Bird Watching (34 page)
People are constantly asking me what I think about Dennis Rodman, because the guy is always ripping me. I’ll tell you this much: I wouldn’t want Dennis on my team, but what he did for Chicago was mind-boggling. Everybody is different. I could never put up with the stuff Rodman got away with when he was on the Bulls, like blowing off practices and staying out all night before a game, but there’s no question Dennis Rodman is one of the greatest rebounders in the last ten or twelve years, and what he brought to the Bulls was championships. They don’t win without him. Period. When Rodman first came into the league, I thought he’d be a great scorer. He could shoot the ball. I remember when I was with the Celtics we played Detroit in a playoff series, and Rodman took a really poorly timed three-pointer at a really bad point of the game, and after that someone must have said to him, “Hey, stick to rebounding.” Too bad. Rodman could have been a complete player if he wanted to be.
Certain guys you see play, and you’d love to have a chance to work with them. Vinny Baker, the power forward who plays for Seattle, is one of those guys. He’s going to be a terrific talent. I also love Gary Payton, Baker’s point guard. I love the way Payton goes at it on the defensive end. He’s one of the few that gives you everything on both ends. It’s got to be a dream to play with that guy.
Although it’s interesting to watch the young guys develop, it’s sad for me to watch some of the older players come to the end of their careers. Guys like Karl Malone, who has never gotten enough credit, because he’s played the bulk of his career the same time as Michael. The one I hate to see go without a ring is Patrick Ewing, because I know him better than any of them, and I know how hard he has worked over the years. He’s a warrior, and I hate to see him leave without a championship. I feel the same way about John Stockton. People think because these superstars have made all this money, they’ll leave the game satisfied, but I know talking to Patrick that it isn’t true. He won’t be happy unless he wins an NBA title, and he knows his time is running out. There’s another reason I have respect for those guys. Karl, Patrick, and John played their careers all in one place. That, to me, is really significant. I am so glad I did the same thing. Like I said at my Hall of Fame induction, one of my biggest worries about this league over the course of the next ten years or so is that we won’t have but one or two players who will stay in the city they started with. I think that’s a shame, and I hope it’s something the league addresses soon.
You have to realize how that stability helps the league. I remember meeting this Celtics fan once. He was telling me how his dad used to take him to the games when he was seven years old. For ten years that kid followed the same team, and as a result he grew up with the players on that team. I think that’s important. In this case, the guys that little kid followed were Kevin McHale and me. By the time Kevin and I finally retired, that little seven-year-old kid was in college, but Kevin and I were still Celtics, and he was still a Celtics fan. Of course, the reason these players move around so much today is because they can make a lot of money doing it. There’s no question the money in the NBA has gotten out of control, but I’m not going to sit here and criticize the players for that. I always said, “Work hard, and get what you can get.” The guaranteed money is a good thing, but it makes guys soft. It makes them lazy. It happened when I played too. The only difference is now they’re being lazy for millions, instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why I believe you need some guys on the end of your bench who are hungry, who are fighting for their lives every day, because they keep all your fat cats honest. That’s what Mark West did for our team in my first season, when he wasn’t injured. That’s what Joe Kleine did for Chicago, and what Greg Kite did for our Celtics teams.
Greg Kite was one of the most hardworking people I’ve ever seen. Rick Carlisle is another guy who survived a lot of years in the league because of the way he worked. You know who else was a damn hard worker? Kevin McHale. He liked to come off like he was an easygoing guy, without a care in the world, but when we got into practice he was there for the long haul. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. He had been a holdout with Boston, and his agent was threatening to send Kevin to Italy if he and the Celtics couldn’t work out a deal. When McHale finally signed and reported to camp, Fitch nicknamed him Spaghetti Man. What I remember most about him is that he blocked my shot three times in practice. The first time he did it I thought “beginner’s luck,” but he kept on doing it. He even blocked some of them left-handed. His timing was unbelievable. He was already one of the top defensive players in the league as a rookie. And he worked so hard on his low post moves. He’d be there after practice for an hour, maybe more, thinking up new ways to beat people on the block. In 1986 he was at his best, and I told him, “Kevin, if you keep on playing like this, you’re going to be the MVP of the league.” But the problem with Kevin was, he’d get bored. He’d score 20 on someone, just scorch the poor guy, and we’d be up by 15 points, and Kevin would say, “Aw, he’s had enough.” That’s when I’d be thinking about putting the dagger in the guy, but Kevin wasn’t like that. He truly was the best player in the NBA that year, until the last month of the season, when he lost interest. I said, “Kevin, but you could have been MVP.” He said, “Larry, I don’t care about that stuff.” My answer was, “You don’t now, but you will twenty years from now, when it’s all over.”
