Souhan on the Wolves: Dumber than usual
Jim Souhan isn’t a basketball guy. I’m sure even he’d probably admit that. His insights on the Timberwolves organization haven’t been, well, very insightful over the years. Just really a reflection of the typical anti-McHale, anti-Taylor angst that what is left of the fan base has been feeling.
That doesn’t exempt Souhan from the tenets of basic logic, though. In today’s column, Souhan goes after the notion of the Wolves hiring Kurt Rambis based on the fact that Rambis (other than a 38-game interim stint in 1999) hasn’t been a head coach anywhere, and has apparently been comfortable with being an assistant to Phil Jackson for most of his coaching career.
Souhan notes:
That’s an impressive résumé, unless you believe that true head coaches don’t sit around in assistant’s chairs for the bulk of their careers, waiting for the right break and the right salary, as Rambis did.
If you are dying to be a head coach, do you really take the easy way out and live the big-time life of a Lakers assistant, or do you do what so many of the best NBA coaches have done, and invest yourself in the craft of running a team by yourself?
Gregg Popovich coached Pomona-Pitzer before becoming an NBA assistant. Flip Saunders, George Karl, Jackson, Jim Boeheim and Bill Musselman became head coaches in the CBA. Larry Brown became a head coach at Davidson, then jumped to the ABA.
If you are made of the stuff of outstanding head coaches, you don’t sit in the cushy chair next to Jackson. You find an uncomfortable head coach’s seat in the CBA, or at a high school, or a small college. You learn the craft of running a team, which is far different than the craft of running one or two aspects of a team.
He then goes on to list some folks who would have been acceptable to him:
There were a lot of intriguing, highly-thought-of coaching candidates available this summer, including Sam Mitchell, Jeff Van Gundy and Avery Johnson.
Let’s look at the coaching careers of each of these individuals, shall we? Mitchell served as an assistant coach with Milwaukee for two seasons before being hired as the head coach by Toronto in 2004. Van Gundy spent eleven years as an assistant coach for Providence, Rutgers, and the Knicks before being promoted to the head job with the Knicks in 1996. Johnson spent less than a year as an assistant coach before being promoted to head coach with the Mavericks in 2005.
None of these three esteemed coaches had ever been a head coach at any level before getting their shot at the NBA level. Per Souhan’s logic, the Raptors, Knicks, and Mavericks were foolish to hire these coaches.
And, by the way, isn’t Rambis’s apparent decision to leave the cushy seat next to Phil Jackson to take the job with one of the worst organizations in the NBA the exact sort of thing that Souhan was urging him to do?
