by Jalen Rose
As teammates, we could exchange ideas and not get caught up in the outside controversy. To me, while I respect what he did and what he believed, the whole scenario didn’t quite add up. At the time he was driving a yellow Lamborghini with no qualms. If he was enjoying the spoils of the NBA life in a free society, how does the national anthem offend him all of a sudden, while everything else about the life is okay? Eventually there was a compromise: Abdul-Rauf bowing his head and staying silent during the anthem.
The whole thing overshadowed what a great player he was—his handle, his ability to stop on a dime, pump fake, and then turn around and drain it was up there with anyone in the league. Along with Mutombo, he was probably the best player we had on the Nuggets those years, and one of the only veterans that I was able to connect with. Robert Pack, Bryant Stith, and Reggie Williams were all guards who I was competing for playing time with, and even though they had love for me, they couldn’t really take me under their wing. I can’t blame them for that; it was an early lesson in life in the NBA. I may have walked into the Nuggets’ locker room feeling that I’d finally reached the pinnacle. But taking the next step, becoming a veteran, the most respected position of all in the league, was no guarantee.
In fact, in the NBA, nothing is guaranteed except the payday. Piss off the wrong teammate, the wrong assistant coach, or the wrong executive, and you can find yourself at the end of the bench, or worse. Just like in any job, the “politricks” can sometimes seem like everything.
There are no limits on the tricks and moves that people can play. And no limits to how fast your reality can change. In Denver, I learned that quickly—when Bernie Bickerstaff blew up the Nuggets roster after my second season, 1995–96. The team wouldn’t make the playoffs again until Carmelo Anthony showed up in 2003. Meanwhile, as part of the breakup of the team, I was traded to Indiana.
And that’s when I really got tested.
—
“CHRIS WEBBER and Juwan Howard are up here,” the guy sitting across the desk from me said, raising his hand above his head. “And Jimmy King and Ray Jackson are down over here, out of the league.”
He paused, coldly staring at me.
“Now I’m going to be the one to determine which way you go.”
Ladies and gentlemen, one of basketball’s most legendary coaches, Larry Brown.
He wasn’t finished.
“If I want you to go up here,” Larry raised his hand again, “you’re going to have a long and successful career. If I decide you’re going to go the other way, you might be out of the league before long.”
I had come to Indiana feeling optimistic. I was back in the Midwest, closer to home, and coming to a team that had made the playoffs for seven straight seasons. Donnie Walsh, the highly respected personnel man for the Pacers, clearly saw something in me, making me the centerpiece of a package that he got in exchange for his starting point guard, Mark Jackson. What I didn’t realize at the time of that last detail was the cross I had to bear in Indy. Mark Jackson was Larry Brown’s favorite player, like a son to him, not to mention Reggie Miller’s closest friend. And he was replaced, by me. What? You thought in the pros, this kind of stuff wasn’t supposed to matter? Welcome to Politricks 101.
Donnie Walsh had made a basketball decision to trade for me. The other key guys in the equation didn’t like that, and they turned my first year in Indiana into a total mess before I could even figure out what was going on. Before the season started, we had an overseas trip with Seattle, and in one of the games I had something like twenty points and thirteen assists, completely lighting up the future Hall of Fame stud Gary Payton. It was preseason, but it was still basketball, and I figured I was on my way to big things. Wrong. In that first conversation we had, Larry Brown had let me know that he was in control with his comments about me, Chris, and Juwan, and he’d added that he was never a fan of the Fab Five, and didn’t like what players like me represented in the league. Well, to this day, I’m not sure what he was talking about, because Mark Jackson was known for doing this shimmy after a big bucket or big play, and Reggie Miller was one of the biggest trash-talkers in the league. None of that mattered, though, because the head coach—the head “politrickian”—was the man in charge.
The first few games of the year, I was a reserve and played twenty to twenty-five minutes. Then we had a game against Washington, which meant we were playing against Chris and Juwan. I was excited to see those guys. We were talking on the phone before the game, talking trash about facing off against each other; it felt like it was going to be fun. Then Larry had to answer questions about the Fab Five before the game. He hated that. He got his revenge by playing me for all of four minutes. That became a pattern all year long. He’d play me for a stretch of games, and then I’d get a DNP (“did not play”) or just garbage-time minutes. He was trying to destroy my confidence. He didn’t know, first, that he wouldn’t be able to do that, and, second, that he wouldn’t change me one bit.
Meanwhile, the players on the team didn’t do much to back me up, at least as far as I could tell. Reggie was the team’s best player, a future Hall of Famer and the team captain. He was a leader who might have had some influence with the coach. But he wasn’t my agent, and it wasn’t his job to tell the coach who to play. Eventually, Reggie became a big-brother figure to me, but that year I was frustrated with the whole situation. The players knew inferior players were getting more time than me on the court, and nobody said a word.