The other part that made you love McHale was how great he was in the locker room. He was really patient and helpful with young players. He’d spend a lot of time with them after practice—all the time they wanted. He worked with Greg Kite, and Joe Kleine, and Stokjo Vrankovic, when he was with the Celtics. Most of those guys, they’d be ready to stop before Kevin would be ready. He’d play all day if he had someone to work with. You just don’t see too much of that anymore, and that’s a shame.
My own playing days seem far, far away. It’s over, and it has been for a while. It’s funny. Once you stop playing, it doesn’t seem that important anymore. Sometimes I feel like I never played before. Sometimes you walk into different arenas and you’ll have flashbacks of a big play, or a big win. That always happens when I walk into the Forum, or Madison Square Garden. But a lot of these new arenas don’t mean anything to me, because I never played in them. I miss the old Chicago Stadium. And I will never understand why they tore down Boston Garden.
In the week or so before the lockout hit, Donnie and I started talking about how we could improve our team for the next season. We had such a great chemistry among our guys, and we were grateful for that, especially after all the crazy things that had happened, with Latrell Sprewell and his reported attempts to choke his Warriors coach, P. J. Carlesimo, at the top of the list. That was terrible—uncalled for—but I’d be lying to you if I said we didn’t have some interest in trading for him.
I feel sorry for P. J. Carlesimo. He was my assistant coach on the Dream Team, and both Rick and Dick worked for him, and they have a lot of respect for him. What Sprewell did was wrong, there’s no question about that. He deserved to sit out a year, which he did. But it wouldn’t have stopped me from taking him. I know that seems like a contradiction to some people, based on how I stress discipline and togetherness and all that. But I took a look at the group of guys we had, and I felt they would make him change. He would have to fall in line with our group. And if he didn’t, we’d have to find someplace else for him to go. To me it was worth the gamble. When a guy messes up like that, he’s either made a big mistake or he’s got major problems. We would have needed to find out which one it was right away. And I never would have traded for him without going to Mark and Reggie and Chris and getting their opinion, which is what I did. I told them, “If you don’t want him, it’s your team. This is your chance to speak up.”
I wanted to help these guys out, to improve their team, but they’ve been together awhile, so I put the ball in their court. I said, “Hey, a couple of improvements and we could do this. Or we might be able to do it just the way we are, because we’re good enough. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Chicago, but we can’t worry about that. We’ve got to worry about ourselves.” They all agreed we should go after Sprewell. He was exactly the kind of player we needed. He was a young, athletic scorer. I think we could have gotten him if we really wanted to, but in the end I felt the price was too high. Golden State wanted one of our big guys, and I didn’t want to do that.
I’ll always wonder how it would have worked out. I know Sprewell has talent. That’s not the issue. But is he capable of understanding that some nights, when he’s really rolling, he might get 20 shots, but on the nights he’s not, he might be on the bench while someone else does it? Guess we’ll never know.
I learned an awful lot about the game in my first season of coaching. If I went to another team I’d do a lot of things differently. I really enjoyed having my assistants, and giving them a lot of influence on what we’re trying to do, because they’re part of it too. But the second time around, I’d probably have my thumb on things a little more. You don’t want to take back some of the power you give people, but there will be some changes in Year Two. I’ll still have Rick draw the plays in the huddle, because he’s the best at it. If something works, don’t change it. But if I ever do go to another team, I’ll draw all the plays myself, because now I have the confidence and the experience I need to be effective.
