Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  When you make a trade of that magnitude at midseason, it often leads to a month where you lose some games that you normally wouldn’t because the players are adjusting to someone new in the lineup. Basketball is not like baseball or some other sports. In baseball, if you trade for another guy, you just put him on the mound or in the lineup, and he does his job pitching or hitting. He’s part of a team concept, but only as far as his individual skills help the team win. The new player doesn’t have to “blend in,” other than to be accepted by his teammates in the dressing room. But in basketball, the guy has to fit in all categories. On the court, he has to be able to pass, to defend, to set picks, to help his teammates. He has to understand your offensive and defensive schemes, which may be much different from the schemes used with his old team. In baseball, you don’t have to alter your swing or change how you throw your slider after a trade; you just do what you do best. But in basketball, a player traded to a new team may be called upon to shoot more—or less. To defend harder, to rebound more, to dribble less. It all depends on his teammates and his new coach’s game plan. That’s why so many teams have a dip after making a trade during the middle of the NBA season. When you acquire a guy who is going to make a major impact on your team, you need about a week of solid practices to get everyone on the same page, to familiarize the new player with your playbook and the guys on his new team—but you never have that time, because you’re usually playing three to four times a week. You rarely have two practices in a row during the meat part of the season, so you try to work things out from game to game, and sometimes you lose.

  But those 1993-94 Hawks were such a receptive team, and Manning’s dedication to team play was so obvious, that we were able to keep winning right after the trade. Amazingly, we won five in a row right after the deal. I compare this to what happened when I was in Cleveland and we traded Kevin Johnson, Mark West, and Tyrone Corbin to Phoenix for Larry Nance and Mike Sanders: We lost 9 of 11 before retooling and finishing the season strong. Very few writers and fans understood how well our players adjusted to the Manning deal, and how rare it was that it happened so fast.

  When I came to the Hawks, I was told that Kevin Willis was selfish, that Stacey Augmon was moody, and that Mookie Blaylock didn’t have the maturity to be a good point guard. I talked with all of those players in training camp, and the message I got was very different: What they wanted most was a sense of direction for the team, a belief that the coaches knew what they were doing—and that the coaches were determined to help them become better players. They were hungry for leadership. They quickly bought into my philosophy, starting with the fact that we had to win at home. Yes, the crowds at the Omni were not always as big or as loud as we’d like, but there still were some rabid fans. Besides, this was our home court; we shouldn’t let teams just come in and beat us. The season before I arrived, the Hawks were 25-16 at the Omni; our home record jumped to 36-5 in my first season.

  When the playoffs came, we beat Miami in a tough 5-game series, then lost to Indiana in six games. Indiana had a great player in Reggie Miller, who averaged 23 points in the playoffs that season. Danny Manning averaged 20 for us, but no one else scored more than 13 per game in the playoffs. In the regular season, we won 10 more games than Indiana, but the Pacers had better talent than us. They were coming together and getting healthy at just the right time, and they beat us.

  The reason I’m discussing in depth what happened in that first season with Atlanta is that it set the tone for everything that was to come later. In a way, it led to the destructive Rider deal, and to my leaving the Hawks. Here’s why: In my first year, we were 57-25 and went to the second round of the playoffs. Suddenly, the bar was set, and was really set too high. The second round of the playoffs wouldn’t be good enough. It’s nice to win all the regular-season games, but what about the playoffs? I heard that over and over. Furthermore, there is a sports culture that is unique to Atlanta. This is not Portland or Seattle or even Cleveland, which proved it would embrace pro basketball when the product was worth watching. We had some excellent fans in Atlanta, but not enough of them. Those who have spent most of their lives in Atlanta say there are two seasons: college football and spring football. That’s stretching it, but not by much. The state is ruled by the University of Georgia football team. The Bulldogs are more popular than the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, and certainly more than the Hawks. In fact, if most Atlanta sports fans had to rate the teams in order of interest, it would be: 1: Georgia football; 2: the Falcons; 3: the Braves; 4: the Hawks. That’s despite the Braves being the best team in the National League in the 1990s. When we played the Lakers, many of the fans wore jerseys with the names of Kobe Bryant or Shaquille O’Neal on the back. When we played the Knicks, a lot of transplanted New Yorkers came to the games and cheered for them. Naturally, Michael Jordan and the Bulls brought in huge crowds, and most of them backed the Bulls. Our fan loyalty wasn’t very deep, except for the truly hardcore.

