posted July 1, 2009 at 19:54 EST in NBA Articles
The Detroit Pistons are in Trouble
by Charles Jay
THE PISTONS ARE NOT PUMPING RIGHT NOW
The Detroit Pistons (+5000 to win the NBA title at BetUS) have just fired coach Michael Curry, which has naturally brought forth talk about who the replacement is going to be. It seems to be almost an NBA rule these days that the name of Doug Collins has to be mentioned. It sounds almost like a weird variation of the NFL's "Rooney Rule."
Collins is known as a good basketball man, and has spent a lot of time articulating that as an analyst on television. This is a little overdone, however. Collins is mentioned in connection with almost every NBA coaching vacancy, even to the point where he and his broadcast partners have pushed such rumors on the air during the games he's worked. Hey - I can't blame the guy all that much if he wants to cultivate the image of being a "basketball guru." It's good for his business, and his prospective business. However, those people who would expect quick turnarounds with him at the helm should look at the record.
Collins spent eight years as an NBA head coach, he finished over the .500 mark four times, and made the playoffs (not a tremendous feat) five times. There are no titles associated with his name, not as a coach anyway. In fact, Collins has three first-round exits in the playoffs and has reached the conference finals only once. His last playoff game was back in 1998. That was when he was in Detroit....the first time.
Yeah, this team has fired him before. So why would they want him now?
Good question. There's a good answer too.
He's on television, dummy.
It is part of the TV culture in sports that the color commentators we hear on the air are branded as "authorities," especially the ex-coaches, and they all too often use the broadcast booth or the studio to springboard themselves into another job. The examples of this are too numerous to mention. Of course, most people fail to ask themselves why many of these guys are not coaches anymore. NBA executives are apparently no exception to that rule, because we continually hear about Mark Jackson in connection with some of these vacancies as well, even though the former point guard who is now an analyst for ESPN and ABC has no previous coaching experience.
He's a "TV star." That's why. There is no doubt that one of his on-air partners, Jeff Van Gundy, will parlay his TV exposure into a bigger salary when he is eventually hired again by an NBA team.
It's almost as if the guys running NBA teams don't really know very much about what a coach does or how he does it and they are instead doing the research for their hiring by following personalities on television. It reminds me of the time when NFL teams (and, we should mention, those in the NBA and ABA) did their college scouting by looking at the Street & Smith pre-season annuals.
Do they not know anything about these guys until they see them on TV; or more to the point, do they think they know about their potential job performance better now because they did some nifty and insightful commentary? That idea sounds kind of primitive to me.
Let's get to Joe Dumars for a minute. The former All-Star guard who runs Detroit's basketball operation has made some great moves in the past, but he's also pulled some bonehead moves as well. He let coaches like Rick Carlisle, Flip Saunders and Larry Brown go, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better group of three in the NBA (maybe the problem is that between them, they have no network broadcast experience).
Dumars' hiring of Curry was criticized, because of the perception that Curry's youth and relative lack of experience was not a good mix with this veteran team. Maybe those critics had a good point, but Curry wasn't the guy who pulled trigger on a deal that sent Chauncey Billups to Denver in exchange for Allen Iverson, which effectively cut the heart out of this Piston team.
That, and the departure of at least a couple of those former coaches is squarely on Dumars. If he is looking for the Pistons to make strides against the likes of the Cleveland Cavaliers (+300 at BetUS), Boston Celtics (+550 at BetUS) and Orlando Magic (+1000 at BetUS), he'll need to do something a little more substantive and imaginative than to recycle an old coach, who couldn't make things work the first time around in the Motor City, just because he's kept his face in front of a TV audience.