In terms of personnel, we have a pretty good nucleus, but I would love, like everyone, to find a guy who can throw in 12 to 15 every night from the low post. Rik isn’t really a post man, and that’s the one thing we really need. I know one thing: things are going to be even more organized in my coaching future. My big thing is conditioning, and it will continue to be. So, okay. A player gets injured. That will no longer mean he’s sitting out. If he breaks his ankle, he’ll work out his arms. If he’s got a broken arm, he can run. We hadn’t had injuries all season, and then all of a sudden Rik went out with his foot problems and we didn’t have anything for him to do. We didn’t have the right weight machines. We didn’t have a swimming pool where he could go every day. My feeling is that you should make it so miserable to be off the court that guys will be fighting like hell to get back on the court. I learned that lesson from Rik. We thought he’d be out two or three days, but all of a sudden he’s out two weeks and he’s losing all his conditioning. That’s our fault. We didn’t have the proper mechanisms in place to keep him sharp.
The Pacers are paying me a lot of money to coach. But Donnie knows better than anyone that I didn’t do this solely for the money. I’ve saved my money. I don’t need this job to feed my family. I know there must be some nights that Donnie goes to bed thinking, “I wonder if he’ll come back.” It’s not just up to me. It’s up to my players too. If I went to that first break-up dinner that night, and those players came to me and said, “Look, Larry, we appreciate all you did, but our careers are winding down, and we think we’d be better off with a different coach,” I wouldn’t be mad at anybody. It was a hell of an experience. I did it, and if it’s time to move on, then so be it. My only regret would be we didn’t beat Chicago. I never stopped believing we could do it. I was hoping Michael Jordan wouldn’t retire, because I wanted another crack at the Bulls at their best. At the same time, I knew when he did retire everybody would be watching our team to see if we could do it. That’s good. I liked the idea of having that kind of pressure on my team.
I’m not sure what will happen when my coaching career is up. There’s been some talk about me going into the Pacers front office, but we’ve got Donnie Walsh, and he’s the best I’ve seen. Why should he get out? I know he’s been telling people he’s going to retire, but what would he do? A guy who works twelve to fifteen hours a day, what will he do then? Go off and just sit somewhere like I did? He could learn from me. I’m not saying I have no interest in that part of the business. I guess I’d like to go in the front office if they didn’t have the salary cap. It’s incredibly frustrating to me that I can’t take one of my players and trade for one of your players, even though I’ve got the money to pay your guy. I understand why they’re doing it. But you need more room, and more freedom to move players. Right now any team is so limited in what it can do.
It was a real downer to have dealt with a lockout in my first off season as a coach. I had all these ideas about how we could help this guy and that guy by giving them specific drills, or working with them on certain things. Instead, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I know some teams didn’t pay attention to the league’s rules, which said you couldn’t have contact with any of the players while they were locked out, but I took the rules seriously. If one of my players tried to call me, I hung up on them. When it got to be October, I still wasn’t talking to our guys, because I wasn’t allowed to, but I kept hearing how they were all working out together as a team. That made me happy.
The funny thing about the lockout was that both sides kept talking about this issue or that issue, but the issue has always been the same: it’s all about money. I remember early in my career, our owner, Harry Mangurian, coming in and telling us we were going on strike. He said, “The players want this, and the players want that, and they’re going to ruin our game if they strike.” I said to him, “Look, I’ll be your model player. I’ll show up, even if nobody else in the league does. But do I get paid if I come in here tomorrow and play?” He just looked at me. Because it was about money and he knew it. Everyone felt sorry for Scottie Pippen because he was underpaid, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. He signed the contract. If he was so sure he was going to be that good, why didn’t he put an escape clause in there? And suppose he got hurt? He wouldn’t be complaining about the contract then.
When I was a player, I never looked at so-and-so and said, “He’s making five million dollars a year. I should be making more than him.” I always believed your talent would take care of all that. When I first came in I was the highest-paid rookie ever, so I had a hand in helping these guys get what they get today. I’m all for the players earning as much as they possibly can, but the one thing I can’t stand is when guys get paid before they earn it, and then they don’t want to come out and play. It makes me want to throw up.