  In my first season, our attendance went from an average of 11,981 per game to 13,335. You would have thought that the 57 wins would have meant an even bigger jump in the attendance the following year, but we slipped back to an average of 12,312 as our record dropped to 42-40. Part of the reason was that we lost Manning to Phoenix via free agency, and that meant our top scorer was gone and we had no one to replace him. Early in the season, we knew we had to find some offense, so we traded Kevin Willis and a first-round draft pick to Miami for Grant Long and Steve Smith. This would turn out to be an excellent deal, but this time we couldn’t stave off the downturn that follows a big trade during the season, dropping 5 of 7 after the deal. Smith is a six-foot-eight guard from Michigan State. His boyhood hero was Magic Johnson, and then he went to Magic’s university. He came to Atlanta wanting to be like Magic, the big guard who handles the ball and can score, too. But there is only one Magic Johnson. When I looked at Steve Smith’s game, I felt his greatest asset matched our biggest need—he could really shoot the basketball. I spent most of Steve’s first season convincing him that he was a shooting guard, and a shooting guard was supposed to do just that—shoot! We had a good point guard in Mookie Blaylock. But we were desperate for scoring, and Steve needed to develop that shooter’s mentality. I didn’t care if he missed five shots in a row, I wanted him to take that sixth shot—assuming he was open. Never have I worked harder on developing a scorer’s mentality in a player than I did with Smith, and he became a 20-point scorer for us. But it took time. I loved Steve Smith’s attitude. He was a great guy off the court, very active in charity events. He was an excellent teammate. He was always on time. He supported me in all ways. He was the heart of our teams in the late 1990s, those Hawks teams that went 56-26, 50-32, and 31-19 in the strike season. He combined with Mookie Blaylock to give us one of the better backcourts in the NBA. But for me, the greatest satisfaction came from seeing Steve mature as a player and a person. He was one of my favorite people to coach.

  The problem was that we couldn’t get enough talent around Steve Smith to move beyond that “rut” of winning 50 games and losing in the second round of the playoffs. We won too many games to draft high. Here’s a list of our first-rounders during my first six years with the Hawks: Doug Edwards, Alan Henderson, Priest Lauderdale, Ed Gray, and Rashown McLeod. Only Henderson became a starter. Some people tried to say that I don’t develop young talent when they saw how the draft choices failed, but that was ridiculous; the team we had in Cleveland proved otherwise, as did our championship team in Seattle. Look at what happened to Edwards, Lauderdale, and Gray after they left the Hawks—nothing. McLeod may become a decent player: He was our first pick in 1998 and was hurt for part of that season with a hamstring injury. Henderson definitely bloomed with us.

  We were in that frustrating NBA cycle: We won too many games to draft high, and the only way to really make another step forward was with high lottery picks. And we were unable to attract a major free agent other than Mutombo. While
we obtained Chris Laettner in a trade, he blew out his Achilles in his second year with us, then moved on to Detroit as a free agent. Laettner was a good player, but not a true star.

  For those reasons, I’m really proud of how our teams played in 1997-98 and 1998-99, especially when you consider that we never had a true home court. Atlanta was building a new arena for us and was doing it on the site of the old Omni. That meant they had to tear the Omni down, so for two years we played some home games at the Georgia Dome and others at Alexander Memorial Coliseum, which is the home of the Georgia Tech basketball team. The Georgia Dome was too big, while Alexander Memorial Coliseum was more like a fieldhouse, a true college facility where many of the seats didn’t even have chairbacks, just benches. It’s hard to expect people to pay NBA prices for that kind of seat, and even worse, parking was a problem. For two years, we were like nomads, yet we had records of 50-32 and 31-19, and were 41-21 on our “home courts.”

  But we couldn’t get past the second round of the playoffs.

  The problem is that talent is the overriding factor in the playoffs. A coach can have a much more dramatic impact on a team over the course of a six-month season. A coach can keep the players’ spirits up, keep them interested and motivated; he can juggle lineups when slumps and injuries come, and he can develop players over the course of the season. He can upset teams with superior talent by convincing his players to really pay attention to details, while the more talented team may just be in cruise control.

  But that all changes in the playoffs. Every team, every player, gives a maximum effort every minute on the court. Teams are scouted so well that there are few surprises. Plays break down because the opponent anticipates where the passes and picks will come from, and the defense stiffens. That’s why the great individual talent, the player who can create his own shot, is so important in the playoffs. Jordan, Bird, Magic, the great Detroit guards…they all could do that. They had the ability to make plays, to beat double-teaming defenses, to score critical points. Latrell Sprewell has had more than his share of problems, but when he was traded to New York, he made the most of his second chance, and he was the reason the Knicks beat us in the second round of the 1999 playoffs. He could use his God-given ability to get off a shot even when the defenses were keyed to stopping him. He also had Allan Houston, a great outside shooter, to work with him and to carry some of the scoring load. We had Steve Smith, a Houston-like shooter, but we had no athlete to match Sprewell. Sprewell helped the Knicks go all the way to the 1999 Finals.

  The fact that we had a better regular season record than New York, or that we had the best defensive team in the NBA, none of that mattered come playoff time. In my mind, it was amazing we beat Detroit with Grant Hill in the first round, before we even faced New York. I was playing Steve Smith close to forty-six minutes a game in that Detroit series just to counteract Hill, and he had no legs left by the time we reached the Knicks. We also were without LaPhonso Ellis and Alan Henderson in the playoffs. The season before, Henderson had been selected as the NBA’s Most Improved Player, and a coach always takes a lot of pride when his player wins that award: It shows that the coaches also were doing something right. So playing without Ellis and Henderson, both injured, meant we had no realistic chance against the Knicks. I know we were swept by New York in the second round, but we had nothing left. Our team had played as well as it could in 1998-99.

