. Finch certainly paid his dues, and in a wide variety of currencies as well. It’s good for the league that it largely weaned itself from depending on college coaches—Billy Donovan has been in the league long enough that he’s an NBA coach who used to coach college ball—or on the endless Kevin Loughery Memorial Coaching Carousel. I remember when the savants had shivering fits when Cleveland hired David Blatt straight from the Euro League. The general feeling that Blatt was a weird fit hung on him like a dead raccoon. The Cavs were 30-11 when Blatt was let go. The reasons given were hilariously bogus:
"What I see is that we need to build a collective spirit, a strength of spirit, a collective will," [then-Cavs GM David] Griffin said. "Elite teams always have that, and you see it everywhere. To be truly elite, we have to buy into a set of values and principles that we believe in. That becomes our identity." … Griffin said of the Cavaliers: "I have never seen a locker room not be as connected after wins as they need to be. We've only been galvanized when expectations were not high."
That’s a lot of words to say, “LeBron was pouting.” (Translation from the original weaselspeak.) Blatt never had a prayer. But now, a Western Conference finalist is being run by the greatest coach Euphony Bree ever had. As Ken tells Ray in the movie In Bruges, “Ray, we only just got off the fucking train! Could we reserve judgement on Bruges until we've seen the fucking place?” Anyway, that’s certainly progress, for Chris Finch and for the league.
As for college coaches, we may yet see another wave of them now that college athletes have been empowered and the Cult of the Coach has lost much of its power over the sport. The main reaction so far has been to see veteran college coaches simply retire and blame NIL and the transfer portal. John Calipari and Rick Pitino both have made the jump once. Brad Stevens was building a mini-dynasty at Butler when the Celtics hired him. (And he is about to endure a summer from hell for his trouble.) But any ambitious young college types now are going to have to compete now with G-League coaches, EuroBall coaches, and the long shadow of Euphony Bree.
But would it hurt some of these guys to show a little personality now and again? Couldn’t Daigneault be urged to share some wild stories about the Leominster-Fitchburg high school football game? (Their annual Turkey Bowl has been played for 145 years now.) Surely, Chris Finch has some tales to tell. I’d pay a shiny U.S. nickel to hear him sing the Euphony Bree team song. Instead, they all talk in fluent, coachly banality. They know the structure of the game, how to fit its pieces together to achieve success. But do they know its heart? Its soul? The evidence is still completely out on that.
It may be that Gregg Popovich, may his name be blessed, is the last one we’ll see for a while who can both coach the game and feel it in such a way that he seems like one of us. In addition, he never failed to demonstrate that he was aware of the wider world. (Hell, he even once considered joining the CIA.) More of that, please. As the late Richard Manuel sang, “Out of all the idle scheming, can’t we have something to feel?” Enjoy yourselves, guys. You’re all one day closer to being fired.
