Or they might say, “Don’t take the loss so hard, you played a good game. You did all you could.” But when you coach, your job is to win every game. And when you lose, you invariably look back and ask yourself, “Could I have done something else, something better?”
I went from being responsible for just myself and accountable only to my coach, to being responsible for twelve players, to having to answer to ownership and the front office, and to being secondguessed by the media and fans. Intellectually I knew this, but there is no way to feel the full impact of that change until you take the job.
I hired Tom Meschery to be my assistant. He was near the end of his playing career, and I respected Tom for his intensity and his knowledge of the game. I needed someone whom the players respected to be my eyes, ears, and voice on the bench. I also needed someone to keep track of the basics such as fouls, timeouts, and how many minutes certain players had been on the floor so they didn’t become too fatigued.
I also knew that I’d need a friend.
As the coach, I could no longer hang out with the players after the game. There had to be some separation. If I started going out to eat with a couple of players on a regular basis, the other guys would assume I was playing favorites, especially if it seemed “my pets” were playing a lot or taking too many shots. If I learned anything about coaching from my final years in St. Louis with Richie Guerin, it was not to try to be friends with the players. A coach can’t do that, at least not the kind of buddy/buddy relationship that players have with each other. A coach can’t have a beer with the players. He can’t play cards with them. He can give them advice, but he can’t loan them money. You’re no longer on equal terms with them; you’re their boss. It’s sometimes hard, and a little cold. John Tresvant was a friend of mine from our playing days; now that I was his coach, he still wanted to be buddies. Soon he was asking for special favors, wanting to come a little late to practice, not big things—but I saw a problem developing, and we eventually had to trade him.
No matter how prepared, how ready you think you are for your first coaching job, I have news for you:
You are never ready.
As a rookie player/coach, I expected to have Dick Vertlieb as my guide. He was the one who traded for me, the one who made the decision to make me the coach, and he was also a fine general manager and a good man.
I was hired on August 5, 1969, as coach.
In October 1969, Vertlieb resigned as general manager to take another job.
When training camp opened, we had five—yes, five—hold-outs. One of them was Bob Boozer, a very good forward whom we acquired from Chicago in a trade. When he finally did report to camp, he was out of shape.
Suddenly, I found myself worrying about our front office getting my players signed.
I worried about Boozer’s weight.
I worried about Meschery, who had developed a blood problem and couldn’t play as much as we’d hoped.
I worried about Bob Rule, who was a very gifted player and was expected to be our starting center. But Rule liked the nightlife and was another player who wasn’t in top physical condition. And then he hurt his ankle.
Suddenly, I realized how vulnerable a coach can be, because he can look at one team on paper and then watch it disintegrate right before his eyes because of injuries, contract squabbles, or a lack of dedication from some guys. I was aware of these things during my playing career, but I never fully understood the impact of them on a coach until I became one. Besides, as a player, my first responsibility was to play as well as I could; if a player has a good season and the team still loses because several of his teammates were hurt, well, he’s done his job. But for the coach it’s a different story. Furthermore, I was a rookie coach without a general manager to help him. For the first two months of the season, I also had to be the guy to talk trades.
Within a few months, I had gone from being a thirty-two-year-old point guard to being a coach and general manager, making the personnel decisions. Early in the season, Phoenix general manager Jerry Colangelo called me about a deal. He wanted Art Harris, one of our guards. I liked Dick Snyder, one of Phoenix’s guards. We agreed on the trade. Then I had to tell Harris about the deal, and he nearly broke into tears. He was devastated, and I felt awful because I was not just the one delivering the news, but I also had made the decision. I was his teammate, and I was telling him I wanted someone else in his spot. It was the correct move, and it was easy to do when I talked to another executive on the phone, when the player was just a name on a piece of paper. But it was different when that player sat in front of me…I’ve been traded myself and realize how traumatic that is to the player and his family. You aren’t just sending a player to a new job, you’re uprooting his wife and kids, too.
And we lost our first six games.
Part of the problem was the point guard. The point guard was thinking too much like a coach, working too hard to get the other players involved in the offense. The point guard who averaged 22 points the year before was passing up shots that he needed to take. And the point guard had no one to tell him that, because that point guard was me.
Finally, on October 31, 1969, I got my first coaching victory. We beat Cincinnati, 129-121. Before the game, the coach had a talk with the point guard. He told the point guard, “If we’re ever going to win a game, you better start scoring or I’m not going to be coaching for very long.” I had 38 points that night, and I felt an enormous sense of relief to know that I wasn’t about to finish the season with an 0-82 record.
Next, I found myself yelling at my players.
I wasn’t as bad as Richie Guerin and some of my other coaches, but I started ripping into them too much. Telling a guy that he stinks doesn’t make him a better player if you don’t tell him why he stinks and what he needs to do to become a better player. After one of our losses, I fined the entire team $100—including myself—for a lack of effort. Another time, I hit Rule with a $500 fine for missing a team flight. Early that season, I was frustrated because we were losing. I was frustrated because Vertlieb was gone and it wasn’t until January that we hired a general manager. I wasn’t playing well, and I knew my game had tailed off because I had too many things on my mind, and it was taking away from my concentration as a player.
