Saunders Never Found True Love In Detroit

Flip Saunders never truly got entrenched in Detroit. He was the Pistons coach for three seasons, but two things about that: 1) GM Joe Dumars has a fetish for canning coaches after a couple years or so, and 2) you never got the feeling that Saunders was securing his place, about to defy the odds created by item #1 in this paragraph. He won a ton of games — 176 of them in three years — but couldn’t push the Pistons past the NBA’s Final Four.

“When you get to where we were,” Dumars said yesterday at the press conference announcing Saunders’ ziggy, “you never feel like you’re not good enough to get to the Finals. Nobody gets to the conference finals and wonders if they’re good enough to move on.”

Dumars used those words to deflect any heat he might face from firing a coach with a winning percentage of over .700 in Detroit. What Joe D was saying was that the Pistons didn’t luck themselves into these last three Final Fours. Yet they couldn’t take that next step, falling in six games three straight times — kind of like Groundhog Day, only with a different groundhog each time. First, it was the Miami Heat, on their way to an NBA title behind the nearly flawless Dwyane Wade. Then it was the Cleveland Cavaliers, behind the nearly flawless LeBron James. Then it was the Boston Celtics, a team that went from 24 wins to 66, and a team that Dumars chided.

“They got some very good players, and didn’t have to give up much to get them,” Dumars said of the Celtics’ acquisitions of Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett over the summer. “It’s not like they had to give up depth. I would have liked to have done that, too,” he added with a wry grin.

So now Dumars may have just set a record for firing the most coaches with 50+ win seasons than any GM in history. He let Rick Carlisle go in 2003 after two 50-32 campaigns, it being hinted that Rick simply wasn’t all that nice a guy to team employees, and wasn’t all that nice to his bosses, either. Dumars replaced Carlisle quickly with the mercurial Larry Brown, who was shown the door after a title and two Finals appearances and two more 50+ win seasons, largely because owner Bill Davidson found Brown despicable toward the end, with the coach’s wandering eye and career restlessness always taking center stage. Again Dumars acted quickly, and brought in Saunders, a coach with some success in Minnesota but none to speak of in the playoffs.

Ahh, the playoffs. That’s where you can start tracing the fan base’s distrust of Saunders — and maybe even the players’, too. I, for one, wasn’t all that giddy about the Saunders hiring three summers ago, mainly because I looked at the standard being set in Detroit — the team was coming off another Finals appearance — and then I looked at the results Flip was getting in Minnesota (there were a lot of early exits with good teams) and I felt a little squeamish. But I also subscribed to the In Joe We Trust mentality, and figured that Saunders must have something for Dumars to commit four years of Davidson’s dough into him.

Then the Pistons went out and started 35-5 in Flip’s first season, and they looked damn near invincible. The second half was a bit more disjointed, and the team had to scramble to beat the Cavs in seven games in the Elite Eight before being melted by Wade’s Heat.

From there, it was dicey, as far as overall belief and trust in Flip Saunders in Detroit. While I hate to give the sports talk radio jabbermouths too much credit, they and their often misguided callers seemed to unite under one common belief: the Pistons win in the regular season despite of Saunders, but will never get back to the Finals — mainly because of Saunders.

Saunders was, by far, the least embraced coach in Detroit — ranking below even the Lions’ Rod Marinelli, who has largely been judged as more of an innocent bystander than anyone with losing blood on his hands. There wasn’t any sort of true affection for him. We never knew much about him, for starters. We knew he had a kid who played at the University of Minnesota, his alma mater, and that he coached the T-Wolves all those years. And that he narrowly missed being a victim of that bridge collapse — also in Minnesota. Maybe he was just too much Minnesota for our liking. Regardless, there wasn’t any of the lovable gruffness and supposed genius that Tigers fans found so alluring about Jim Leyland. There wasn’t the quiet calm and confidence exuded by Red Wings coach Mike Babcock that hockey fans find reassuring. There wasn’t even the “Aw, shucks/pound the rock” affability projected by Marinelli. With Saunders, he was like the outsider who was just keeping a seat warm until Dumars decided to satisfy his fetish again. No real connection. No real affection. No real empathy about what would ultimately happen to him.

Fair? Probably not.

I think that Flip Saunders became the Pistons coach at a very difficult time in team history. And all his regular season success couldn’t wash away the film that the disappointing playoff endings always left on the organization. He had to win another championship, Saunders did — or at least make it to a Finals or two — to continue to coach here. He was the victim of the expectations built first by Carlisle and then reached by Brown. And in the end, for whatever reason, Saunders simply didn’t have enough moxie to achieve those lofty goals.

