Bird Watching (7 page)
Anyway, it put me in a tough position, because everyone knew how I felt about Dave. Not long after that, Paul Gaston asked me if I would be interested in taking on a bigger role and doing something in the front office, but I said no. I was not about to go in there after Dave Gavitt. He was my friend, and I would never do that, not after the way they had treated him.
I wasn’t involved in finding a replacement for Dave. I know at one point they made a call to Frank Layden, who used to coach the Utah Jazz and had a reputation as one of the funnier guys in the game, but he wasn’t interested in being their comic relief. He thought they wanted him to crack jokes all season, to keep the fans smiling through what was probably going to be a pretty awful year. For a guy who had coached successfully in the league for years, he found that pretty insulting. Finally, Gaston told me he was thinking of M. L. Carr to take Dave’s place. Even though M. L. and I were friends, I had my doubts. I just couldn’t see M. L. in that role.
M. L. is a great person. He has lots of energy, and he’s great with people. You always wanted him on your side, because he was always getting the crowd riled up—and sometimes the other team too. He was the kind of guy that would back you up out there no matter what, and he was great in the locker room. He always knew how to break up tension and keep everybody loose. People forget M. L. was also a pretty good basketball player. He led the league in steals for Detroit before he came to Boston. He has always been someone I considered a friend, but I just didn’t feel he was the right person to run the Celtics franchise. I wasn’t convinced he was serious enough about the job to do what needed to be done. To me, a big personality wasn’t going to be enough to help Boston win another championship. I wasn’t convinced he had thought this decision through, to run an entire basketball team.
Right away I could tell M. L.’s basketball judgment was much different than mine. I would listen to him talk and think, “Did we just watch the same game?”
There were a number of things the Celtics did while M. L. and Paul Gaston were in charge that bothered me, but Sherman was the one that really got to me. He was a tough point guard, only about 5 foot 9, and even though he didn’t lead Boston to a championship, at least he was out there every night competing. The only reason the Celtics had a chance in the 1995 first-round playoff series against Orlando (they lost in four games) was because Sherman Douglas almost singlehandedly kept them in it. He wasn’t the best player on that team, but he was the leader, the way Mark Jackson has been for the Indiana Pacers.
You’d think a player would be rewarded for that, but instead the Celtics went out and offered Dana Barros, who was a free agent, a huge contract. Paul and M. L. told me about it in a meeting we had up in Boston, and I was sitting there wondering, “Where is Dana going to play?” I told them he wasn’t a point guard, and besides, we had Sherman. But they started talking about how Dana was a local kid from Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Boston College, and the fans would love him, and that’s when I realized the decision really didn’t have very much to do with basketball. I told them Sherman was their MVP, and they nodded their heads, but they weren’t listening. They had already made up their minds. So they signed Dana Barros, and Sherman got ticked. He wasn’t stupid. He knew they weren’t going to bring Barros in there to sit on the bench. This was right at the beginning of the season, and there had been a newspaper article quoting Gaston talking about the business aspect of owning the Celtics that had him saying, “I think I know our team stinks.” Gaston said he was misquoted, but Sherman wasn’t buying it. When reporters asked Sherman what he thought about Gaston’s comments, he said, “I think he stinks too.”
They ended up sending Sherman to Milwaukee for Todd Day, who was a shooting guard, and Alton Lister, a center who was around when I was a player. It was a terrible trade. Todd Day was a selfish player who thought about only one thing—how to get himself a shot. Alton Lister was in his late thirties and on the downside of his career. When I heard about the deal, that’s the day I made up my mind I wouldn’t be in Boston too much longer.
I don’t have anything against Dana Barros. He works hard, and he’s a nice kid, but Boston paid him half a million more a season than they had to, just to get him. Dana had one great year, in 1994–95 with Philadelphia, when he averaged over 20 points a night, but what the Celtics didn’t look at was he played the most minutes of anybody in the league. He had a total green light. Give that kid a green light, and he can score, but look how many games the Sixers won that year. Twenty-four. Is that worth $21 million?
