Facing My Mark Jackson Fears

I’m getting way ahead of myself today. Considering that there is no guarantee there will be an NBA season this year, writing about the new Golden State Warriors head coach seems like a futile exercise. The man has barely had a chance to meet his players let alone get the chance to start implementing plays or strategy for the team. However, since the NBA regular season was supposed to start this week, I’m getting a little antsy, and his lunch with the local Bay Area media has already received a lot of attention.

A little background before I dive into his quotes. I have been anti-Mark Jackson from day one. I was upset he was even considered a candidate to become the new Warriors head coach. When he was hired, I was more than a little upset. This had nothing to do with the fact that I thought he was annoying TV personality. It was the idea that he had always wanted to become a head coach but instead of actually, you know, going into coaching he chose the cushy life of an NBA TV color man. No disrespect intended for anyone who works in TV, but I’d assume if you work in TV it’s a career that you actually intended on doing. Pretty safe to say most successful NBA coaches who were former players actually decided to hone their coaching skills by taking some sort of assistant job rather than taking a gig as a TV personality.

The great Matt Steinmetz of CSN Bay Area provided all these quotes and blurbs from Coach Jackson. One of the major points Jackson was trying to emphasize was that he wasn’t a fan of “false hustle.” Basically he was saying that working long hours just to do it, or having extra long practices just to say you practiced isn’t worth it and he’d rather focus on the efficiency and quality of the work that he, the coaches and the team puts in.

Now this notion in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. After all, like my man Allen Iverson once said, we’re talking about practice, man! And I agree that it is better to work more efficiently than to do work just to do work. The problem I have with this idea is that it sort of assumes that the Warriors as a team are used to working hard and just need to tweak a few things to become a better team. Which if you’ve watched any of their games in the last few years you know is 100% untrue. I am a firm believer in what Jackson, Joe Lacob, Jerry West, et al. are trying to do with this team, which is emphasize more of a defensive game. But this isn’t a change that can just be made overnight with a few quick, efficient practices. It’s going to take hours and hours of hard work in training camps and practices to get the players to buy into playing strong defense. Looking at the roster we have now, I can see 2 players who have actually been coached defense: Dorrell Wright (from his Miami days with Pat Riley and Erik Spoelstra) and Ekpe Udoh (from his college days at Baylor.) The rest of the team has spent the majority of their careers playing under Don Nelson (or Keith Smart) and Mike D’antoni, not exactly the 2 names that come to mind when you think of defense.

Playing individual, man on man defense is just a matter of effort, which any of the current players can give at any point. But playing team defense, understanding when to help, double, and rotate properly takes a lot of work. Now Mark Jackson has been in and around the NBA for a long time so maybe he sees something in this group of players that makes him believe this team can transition to a hardnosed defensive team quickly. I just don’t see it happening that quickly.

The other aspect of this quote that bothers me has to do with what I mentioned earlier, him going straight from his playing career to his broadcasting career. It seems like he opted to take the easy route with his career by taking a job that allowed him ultimate flexibility rather than taking a less glamorous job as an assistant coach. Again, I can’t fault the man for that. A broadcasting job allowed him a lot of time to be around his family whereas an assistant coaching job would require long hours and lots of road trips away, which I can completely understand. However to think that being a head coach in the NBA will be an easy job is ridiculous. Working 16 hour days like some NBA coaches does work for some and doesn’t for others. But for a man with ZERO coaching experience at any level to outright say he’s not going to be that guy is quite disheartening. Its almost like he’s saying he wants all the glory and press that comes with being an NBA coach but he doesn’t want to put in the actual work. The Warriors just had a guy at the head coaching position with that attitude named Don Nelson. And he only got away with it because he had DECADES of coaching experience.

The other quote that he had that was bothersome to me was saying that he wasn’t going to assign any of his assistant coaches specific roles (paraphrased). Basically he doesn’t have one assistant being in charge of the guards or the big men, or have a specific defensive coordinator or offensive Xs and Os guy. This bothers me for several reasons. The first is that Mark Jackson was a very good point guard during his NBA career. The Warriors starting point guard is Stephen Curry, who is not a natural point guard and is learning on the fly as his career goes on. I would hope that Jackson who IS a natural point guard could be able to teach Curry a lot about how to play the position successfully. Now maybe Curry can become Jackson’s pet project, but judging from what he said it doesn’t sound like he’s too interested in that.

Not having assistants in specific roles also goes back to my point about practicing. I would think that the players would need a guy to be the defensive guru on the staff to really coach up playing a team defensive game. In Jack McCallum’s book :07 Seconds or Less about the 2005-6 Phoenix Suns, Mike D’antoni had all of his assistant coaches have specific roles and the players seemed to love this. The Suns teams of the mid-2000s clearly weren’t known for their defensive but they had a defensive “coordinator” that would get on them if they missed an assignment on defense, and a specific backcourt coach whose job it was to coach the guards, and so on. This works both ways as the players would know who to come to if they had any issues or ideas for the team or for their specific role on the team. Again, not saying what Jackson is doing is right or wrong here, but D’antoi’s Suns teams were quite successful and it seems like it’s something most other teams in the NBA do.

Like I said from the onset, I’m getting WAY ahead of myself. These are just a few random quotes Jackson said to a bunch of media members when there technically right now isn’t even a season. Perhaps he’s 100% flexible on all these ideas and will be flexible during the season. However I’m a very pessimistic sports fan, especially when it comes to the Warriors, and quotes like this do not inspire much confidence. The good news I guess is that we should be able to tell very quickly if his coaching style translates on to the basketball court. If the team looks like a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off once games start, then we should probably just let top assistant Mike Malone take over as head coach. He has a few  years of coaching experience, or so I’m told.