There was his relationship with Rasheed Wallace, for one. Sheed is a reminder that coach killers are still a long ways away from becoming extinct in the NBA. They’re alive and well, and Sheed contributed, more than any other player, to the decision Dumars reached regarding Saunders’s status. Ironically, Wallace himself may also be gone — but not before having plunged a knife into Flip’s back. You can’t kill a coach killer, but you can get rid of him. Maybe Wallace will be some other team’s headache.

Dumars spoke — and with some definite agitation — of the final ten minutes of the Pistons’ season, those final, ghoulish minutes against Boston in the fourth quarter of Game 6. The ten minutes that put Saunders in the coffin and lowered him six feet under the daisies. The ten minutes that saw the Pistons turn a 10-point lead and a raucous crowd and an imminent Game 7 into yet another ugly, gut-churning, cold ending to a season. The ten minutes that gave Wallace one more chance to show why he’s one of the least clutch starters in the league, and why the Pistons didn’t have the heart or the guts to beat back the Celtics, even on their home floor, their crowd behind them and their opponents about ready to gag.

The Pistons coughed up two hairballs in the Final Four: Game 3 and the final ten minutes of Game 6 — both at the Palace. They were 58 minutes of basketball that are now the first domino of a summer of change in Auburn Hills. Flip is gone, just as we all suspected he might be. But this isn’t a fire-the-coach, keep-the-players sort of thing. Not even close.

“I’m open for business,” Dumars declared of his personnel plans. “No one is a sacred cow.”

No; they’re four fatted calves — you know who I mean — and at least one of them is about ready to be slaughtered.

Pistons Maybe On Verge Of Change For Change’s Sake

There is no shame in not winning an NBA championship. A cynic — and I’ve been that — would tell you that the way pro sports works is this: There’s a first place winner, and all the other teams in the league are tied for last. The only thing that changes is the length of everyone’s off-season vacations. But the truth is, you can not be crowned the king and still consider yourself having had a successful season. Some of the time, anyway.

The Pistons are on the verge of being tied for last in the NBA. They’re down, 3-2, heading into tonight’s Game 6 of the Final Four. If they lose this series — and they probably will — they’ll have all summer to beat themselves up for letting the Boston Celtics off the mat in Game 3 after working so hard to wrest home court advantage away in Game 2. Game 3 was a mind-numbing, MIA performance that should haunt this team all the way until they manage to win another title. It was a disgraceful, absolutely baffling display — more befitting a cold January night in New Jersey than at home in the Final Four. Whatever.

Joe Dumars was asked by ESPN.com in an interview played on their website recently about coaches and job security.

Is it fair, Joe D was asked, to issue an edict to a coach that goes something like this: Win the whole enchilada or pack your bags?

Dumars didn’t think so. He pointed out how only one team can win, and that no coach should be working under that kind of pressure. Fine. Agreed. But the more apt question would have been, Is it fair to place a coach under such an edict — or something close to it — when he’s seemingly had the talent to pull it off yet has been toppled three straight years in the Final Four?

Read: is Flip Saunders on the hot seat? Should he be?

In 2005-06, the Pistons went 64-18, including a crazy 35-5, 1984 Tigers-like start. Yet they were extended to seven games by the inferior Cleveland Cavaliers in the Elite Eight and ran out of gas against the Miami Heat. Last season, another inferior Cavs bunch toppled them, despite the Pistons putting them in an 0-2 hole (which they did in ’06, too) in the Final Four. This season, a shaky start against the 76ers had the Pistons scrambling right out of the gate. Then, a corrected series against the Orlando Magic and a gutsy Game 2 win in Boston preceded Game 3′s nastiness, and the Pistons have been playing catch-up with the Celts ever since.

So: after reading the above paragraph, what do YOU think about Flip’s impending return to the Pistons’ sidelines?

This isn’t just about Flip, though — despite his head-scratching rotation that doesn’t seem to have any pattern or rhythm. It must be terribly frustrating to play for Saunders if you’re not on the floor when the game begins, for you may play five minutes, 25 minutes, or none. Jarvis Hayes and even Jason Maxiell, at times, have been ignored with mystifying regularity.

No, it’s not all Flip. It’s the players, stupid. Time to let go of nostalgia and take a long look at the roster — the starting five portion. The Pistons rightly let Ben Wallace walk two summers ago, and now it’s time to move others — and yes, I mean for the sake of change. Sometimes that’s the last bullet left in the chamber.

