Like Daly, Babcock Just Another Great Coach Who Goes Unfeted

“Babcock displayed his coaching genius in last year’s playoffs when he sat goalie Dominik Hasek down in a 2-2 first round series. It was a bold move, predicated on the belief/hunch that Chris Osgood gave the Red Wings a better chance to win, at that moment.”

Mike Babcock is the best coach in the NHL, yet he’ll likely never win Coach of the Year honors.

Such is how coaches and managers are viewed.

You may as well rename the COY award the “Most Improved Team and So Here’s an Award for their Coach” Award.

There’s a fallacy that great teams can’t seem to be coached by great coaches. Or, at the very least, great teams would be great no matter who coaches them.

Baloney.

Sparky Anderson, his critics said, only needed to possess a pen when he managed the Reds. That’s all that was required to write in the names of Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and the rest every day.

Sparky’s Big Red Machine — that could have been managed by anyone and the results would have been the same.

Again, baloney.

If that was the case, if only the most talented teams won championships year after year, then we would be spared the drama of actually having the games be played.

We’d simply feed every team’s roster into a computer and have it declare the champion for that year.

I won’t deny or disparage the coach who coaxes maximum results from a talent-challenged personnel group. There’s no doubt that it takes a special effort to turn ugly ducklings into beautiful swans, in one year’s time.

Jacques Demers arrived from St. Louis in 1986, about to take over a Red Wings team that won all of 17 games and totaled 40 points the season before. Demers surprised the Blues with his defection, but he decided that the challenge and opportunity to work for Mike Ilitch was too good to pass up.

The Red Wings improved from 40 points to 78 points in Demers’s first year and made it to the Final Four. He won the Jack Adams Award for best coach. Then, the next season, Demers again led the Red Wings to the Final Four, despite losing Steve Yzerman for the last month of the season and the first two rounds of the playoffs to a knee injury. Once again, the NHL honored Demers with the Jack Adams.

Were there better coaches, with more talent, who should have edged Demers out in one of those two years? Probably yes, especially the second time.

As long as Babcock keeps sipping champagne from Cups, I suppose he won’t sweat not winning any Jack Adams Awards

Chuck Daly never sniffed a COY award with the Pistons, even though I’d have no one else on my sidelines if I was an NBA owner in the mid-1980s to early-1990s. Pat Riley was another who was annually snubbed, coaching the Lakers.

How come the Atlanta Braves could win 15 straight divisional titles yet only one World Series?

How could the talented Tigers finish 74-88 in 2008?

Or how about any team with star players who just can’t mesh and jell?

There was no man who was more qualified to coach the Pistons championship teams than Daly.

“Daddy Rich” correctly understood one thing. A tenet that should be made into a placard and mounted on the wall in every NBA coach’s office in the country.

“You’re not just coaching players,” Daly once intoned. “You’re managing twelve corporations.”

Not only did Daly understand that, he put it into practice. The Bad Boys Pistons, had they been under the charge of a lesser coach, could have imploded.

Perhaps the greatest testament to Daly’s brilliance occurred when GM Jack McCloskey put his coach on the spot by trading Adrian Dantley for the volatile Mark Aguirre.

Trader Jack did it to Chuck on Valentines Day, 1989, the playoffs about two months away. Not much time to integrate Aguirre, who had a bad rep, into the scheme of things.

No worries. Daly’s players, on their own, took Aguirre out to dinner almost as soon as he reported for duty. But this was no congratulatory, feel-good meal.

Led by Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer, the Pistons contingent let Aguirre know, in no uncertain terms, what was expected of him in Detroit. They made sure Aguirre was aware that this wasn’t Dallas, from where he came. Aguirre wasn’t going to be “the guy” any longer.

Fit in, or else.

Laimbeer was the most pointed.

“The only reason I’m giving you a chance is because you’re Isiah’s friend,” Laimbeer was reported to have said to Aguirre at the dinner. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have anything to do with you. I’ve heard a lot of bad things.”

The Pistons players did this on behalf of their coach because they believed in Daly and what he had put together.

Think that happens every day?

Yesterday, Mike Babcock became the first coach in NHL history to win 50 games in the first four years with a new team. He joins Scotty Bowman, no less, as the only other coach to win 50 games four times in a row, period.

Babcock displayed his coaching genius in last year’s playoffs when he sat goalie Dominik Hasek down in a 2-2 first round series. It was a bold move, predicated on the belief/hunch that Chris Osgood gave the Red Wings a better chance to win, at that moment.

Babcock may have won the Stanley Cup for the Red Wings with that decision — one that very few coaches in the league would have had the cojones to make.

But Babcock won’t win the Jack Adams Award this year. Just like he didn’t win it last year (he was a finalist but finished third). And like he won’t win it next year.

Ironic, that the award is named for a Red Wings coach, isn’t it?

Leyland, Babcock, Saunders On Hot Seat? Chances Are, Yes — Eventually

Mike Babcock is going to get fired, odds are. So will Flip Saunders. I’d even say that Jim Leyland’s seat will get hot one of these days.

