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11:51:00 AM EDT
The Blame Game
Newsday reported yesterday that the three Knicks rookies last year, Channing Frye, Nate Robinson and David Lee all expressed gratitude that Larry Brown was gone.
Complaining about his ever-shifting lineups (the Knicks used 42 different starting fives last season), his conflicting advice to his players and all-around bad attitude, the trio praised the positive vibe that new coach Isiah Thomas is bringing to the Knicks as the Las Vegas summer league gets under way.
Channing Frye, the very talented rookie center, had a lot to say on the subject of Brown:
"It's not even comparable," Frye said. "It's
just a positive environment every day. I'm happy Isiah is here and very excited
about what we can do with the guys we have.
"I was excited for a change. It's going to bring some 'positivity' to the
team."
"If I told you to do something different every day at the newspaper or the
TV station, how would it work out?" Frye said of Brown's roster roulette.
"But that was his coaching style and he made the decisions he made, and
our record showed it."
"Thank God, we have Isiah right now and there's not as much media
attention on what's happening between the coach and Steph," said Frye, who
is fully recovered from a sprained left knee suffered near the end of the
season.
"It was a weird year between the media and what was going on with the
team. Everything was just a giant circus.
"
Robinson said he felt he was in a "tug of war" with Brown, who described him as "a highlight reel, not a point guard." While Thomas has given Robinson a simple blueprint to follow, the 5-9 point guard claimed Brown gave him conflicting instructions from day to day.
"It was like, 'I'm trying to do everything you ask me, and it seems like it's not good enough,' " Robinson said. "It's like, 'We're butting heads here because, Coach, you told me to do this yesterday, but today, you told me not to do it.' ... At first, it was like he was trying to take my joy. "
And finally, there was David Lee:
Lee was in the starting lineupduring the Knicks' six-game winning streak at
the beginning of January. But after starting 13 straight games, he didn't play
at all in four of the next 20 and started only one of the final 43.
"We won six in a row there, and I was a little surprised when, all of a
sudden, I'm not only not starting, I'm not playing at all," Lee said.
"It was a little strange, and toward the end of the season [playing time]
was so up and down. I really didn't understand what was going on.
"
Golic was furious at the three rookies. Some excerpts from his mocking characterization:
“Let’s make sure to be touchy feely…Don’t worry if you lost by thirty – you gave a good effort, that’s all that counts.” In response to a comment by Lee, that when you play good defense and get positive reinforcement, it motivates you to want to do more of it, Golic hit the roof: “good job moving your feet…it’s all so positive now. You still suck, but you feel good going to the gym.”
Greenberg and Buster Olney, filling in for Golic today, shared Golic’s derision. Greenberg, noting that he himself was as unmanly a guy as you can find, still appreciated what he characterized as the football ethos of “man-up,” and criticized today’s athlete for needing to be treated with kid gloves. Greenberg also replayed some of Stephen A. Smith’s comments from last night, in which Smith lamented that the remarks by the three rookies were a “sad statement of the times in the NBA and in our society” and went on to attack the older guys on the team, “the cry-baby Knick veteran prima donnas” for having set a tone and established a culture that would allow the young players to feel comfortable ripping a Hall of Famer like Brown.
This is old stuff, of course, sportsdom’s single favorite trope – that the old school, suck-it-up, man’s-man world of sports is slipping away, reflective of a society wide decline in honor and manly virtue, “contaminated” (Stephen A’s term) by players’ greed and egos.
Now, let’s stipulate that today’s player is more likely to talk back to the coach and less likely to keep his mouth shut than players of yore. As Pete Rose himself admitted(without meaning to), such behaviors didn’t suddenly emerge after 1990. But, I’ll grant that those things are certainly more a part of the culture of sports than was the case thirty or forty years ago.
If that’s true, then, really, who’s being the baby here? Last time I checked, every NBA season has resulted in a champion being crowned. Every game continues to end with a winner and a loser. The league’s overall won-loss percentage continues to be, by definition, .500, just as it was in 1949-1950. Times change and part of a coach’s job is to adapt successfully to his circumstances. Now, this Knicks’ team is poorly constructed. And, I love Larry Brown. But, is there any doubt that he sucked as a coach last year? By all accounts, the man alienated every one of his players. If he did so in order to stand on principle, well bully for him, but isn’t the point to win basketball games? As crappy as this Knicks team is, it’s hard to imagine a coach in the league who would have done worse than 23-59. Brown was a failure, and if it’s because he can’t adapt to the new realities, then it’s time for him to retire.
In 2002-03, following the school’s worst basketball season in more than forty years, Matt Doherty coached three very talented UNC freshmen to some big wins over top-ranked opponents and ultimately, a bid to the NIT. There were grumblings all season, however, about Doherty’s temper and treatment of players. In the Spring of 2003 he was canned. There was much hand-wringing in Chapel Hill, because, once again, a bunch of prima donna kids, like Rashad McCants, upended the proper hierarchy in sports by successfully engineering Doherty’s ouster. Now, to follow this line of reasoning, you’d have to assume that this was simply an uncoachable group, because an unstated assumption of so much sports conversation now is that when a coach loses his players, or the players screw up, it’s never the coach’s fault. “The players are the ones making the mistakes” is a familiar refrain in defense of coaches whose jobs are in jeopardy, and we’re hearing it a lot right now in reference to Dusty Baker (who should lose his job just for insisting on batting Juan Pierre lead-off every game). UNC, of course, hired Roy Williams, and lo and behold, took all of two seasons to win a national championship with that “uncoachable” core. The fact is that, like Brown this season, Doherty had lost every single one of his players. Make all the excuses you want - that’s a coaching failure.
Williams, by the way, is himself a hothead, who’s screaming at players the moment he rolls out of bed in the morning. Gregg Popovich is another very successful coach who’s about as untouchy feely a guy as you’re likely to find. Ditto Pat Riley. But, there’s something called leadership. Good leaders know how to reach people. If positive reinforcement is one way of doing that, and on principle you don't use that tool, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Golic, Greenberg, Smith and Olney don’t have to like it. But, if it’s so obviously the way of the world right now, then I have a suggestion for you guys – suck it up. Or, to use Greenberg and Olney’s preferred term today – man up. If a coach can’t get it done, stop whining and complaining and blaming a culture and societal reality that you all agree is here to stay. Because, guess what, every year, plenty of coaches are going to figure out how to reach their players just like they always have, and plenty of coaches won’t, as has always been true. If a coach fails in that regard, he and his defenders need to stop their knee-jerk blame game.
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