So if I knew I was leaving as early as 1995, why did I wait two years before I actually did go? I probably should have left sooner. We’d have ten guys in a room trying to make a decision on one player, and it drove me crazy. I’m not saying I had all the answers, but the way they tried to do things, it’s a wonder they got anything done. As much as that bothered me, I had my reasons for staying. The one thing my doctors told me after my fusion surgery was to be really careful about letting my back heal. They warned me, “Take it slow, or you could have some major problems down the road.” My feeling was, the Celtics had such great insurance, why should I have to pay for my care when I got hurt on their job? I stuck around because it made sense from a business perspective.
In the last year or so before I left the Celtics, Dan Dyrek told me about a group that was interested in buying the team. He asked me to meet with one of the guys, who happened to be a friend of his. I talked to him, and I liked him a lot. His group said the only way they’d be interested in buying the team was if I stayed on. At that time it sounded like a great situation, but Paul Gaston didn’t want to sell. And I knew as long as Gaston was still there I wouldn’t be staying.
It wasn’t easy watching what was happening in Boston. There was another move the Celtics made in the summer of ’95 that I didn’t like: signing Dominique Wilkins as a free agent. Gaston never even bothered to ask me what I thought about that one. The Celtics signed Wilkins without telling me. I heard about it on the news.
It’s just as well they never did ask me about Dominique, because I would have told them it was a big mistake. From day one I knew there was no way that one would work out. Dominique was at the end of his career, only he didn’t know it. He still had a superstar’s mentality. He thought he was good enough to run the show, but his skills had deteriorated and he just didn’t have the same mobility or lift that he had in his prime. But what bothered me the most about that signing was that Wilkins wasn’t a Celtics kind of player. A true Celtic is a guy that’s going to do everything for the team. Dominique was always one of those guys who wanted to do it all himself. You can’t win that way.
I had some great battles with Wilkins during the eighties, when he played for Atlanta. He was so good back then. There’s no question he’s a terrific basketball player, but I always felt we could beat his teams, because one guy can’t beat five guys, and Dominique always died trying.
We were involved in a classic playoff series against Atlanta in 1988. The Hawks were a young, up-and-coming team, but even though people considered our “old” Celtics team dead and buried, we knew we still had what it took. The series against Atlanta was in the Eastern Conference semifinals, and Dominique and I got into some major scoring duels. Wilkins was at the top of his game, but even after seeing him score all those points I never doubted that we’d come out winners, because our guys knew how to make the pass to beat them. When the game was on the line, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish and I never worried about who was going to take the shot. We just made sure it was the best possible one we could take. We beat Atlanta in seven games because we played together. After that series the Hawks were never the same. In fact, I think they lost in the first round of the playoffs the following year.
Dominique was a big name, and that’s why Boston went for him. You have to understand that at that time the fans were getting antsy. I was retired, and Kevin was retired, and Robert Parish had gone to play for Charlotte. The Celtics felt they needed a draw, and they were convinced Dominique Wilkins was going to do that for them. But they should have listened a little more closely to the people around them who knew basketball. Chris Ford, who was the coach at that time, didn’t want the Celtics to sign Dominique either. He was mad at Wilkins from his first day of camp because he showed up out of shape. The whole relationship was doomed from the start. Wilkins had a terrible year in Boston. He was unhappy with his minutes, the way Chris used him, everything. That summer the NBA locked out their players while they negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement, and Dominique used that to escape to Europe. The Celtics were lucky, because by then the fans had turned against Wilkins, and it was getting pretty ugly. I honestly felt sorry for ’Nique. He’s not a bad guy at all. He got set up to be some kind of savior, and that was never going to happen.
It must have seemed to Chris Ford that he never got who he wanted. In 1994, when the Celtics had the eighth pick in the draft, he wanted the guard from Temple, Eddie Jones, really bad. I could see why. I liked Eddie Jones too, because he was tough and athletic and played really good defense for a college kid. But the Celtics ended up taking the big center from North Carolina, Eric Montross. Somehow it came out that I was against taking Montross, but that really wasn’t true. I wanted to take him, because I knew Parish was going to sign somewhere else as a free agent, and both Red Auerbach and I realized how vital it was to have a center. I figured if it turned out we didn’t like Montross, we’d always be able to trade him. I mean, the kid was seven feet tall, and he was a hard worker.