My solution was simple: treat practice like games and work my ass off. Summoning anger for use on the basketball court had always been one of my biggest weapons. I’d be as loud and as brash and as dominating in practice as I could be. All the better if I was matched up against Reggie. It wasn’t going to get any worse, and as long as my confidence stayed intact, I knew I’d be all right in the end. Even if Larry benched me every time we played in Detroit, in front of my friends and family, and even if he continued to try to mess with my head in every way he could. And there was something I knew was just as important. I never reacted in public, never lashed out or brought more controversy upon myself. That would have helped Larry Brown achieve what he wanted.
I could also take solace in the fact that the team, which had made it to the conference finals just two years earlier, was imploding on the court. Toward the end of the year, in the midst of one of my DNP stretches, I got called into Donnie Walsh’s office. Maybe my stay in Indy was going to be short, I thought. Instead, Donnie said something I wasn’t expecting: While Larry wasn’t going to be around after the season, I was. He told me to keep practicing hard, because I was still in his plans.
My goal when I walked out of Donnie Walsh’s office, late in that 1996–97 season, was to not become what Larry Brown wanted to make me. I didn’t want to be a journeyman, a guy who flames out of the league in a few years. In my house in Indiana, I still had an unopened letter in a drawer from a guy who had been a two-time All-Star in the league. I hadn’t gotten to that level yet.
I wouldn’t have predicted that the guy to take me would be one of the greatest legends the game of basketball has ever known.
And a white one at that.
9. The Three Things That Mean More than Anything in the NBA
You can never get away from politricks in the NBA. If a team ever did, I can guess where they’d be: definitely still playing in May and June, and probably standing on a podium getting the Larry O’Brien Trophy at the end of the season.
It’s not easy to get to that place. I guarantee you that every great team that’s won a championship over the last several decades—or, in a lot of cases, come damn close—had some common ingredients. You always want to keep these things in mind, no matter what opinion about a player, a team, a game, or a series some guy gabbing on TV is promoting (including me).
Fate.
Coaching.
Talent.
These concepts are often misunderstood. Let’s try to get a handle on them.
—
SPEAKING OF fate, let me go back to my college days for a second. I loved playing against the biggest names, like Coach K and Bob Knight, because I always felt like I was part of the long tradition of basketball when they were involved—living legends who’d been trained by the legends who came before them. When we played Duke or Indiana, I felt like I was supposed to be playing them, and beating them. I’d go up to them, shake their hand, pay tribute, and then go about my business of trying to win. I did the same thing when I spotted someone in the stands, an alumnus or a parent of a player or a legend who was in town and wanted to catch the local Big Ten matchup.
Sophomore year, we lost to Duke early, but then rolled off nine wins in a row heading into our Big Ten opener at Purdue. Purdue came in undefeated. It was Glenn Robinson’s first year on the team, and he was already playing like a stud. The Big Dog (a future Michigan dad—Hail!) had thirty points that night, but we won the game. Afterwards, while everyone was celebrating and heading off the court, I went over to the corner of the stands, where I’d spotted an even bigger star sitting and watching the game—none other than the immortal Larry Bird.
I’d actually almost met Larry Bird a few years earlier when, as a reward for winning one of our city titles, Coach Watson had taken our team to a Pistons–Celtics game and got us into the locker rooms after the game. Mike Ham and I saw that trip as an opportunity to prove that we really were—as we told everyone in school—six feet nine inches tall. Well, everyone knew Larry Legend was six nine, so we slyly wandered up next to his locker, and measured ourselves. Forget it—we weren’t even close. Eventually, I got myself listed at six eight, and we will leave it at that.
But back to the Purdue game. It was Bird’s first year of retirement, and he was living in his hometown of French Lick, scouting for the Celtics. Purdue was in his neighborhood. I went over to him, shook his hand, told him how much I appreciated his coming to the game. I had been a Magic Johnson fan growing up, and part of following the Magic–Bird rivalry was understanding how amazing Bird was. Bird was the kind of enemy I admired and respected, like Christian Laettner. Larry Bird may have broken my heart many times (including with that steal against the Pistons in the ’87 conference finals), but not before establishing himself in my mind as the greatest small forward ever to play the game.
When I shook his hand that night in 1993, I obviously had no idea that four years later, the Legend would make his full-time return to the game as the coach of the Pacers. And that, apparently, he’d tell Donnie Walsh the same thing that he’d told the Celtics’ front office after that game at Purdue.
He—Larry Bird—wanted me on his team.
—
THE MOST overlooked factor that goes into life in the NBA is fate. I say fate rather than luck, because it’s not right to say that players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird are lucky, but fate still played a role in their careers. I define fate as the part of the game that the competitor has no control over: the draft lottery, injuries, a freak play. They all can matter as much as skill.
For example, before free agency, an athlete’s career could be defined by who drafted him. If you got drafted by a team from a small city, you were going to be a small-market player for as long as that team wanted you. In the age of free agency, players who last in the league have more freedom to choose their teams, but they still don’t have control over everything. Injuries can turn franchise players into mere mortals—it’s amazing how much can go up in the smoke of a blown-out knee. It’s a reminder that a huge piece of success in sports is simply fate.