  At the end of the season, I could tell that team president Stan Kasten was very frustrated. We all were, but he seemed to be even more sensitive to the media criticism we received for being “stuck” in the second round, for not having the kind of player who was charismatic, a player who captured the interest of the fans. Our new building would be ready, and the media were demanding that we didn’t put “the same old Hawks” into it. Not getting past the second round of the playoffs was like a bone in all of our throats. It was always there, even when we tried to pretend otherwise. As a coach, the hard part was that the regular season hardly seemed to matter. There was virtually no criticism of how we played the first 82 games. Over and over, we heard that the team overachieved. But then we supposedly “underachieved” in the playoffs. That just didn’t seem right.

  Which brings us to J. R. Rider.

  We were having our off-season meetings about what could take us to “the next level,” to be able to seriously compete for a championship. In general, I agreed with the assessment by the front office that we had to change our roster in order to make that next step. We wanted to get more athletic, play a more uptempo game that would interest the fans. We also agreed that athleticism would help us in the postseason, because we needed a player to be able to create a shot as the twenty-four-second clock was ticking down.

  That’s when J. R. Rider’s name was first mentioned.

  When Pete Babcock said Portland was offering him around, I remember swallowing hard at the very mention of his name. I didn’t know about all of his “problems,” I just knew he had a lot of “problems.” I am not afraid of a “problem player.” As I mentioned before, Willis and Augmon supposedly had “problems” before I arrived in Atlanta, and they were great with me. You just had to communicate with them, gain their respect.

  But I knew that Rider was a different story. I knew he had been suspended a couple of times in his career, and that he was late—a lot.

  “He’s a great offensive talent,” said Kasten. “The kind of player we don’t have.”

  This was very true. Rider was a career 18-point scorer. A bullish six-foot-five, 220-pound guard, he could score a lot from the low post, taking opposing guards near the basket, catching a pass, and simply jumping over them or bolting around them to score. He also was a decent outside shooter; his career mark of 36 percent from 3-point range was very acceptable. The coach in me saw that I could take a raw talent such as Rider and really develop his game.

  But did Rider want to be coached?

  And why was Portland so anxious to get rid of him?

  He was twenty-eight years old and had been in the league for six years, so he was no longer a kid. He would be coming to Atlanta already having five suspensions and three arrests on his record. Could he change?

  Other coaches had told me that Rider could destroy the morale of a team. He had been suspended for two games for marijuana possession, suspended for three games for spitting on a fan, suspended for a game for missing a practice, benched several times for being late, and fined continually. He also accused some people in Portland of “being racist” when he was booed while playing poorly at home. These were just some of his “problems” in his last two years with Portland. There were others, and I wasn’t even aware of all of these when we discussed the trade.

  Not that it would have mattered much. Our front office wanted to make the move. They wanted to shake things up, create interest in the team, and, they hoped, create a more exciting image for the Hawks as we prepared to move into the new building.

  “Rider is on the last year of his contract,” said Babcock. “With free agency coming, it’s in his best interest to behave and play the best he can—if for no other reason than it would be worth a lot of money to him.”

  “This could be a very big risk,” I said.

  When I heard that Steve Smith was to be in the deal, my heart just sank. Steve usually was the first one at practice, the last to leave. He could be very emotional, but all you had to do was take him out of the game, rest him for a moment, and he’d calm down and be ready to go. He had a tremendous burning desire to win.

  “We’re worried about Steve’s contract and his knees,” said Babcock. “He’s thirty years old. We worry that his body will begin to break down.”

  There was some reason for concern, because Steve did have knee troubles for much of his career. He missed a few games every year because of his knees. As for the concern about his contract, I was somewhat amused by that: Who gave him the contract in the first place? The Hawks did. Now they thought the contract was too expensive. The Hawks aren�
�t the only team to do this, you hear it a lot: A team gives a player a contract, then complains that the guy is being “overpaid.” Well, they’re the ones who decided to pay him that much.

  Anyway, there was an economic argument to be made for the trade: Smith made almost twice as much as Rider. Smith would be signed for several more years, his salary increasing. Rider was to be a free agent at the end of the year.

  “If the trade doesn’t work out, we can just say goodbye to Rider and then use his money on our salary cap to sign a free agent,” explained Babock.

  In theory, all of this was true.

  But if Rider blew up—and there was a good chance of that happening—we were trading Smith for a free agent to be signed later, whomever that would be. And what were the odds of that free agent being the same caliber player as Smith?

  “This is still a big risk,” I repeated. “A huge risk.”

  I was told Rider was the most talented player available. I was told we also could get Jimmy Jackson in the deal, and Jackson was a solid pro, a 15-point scorer who could play small forward and shooting guard.

  “Rider is not a stupid guy,” I was told.” He’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he’ll play well because it’s in his own self-interest. He could be great for us.”

  I remember one coach telling me, “If you can ever hit the right switch with this guy, you’ll have a helluva player. But believe me, he’s a handful.”

  The deal was hanging in the air during the summer, because NBA rules dictated that it couldn’t be announced until August 1. I had a lot of anxious moments thinking about it. I was uncomfortable breaking up our team, especially for Rider.