Saunders cannot be judged an innocent, but neither can the players — some of whom should be gone if the Pistons bow to the Celtics, as expected (starters included)

Keeping a quintet together is great if you’re the San Antonio Spurs of today (yes, I know they lost to the Lakers but they’re still the closest thing to a dynasty the NBA has had since the Chicago Jordannaires), or the Celtics or Lakers of the 1960s or 1980s — because those teams consistently won championships. The Pistons are almost certainly on the verge of dropping to 2-4 in the Final Four, and where’s the fun in that? Where’s the warm-and-fuzzy appeal there?

Trades.

Dumars has built his reputation as one of the NBA’s best GMs because of his almost spooky and uncanny ability to properly blend aggressiveness with restlessness and intuition. He’s done it with his coaching firings and hirings, and with trades. He has, more than once, upset the apple cart and fixed what none of us saw as being broken in the first place. Then, six months later, we see that there needed to be repair, after all. And that’s why Dumars is one of the best in the business.

It’s time now for that to show through again.

No one — no one — should be an untouchable this summer. Everyone should be in play. A wire should be sent throughout the NBA from Auburn Hills that reads something like, “If there’s any interest in anyone on our roster — anyone — give us a shout. Let’s talk.”

What is there to lose, at this point? To have this burdensome streak of six consecutive Final Four appearances end? Is that what we’re striving for now? To play through Memorial Day and then break for the summer?

I’m telling you, I’d be a whole lot happier with Dumars if the Pistons made a blockbuster trade and be eliminated earlier in the playoffs next season, if there was greater payoff down the line. Better that than to stand pat and lose in another Final Four. But that’s just me.

Only one team can win it all. But that doesn’t mean that the others should ever stop trying — even if it means breaking up the gang in order to do it.

The best starting five in the NBA? And where exactly has that gotten the Pistons lately?

Tied for last, that’s where.

Coming To A Basketball Arena Near You: Coach Joe Dumars

The Pistons were in the midst of another search for a coach. It was typical, for a franchise that had two winning seasons on its resume in 26 seasons in Detroit.

It was the spring of 1983. General Manager Jack McCloskey was rumored to have interviewed several candidates. A couple, it was whispered, turned him down. One of those rejecters was supposedly the revered Dr. Jack Ramsay, a future Hall of Famer. McCloskey, it was reported, turned to an old friend from his days with the Lakers, Jack McKinney. McKinney, too, said no.

Other names bobbed to the surface. The days dragged on. Then it occurred to me.

Jack McCloskey wants to coach this team himself.

He could have done it, you know. McCloskey was a successful coach in the Ivy League, back when some of the best college basketball in the country was played in the small arenas of Princeton, Brown, and Yale. And Penn, where McCloskey roamed the sidelines in the 1960s. In the NBA, McCloskey coached the woeful Portland Trailblazers, getting fired just before the team drafted Bill Walton. He assisted his friend Jerry West with the Lakers, and did the same thing for McKinney with Indiana.

It was while on the Pacers bench as an assistant that McCloskey was recommended to Pistons owner Bill Davidson as just the basketball man the dysfunctional franchise needed to recover from two years of Dickie Vitale’s destruction. That was in December 1979.

So I was bracing myself for the announcement that I was sure to come, that McCloskey had tired of the coaching search and was going to assume the role himself.

He made a fool of me. He hired Chuck Daly, another former Penn coach. I suppose it was a good decision.

I hit McCloskey with my theory in 1989, the summer after the Pistons’ first-ever championship.

“If I thought it was the best decision for the team, I would have taken the job,” McCloskey told me with a shrug. But no, it wasn’t his intention.

I wonder if Joe Dumars will ultimately show the same restraint.

Flip Saunders is the Pistons coach, but he isn’t where the buck stops when it comes to in-season personnel matters. They do things a little differently in Detroit. Most NBA coaches bristle when it’s suggested that he’s not the one pulling all the strings all the time – during the season. The GM’s role for those teams is to make trades, look at free agents, and sit in a suite somewhere during the games. And keep the pie hole shut when it comes to who should play when, and for how long, and against which teams.

Dumars doesn’t play that.

Frequently he’s consulted, and I wonder how much of it is Saunders consulting Dumars, or Dumars consulting Saunders, if you get my drift.

The coach was talking to the media last week about veteran Lindsey Hunter, idle for over a month and resting – getting ready for the playoffs, when he’ll once again coax energy and ball-hawking defense out of his 37-year-old body.

When, it was asked, will it be time to suit up Hunter and begin blending him back into the rotation, the playoffs about a month away?

“Not sure,” Saunders said. “Gotta talk to Joe (Dumars) about it. See what Joe thinks.”

You can count on one hand how many NBA coaches would be comfortable with such an idea, and have some fingers left over.

Gotta talk to the GM first? See what he thinks?

Hey, if it works for Saunders and the Pistons, then everyone has my blessing. But it’s starting to crystallize now – why Joe Dumars has burned through coaches like a teenager does with his allowance.