At home, I was very quiet, almost sullen, taking out the losses on poor Marilyn and our kids. Then we lost a game on a night when my wife had some friends in town. As I came out of the dressing room, I heard her telling them, “Well, we can forget about going out to eat tonight.”
“Why?” they asked.
“Because of the game,” she said. “Lenny is not going to be in the mood.”
That really bothered me. I was letting basketball dominate my life, even at home. That wasn’t right. My wife’s evening shouldn’t be spoiled because my team lost a game. I shouldn’t be a distant father or husband because my team played poorly. I didn’t want basketball to consume me and my family. I’d spent my life saying the most important things to me were God and my family, and here I was, putting basketball in front of all that. If I’d been on the road for a week and had just come home, it was natural that Marilyn would want to go out to eat: She’d been home with the kids all that time, while I was eating out. She was taking care of everything at home, twenty-four hours a day. She deserved a break.
This all hit me when I overheard her tell her friends about forgetting dinner.
“No,” I said. “Let’s go out.”
I’ve seen coaches put their families through a mental meat-grinder, with the entire family’s mood dependent upon how the team played. When I saw it in someone else, I knew it was ridiculous. When it began to creep into my own family, I had to stand up and put a stop to it. The family feels helpless. They can’t play. They can’t coach. They can’t do anything but sit back, watch, and maybe pray the team will win so Dad won’t be in a lousy mood. On that night, I vowed not to take work home to the extent that it got in the way of my family. When I realized the pain
I was putting them through because of my approach to coaching, it really hurt me. They didn’t lose the game. They didn’t forget to rebound or play defense. All they did was love me, win or lose, and that was the least I could do for them.
The lessons continued.
One day, a college coach named Marv Harshman was at a practice. I really lit into one of my players because he couldn’t get the ball to one of our big men at the low post. I let him have it: How dumb could he be? Didn’t he see the man open? Didn’t he want to get him the ball?
In some ways, I was acting just like Guerin and my other coaches without even realizing it.
After practice, Harshman told me, “Lenny, you know that you’re a very gifted player.”
I waited, knowing Marv had something on his mind.
“You really see the floor,” he said. “It’s easy for you to make that play, to get the ball to the low post. But not everyone sees the game the same as you.”
I was starting to get the message.
“You have to show them, to teach them,” he said. “You can’t assume everyone knows the game like you do. Show them that there’s more than one way to make that play.”
I nodded.
Of course, teach them. It sounds obvious as I talk about it now, but teaching wasn’t the norm for NBA coaching back then. It was screaming. What Marv told me made sense. I thought back to my rookie year with the Hawks, and how no one really taught me anything. Few people even said a word, unless it was to yell at me. I was acting just like my former coaches, who figured, “Hey, I know how to make that play, so you should, too.”
But why would the players know how to play the pro game, especially the rookies? Even some of the veterans had real blind spots in their games, because no one bothered to show them how to make certain plays. If you didn’t pick it up on your own, the assumption was that you couldn’t do it.
About midseason, I really started coaching the guys. We went back to the basics. And I felt better because of something else that came out of that conversation with Marv Harshman: I didn’t have to yell all the time. Screaming was never a part of my personality, so I was glad that I could coach more like myself. Talk quietly. Listen. Teach. Be patient. Admittedly, not all of this happened at once, but slowly I began to feel comfortable as a coach.
And we began to win.
After a rocky start, we went 18-12 to finish the season with a 36-46 record, which was an improvement from the 30-52 mark the year before. Bob Houbregs had been named general manager. He asked me to return as player/coach, and Schulman gave me a two-year contract.
When your star players are injured, it doesn’t matter if you’re a great coach. You lose.
I always knew that was true, but I learned it the hard way in my second season as the Sonics coach. It began with Bob Rule, my talented but troubled center who was holding out. He rarely played in top physical condition, and he liked to party, yet he still averaged 20 points and 10 rebounds for me. Now, as the 1970-71 training camp opened, he wasn’t signed, and I knew he was getting fat. I gave him a weight and said he’d be fined $100 per pound if he failed to meet it. It took a long time for him to sign, but he finally did right before the season. He nearly starved himself, but he showed up close to his designated weight. Rule was brilliant early in the season, and we moved into first place.
Then he blew an Achilles tendon and was out for the rest of the season.
We had acquired Don Smith, a forward, right before the season opened. After Rule got hurt, I moved Smith to center. In the next twelve games, he averaged close to 19 points and 17 rebounds. He was outstanding. We were winning. Then his chest began to hurt. It turned out that Smith had pericarditis, an inflamation of the heart lining. He was out for several months, and when he did play again, he wasn’t the force that he once was under the basket.
You lose your top two big guys, you lose.
It’s that simple, even if the coach is also an All-Star point guard. In fact, I was the MVP of the 1971 All-Star game, scoring 21 points in twenty minutes. But without my big people, I was a coach who wasn’t going to win a lot of games.