Put Bill Belichick on that list, too. And Mike Holmgren. Don’t be surprised if Terry Francona gets canned by the Red Sox. Or if the Celtics fire Doc Rivers.

Looney? Not at all. A wise old man, also known as former NFL coach Bum Phillips, once astutely observed, “There’s two kinds of coaches: them’s that have been fired, and them’s that are gonna get fired. And I’ve been both.”

Or as a long ago Pistons coach, Earl Lloyd, said upon getting the ziggy, “It’s funny. When you sign on as a head coach in this business, you’re basically signing your termination papers.”

So it’s not all that wacky to suggest, as I have, that each of the above named gentlemen will lose their jobs, soooner or later. A look at the roster of men who’ve been fired in sports history will also look like a Who’s Who of coaching.

Of course, there are exceptions.

One of them is Tony Dungy, and he’s the rarest of rares. Not only will he not be fired by the Indianapolis Colts, he will get the opportunity to choose his successor.

Dungy announced the other day that he will, indeed, return to lead the Colts in 2008, and when he decides to step down, there won’t be any need for applicant interviews, because assistant Jim Caldwell will take over.

And you want even more rarity? Both men are African-American.

This is not to say that we’ve now reached the apex of race relations in professional sports, and that we can place a “check” mark next to that on the to-do list. Far from it. Especially in the NFL, which hasn’t exactly been a haven for blacks in coaching or management positions over the years. But it’s still remarkable, to me, what’s happening in Indy. And fitting that the announcements came on MLK Day.

But the reality is also that Caldwell himself will probably be fired, some day in the distant future. It goes with the territory. The Florida Marlins fired Joe Girardi as he was being voted Manager of the Year in the NL. And the Cincinnati Reds fired Sparky Anderson, in 1978. Sparky said in his book that he remembers the room number of the hotel in which his ziggy was rendered.

Scotty Bowman was fired, by the Buffalo Sabres. Joe Torre was, in essence, fired by the Yankees last fall. They just went about it in a very broken arrow sort of way.

So there really are two kinds of coaches, as Bum Phillips said. Those that have been fired, and those that will be.

Tony Dungy is amazingly neither, but Jim Caldwell is probably the latter. Odds are.

Donovan Saved Magic, Himself From Certain Failure

If only Jerry Tarkanian had second thoughts. Or John Calipari. Or Rick Pitino — twice. Lord knows where the Pistons would have been had Dick Vitale not had his non-glass eye set on their coaching job — shameless campaign thru the newspapers and all.

The Orlando Magic — ownership, players, and fans alike — may not feel like it right now, but I figure they’re some of the luckiest people on earth right now, in the wake of Billy Donovan announcing he’d like to avoid the long lines at Disney World and stay at the University of Florida.

Ironically, I doubt it was a sudden realization or appreciation for the pro game’s history of failed college coaches that dissuaded Donovan from fulfilling his signed contract with the Magic, just a couple days after the ink dried. He cited being “conflicted” between his desire to enter the NBA as a coach and his love for UF.

Actually, it’s sort of like when someone gives up their ticket on a plane to someone else, only to see it crash. Fortuitous, but hardly planed.

Donovan, barring his emotional duress, would have boarded that plane — the rickety one that flies college-to-pro coaches to their career deaths — while so many of us would have been left on the ground, screaming, “For the love of God, don’t do it!”

Psych!

Why, oh why do college coaches think they can make it in the pros — in every sport? And why do they continue to think so, despite overwhelming evidence that the chances of success are abysmal at best and nil at worst?

From little-known dudes to overrated blowhards to legitimate big-name guys, it just doesn’t happen when the switch is made from books to bucks.

Have there been exceptions? A few. But there’s been snow in May, a White Sox world championship, and moments of dead air on a Bill Walton-occupied broadcast, too — but I wouldn’t be running to the betting window to wager on any of them happening again anytime soon.

The other funny thing is listening to the observers making a laundry list of why Donovan would stay. Vitale, who should know, was pontificating into a telephone the other night on ESPN.

“He has a university who loves him. An athletic director who loves him. He has a great situation. He has happiness. Like (former coach) Jim Valvano used to say, ‘DON’T MESS WITH HAPPINESS.’”

Well, yeah — but don’t most of them who flee the campuses have all of what Donovan has at Florida? I’ll answer my own question: Yes, they do. Yet they leave anyway.

Look, I understand about wanting new challenges and succeeding where others have failed and all that. So it’s not the coaches I find culpable — for if they’re offered, who am I to tell them they shouldn’t go?

So I guess my cross eyes should be aimed toward the owners and management of those pro teams who are, right on schedule every so often, dipping into the college ranks for their next hotshot coach. The Red Wings were one of the early cautionary tales, hiring Ned Harkness right from Cornell University in 1970. At least they learned their lesson and never tried it again.

“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”

Ahh, but the owners and GMs aren’t forgetting the past — they’re ignoring it. They’re defying it. They’re spitting into the teeth of its wind. And time and again, they’re ending up with saliva on their puss.

“A pro fool and his college coach are soon parted.”

I made that one up myself.

Of course, the coach still ends up with the money in the end. So he’s not the fool, after all.