That reality applies to championship teams as much as anything else. Teams have to stay healthy. They have to have a thousand little things go their way over the course of the season and the postseason. The big shots have to go in, the big plays have to go their way. Though if you look back you’ll find that, more often than not, fate smiled down on the teams who deserved it. Like Ray Allen’s famous prayer at the end of Game 6 of the 2013 Finals. Was it a lucky shot? Or was it one of the best shooters in NBA history having the ball in his hands and getting the perfect opportunity, after one of the best players in the league, Chris Bosh, found a way to get it to him? Yes, it was fate that the ball went in to extend that game, and the series. But Allen, Bosh, and the Heat had done everything they could to get it to that point, and to put themselves in position for fate to smile upon them.
You can argue about the importance of fate the next time you run out of topics with a friend at a sports bar. (Talk loudly—tell people you got the argument from my book!) I’ll say this: The first three seasons of my career, largely for reasons that were out of my control, were nowhere near as successful as I expected them to be. Then came the stroke of good fate: Larry Bird gets hired to coach the Pacers, giving me a new lease on my NBA life.
By that point, I’d learned enough about pro basketball to know that when fate smiles down upon you, you do everything you can to capitalize.
—
THE SUMMER league is for rookies and undrafted free agents. Not many guys who’ve been in the league for a few years play in the games. But in the summer of 1997, I saw the summer league as a huge opportunity to showcase my game for Larry Legend and his new staff, and even more important, let them know that I was ready to do anything I had to do to take my career to the next level.
Larry had reached out to me immediately when he’d taken the job, letting me know that he had a sense of what had happened the year before with the previous coach, that he had always liked my game since watching me in college and wanted to work with me to make me a great pro. It was a quick phone call, no longer than a minute, but it sent a message to me. From then on, my outlook on playing with the Pacers did a complete 180. Sometimes it’s the simple things—in this instance, just one phone call.
At the summer league, I got acquainted with Larry’s top assistant and former teammate, a guy by the name of Rick Carlisle. Now, if you think that the Hick from French Lick and the Rose from west Detroit were a strange combination, you’d probably think Carlisle—who looks like a cross between a farm boy and a drill sergeant—and I were an even less likely pair. But there’s no doubt that I owe more to both of them than anyone else for the success I had in the NBA. From the summer league to the time training camp started in that ’97–’98 season and beyond, Carlisle had me doing drills, watching game film, and working overtime in practice to develop my game further. He helped me strengthen my post game in particular, where I could exploit my size advantage over a lot of guards, making me a better player overall.
Larry Bird, meanwhile, was the overseer, the CEO of the team. In some crazy way, we were a natural pair. First off, he was one of the great trash-talkers in NBA history. Talk to anyone who went up against him in his era, and they’ll tell you how much he dominated the mental part of the game as fiercely as he took care of business with his jumper and unparalleled all-around arsenal. I bonded with him as much as I had with any other coach in my life. I appreciated that he told me he was a big fan of my dad as a player, and he’s one of the smartest guys I’ve met in basketball. In meetings in his office or conversations on the road, we talked about a million things, on a basketball level and a personal level.
The result was that Bird and Carlisle had not just my respect, but my trust. I would do anything for them, as I had for Perry Watson and Steve Fisher. They didn’t immediately turn me into the team’s featured star or anything like that. Larry said he was going to coach for three seasons, and no more. The first two seasons, I started one game, total. Every other game, I was the team’s sixth man, averaging twenty-five minutes a game or less, averaging ten shots a game or less.
What they did do was turn around the team. With almost the same roster—plus the reacquisition, ironically, of Mark Jackson—they guided the team that missed the playoffs in 1997 to the seventh game in the conference finals in 1998 against Michael Jordan and the Bulls. The next year, in the strike-shortened season, we lost in the sa
me round to the Knicks. Then, finally, everything came together in the third year.
It was a huge lesson for me: how much coaching can make a difference in a career. The impact of a figure like Larry Bird was totally undeniable.
He coached us two wins short of an NBA title.
—
THIS NEVER fails to trick even the biggest basketball fans. Over the last thirty-four NBA seasons, three men have combined to win more than two-thirds of the titles, twenty-three in all. Those three men also have collectively made the Finals another seven times. All told, twenty-eight out of thirty-three seasons, one of them was either raising the trophy, or right there, missing by just a game or two. Who are they? No, not Magic, not Michael, not Larry, not Kobe, not Tim Duncan, not LeBron. They’ve all won multiple titles, but even the best players can’t dominate three-plus decades that dramatically.
The three guys aren’t players. They’re the three best coaches—check that, the three best leaders—of the modern age of basketball: Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, and Pat Riley.
Now let’s roll back the timeline even further. This one’s easier. One guy was at the helm of the team that won almost half of the NBA titles from the mid-’50s to the early ’80s: the legendary Red Auerbach, the coach, general manager, and president of the Celtics.
Everywhere else people look at successful companies or organizations and give credit, rightfully, to the leadership, to the CEO, the president, the chairman or chairwoman, whatever. In basketball, it should be the same. Over NBA history, great organizations like the Celtics, the Lakers, and the Spurs have remained a cut above everyone else because of one reason: their leadership.