Schulman tried to alleviate the situation by signing Spencer Haywood, who had been a star in the rival American Basketball Association. The NBA and the ABA never competed on the court, but they tried to sign the same players out of college, and they also tried to convince players to jump leagues. Rick Barry was the first to do it, going from the NBA’s San Francisco Warriors to the Oakland Oaks of the ABA. Part of the reason was that Oakland hired Bruce Hale as its coach; Hale just happened to be Barry’s former college coach and his current father-in-law.
Schulman was the first NBA owner to attempt to sign a player from the ABA. Haywood was six-foot-nine, and he averaged 30 points and 19 rebounds in his first year with Denver in the ABA.
But there was a problem. The ABA claimed Haywood was still under contract to its Denver franchise. Some of the NBA teams were unhappy with what they considered Schulman’s “raid” of Haywood from the ABA, mostly because they didn’t think of it first. The league owners even voted, 15-2, to take some sort of disciplinary action against Schulman. Naturally, lawsuits were filed from several different directions.
I kept hearing that Haywood would soon be playing for us. Then he wasn’t. Then he was. Oh, no, not just yet. Then the lawyer said this, the judge said that. This was all new, because pro basketball was changing. None of my old coaches ever had to face the prospect of players jumping to a team at midseason, or a star coming to a team in the middle of the year—assuming a judge said it was OK. This was disturbing to the players, who didn’t know when Haywood would come, or if he’d fit in with the team. They also knew he would be paid more money than any of them, and that caused another problem—jealousy. Who was this new guy who had never played a minute in the NBA and was going to be the highest-paid player on the team?
The blessing was that when Haywood was finally cleared to play, it was obvious that he had great talent. In thirty-three games for us, he averaged 20 points and 12 rebounds. He also was a decent guy, and the players accepted him.
There was one rough spot. Rod Thorn had become my assistant, and one night he chastised Haywood for forcing too many shots, not passing to open teammates. This was at halftime. So in the second half, Haywood pouted and refused to shoot, which really hurt our team. We lost the game.
I really wanted to blast Haywood in the dressing room in front of the other players. But this wasn’t my way, and I realized it would just make the situation worse. Times were changing. This was 1970, and it wasn’t going to motivate someone if I embarrassed him in front of other people.
I let things calm down, and then I approached Spencer away from the other players.
“Spencer, did you learn anything tonight?” I asked.
He looked at me strangely. “What do you mean?”
“Rod was just trying to give you some constructive criticism about sharing the ball,” I said. “But you copped an attitude about it. You were out to show us, right?”
He said nothing, but I knew he was listening.
“You wanted to make a point, but what did you really do?” I asked. “You hurt the whole team. Yes, you showed us that we need you to score. But by not shooting, you saw what happened. We lost, right?”
Haywood looked me right in the eye. He nodded. I could tell he understood.
After that day, I had no real problems with Spencer Haywood. But we just weren’t a very good team. Still, despite the injuries and controversies, we finished with a 38-44 record, a two-game improvement over my first season as player/coach.
I was upbeat entering the next season, my third as coach of the Sonics, and we ended up with a 47-35 record for the first winning season in the history of the franchise. We did it even though Haywood slipped on a wet floor and injured his knee, Don Smith missed the final 13 games with an ankle problem, and Dick Snyder hurt a finger on his shooting hand in the same game in which we lost Haywood and was through for the seas
on.
We played the final nine games without three starters, and we failed to make the playoffs. But I thought we played well, given the injuries and another set of legal battles. We had signed another player from the ABA, Jim McDaniels, and that led to more lawsuits and more problems as I was supposed to work him into the lineup even though he joined us at midseason and wasn’t in shape and didn’t understand our system. He also wasn’t nearly a player of Haywood’s caliber, and the money McDaniels received to jump leagues bothered some of our players, who were feeling underpaid and underappreciated as the front office continued to pursue these players from the ABA.
In that context, 47 victories and a home attendance that set a franchise record of eleven thousand per game was a good year—at the very least worthy of my being retained as coach. The team even had a “Lenny Wilkens Night,” on February 26, 1972, where I received a variety of gifts along with $500 bonds for each of my three children. The only downside was that we didn’t make the playoffs, but in the early 1970s only the top three teams in each division made the playoffs. So even though we were 12 games over .500, we missed the postseason.
But I was concerned about Bob Houbregs, the general manager who replaced Vertlieb. He had been a star at the University of Washington and was working for the Converse Shoe Company when the Sonics hired him as GM. At first, we got along well, but in that third season I sensed a distance between us. I wasn’t sure why, but he just didn’t seem as open to me.
Then, near the end of the season, I received in the mail a clipping of a story from the Tacoma newspaper. In it, Houbregs was quoted as saying that he thought my play had slipped, that I had been “a one-on-one player,” and I was slowing down. That made no sense, since I had never been a “one-on-one player.” He also wondered if trying to do both jobs was taking too much out of me.
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