Besides, the Celtics had just signed Dee Brown to a big six-year contract, and he and Eddie Jones played the same position. There’s no doubt in my mind that Jones would have come in and beat out Brown for the job, but then what are you going to do? You’d have a veteran sitting on the bench making all that money and being very unhappy. I don’t think the Celtics wanted to deal with that. Dee had talent, but Eddie Jones would have beaten him out.
Anyhow, Montross had a really solid rookie season. I thought he might be the best backup center in the league at that time, even though we were asking him to start games. Ever since then, it’s been all downhill for him. Part of it was that Chris Ford got fired after Montross’s first season, and M. L. Carr took over as coach, and he just didn’t use him the right way. The kid lost all his confidence, and then he got traded to Dallas, and has been traded again twice since. I think Montross still could be an effective backup if someone would just spend some time with him and help him get his confidence back.
Of course, the Lakers ended up drafting Eddie Jones with the tenth pick, and he was a steal. He’s been to two All-Star games and has proven he can be a big-time scorer as well as a great defender. No wonder Chris Ford wanted him so bad.
Most of the time when the Celtics ignored my advice I didn’t really say anything. Hey, it’s Gaston’s money, it’s his team. But there was one time, in 1996, when they were talking about trading their number six pick in the draft plus their first-round pick the following season to Toronto. The idea was to get the Raptors’ number two pick in the 1996 draft so the Celtics could take Marcus Camby. For some reason, Gaston and M. L. were really hot on the idea of getting Camby, but I told them I strongly objected to the deal.
They kept talking about how Camby was such a huge star at the University of Massachusetts, and how he would be a big draw, but I couldn’t see that. I was really upset about it, because I felt strongly that either Antoine Walker, who was a scoring forward from Kentucky, or Ray Allen, who was a shooting guard from Connecticut, would be much stronger picks, and would be there when we selected sixth. Plus, we knew Boston wasn’t going to be that strong in the upcoming season, which meant the draft pick in 1997 had a chance of being a very high pick (number three, as it turns out). Even after I said all this, I could sense they were still going to do it. I was flying back to Indiana that day and I remember after the meeting I told Gaston, “I can’t leave town knowing you might make that trade. Tell me you won’t make that deal.” He never gave me an answer.
Thankfully, they didn’t make the trade, and Boston drafted Antoine Walker with the sixth pick. Walker is a terrific talent, a superstar in the making. I love the way he plays. He passes the ball so well for a big man, and he can rebound the ball. He takes a lot of bad shots, but he’s still very young, and a good coach will get that straightened out. Camby has talent too, but it’s hard to say how good he is, because he’s injured so much. Maybe now that he’s been traded to New York and will be around all those veterans, his game will blossom.
As it turned out, in the summer of 1997, after Walker’s first season in Boston, Gaston came to me and said they were ready to replace M. L. as head coach. He asked me to put a list together of the names I thought would be good choices. I asked him if he had talked to M. L. about it, and he assured me M. L. understood they needed to go in a different direction, and that M. L. was going to be taken care of, with a different job in the organization.
I started quietly making up my list. Not long after that, I noticed M. L. was acting a little funny. Something was definitely wrong, so I went in to talk to him, and he was really hot. He started saying to me, “How could you do this behind my back?” He was really mad. He said he had gotten a call from someone in Cleveland who said I had contacted the Cavaliers to see if the Celtics could get permission to talk to their coach, Mike Fratello, about the coaching opening they would have at the end of the season. M. L. said that was how he found out he was going to be replaced.
The funny thing about that was I never did call Cleveland to ask about Fratello. It’s not because I didn’t think Fratello would be good, it’s just that I knew he was under contract and doing a good job there, and I didn’t expect he’d be available. I was concentrating on finding people who I thought might be ready to move on.