Let’s take a look back. Dumars canned Alvin Gentry in 2000, promoting assistant George Irvine. Irvine was gone a little over a year later. Dumars then brought in Rick Carlisle, who lasted two seasons – both 50-win seasons, by the way. Despite leading the Pistons to the conference finals, Carlisle was fired. Larry Brown was hired. Brown flamed out in two seasons, as well – with a championship and a runner-up on his record. Enter Saunders, who’s actually survived into a third season – a record for any man that Dumars has hired.

Dumars, letting another coach go (Carlisle, in 2003)

I wonder how much of this is Dumars being aggressively restless and risk-taking, and how much of it is that he can’t get along with coaches? Or, rather, that they can’t get along with him?

I’m not castigating Dumars here. There’s no crime in running things the way you see fit, especially if the success rate is high. But something tells me that Joe Dumars may not be totally content until he seizes control of the team himself, as coach someday. He already is mega-involved in personnel decisions. Don’t kid yourself here. One of the reasons you see Saunders’s rotation fluctuate and change so often – in an ongoing effort to bring the youngsters Dumars has drafted into the fold – is because Dumars has ideas. And he isn’t shy to flex his muscles with his coach when it comes to those ideas.

Is Flip Saunders a puppet? That’s far too strong of a word. But it’s not inaccurate to describe Dumars as a sort of micro-manager, and those types aren’t ever happy unless they can do things themselves – like coach basketball teams.

Gregg Popovich is maybe going to go into the Hall of Fame one day as a coach, leading the San Antonio Spurs as the team of the 21^st century. But Popovich was an accidental coach himself. He was a little-known GM when he fired his coach one day, took the job on an interim basis, and never gave it up.

Saunders will coach the Pistons next year, odds are – barring a total meltdown in the playoffs, i.e. a first or second-round exit. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. And I’ll again brace myself, as I did back in 1983, for the Pistons GM to announce that, guess what, he’s the new coach, too.

McCloskey made a fool of me in ’83. I doubt that Dumars will.

Flip In Elite Company; Third Year A Charm?

The first, and maybe among the best, was Ray Scott. He was a true Piston. A player first, drafted fourth off the board in 1961 – a towering, rebounding and scoring machine from the University of Portland, but a born and reared Philly kid – who would adopt Detroit, and vice-versa.

Then there was Herb Brown, with his open collars and shoes with no socks. He had coached everywhere, including Israel. He rubbed his players so wrongly, the confrontations nearly became physical.

Then came Bob Kaufman. He played in the league, and wore the dual hats of coach and general manager in Detroit for a time. That is, before he gave way to the maniacal bleatings of Dickie Vitale, who became a de facto GM, too – when Kaufman gave up and fled town.

After Dickie was dragged screaming into the night – only to resurface on American television sets that were best off equipped with that wonderful invention called the “mute” button – there was another New Jersey guy to take his place: Richie Adubato.

Scotty Robertson was next, with his southern drawl and down-home honesty and humility.

Then the best: Chuck Daly, who rolled into town with coiffed hair and a resume that was in line with his predecessors. That is, largely undistinguished and filled with basketball stops in small towns and oh yeah – there was a college somewhere out east. Plus a brief NBA head coaching stint in Cleveland, one of the league’s two Siberias. The other was … Detroit. The won-lost record in Cleveland was so bad as to be best left off the undistinguished resume.

Some good, long-overdue stability with Chuck, before the door became revolving again. Ron Rothstein, who openly campaigned for the job and was brutally ineffective once he had bullied his way into it. Don Chaney, a nice man – and former Celtic champion – whose roster was filled with the dregs of the league and Grant Hill, pretty much. Doug Collins, whose claim to coaching fame was being lucky enough to be in charge in Chicago when Michael Jordan claimed ownership of the league. Alvin Gentry, another of those assistants who was minding his own business when management shoved the silver whistle into his mouth. George Irvine, who never really wanted the job, then coached like it, just to drive home his point.

More brevity, but with some success. Rick Carlisle, once labeled an up-and-coming genius, but who now finds himself in an ESPN studio, telling us what just happened and why. Larry Brown, a champion here, whose brevity was fait accompli, befitting his nomadic past.

All of which brings us to Flip Saunders.

Saunders is doing something quite extraordinary in Detroit, starting next week in Miami. For he is being entrusted to coax, prod, and nudge his players along through a third perilous NBA season. He’s breaking the string of two-and-out when it comes to Pistons coaches hired by the sage Joe Dumars. But the two-and-out wasn’t invented by Dumars. Far from it.

Saunders will get a third crack at reining in Rasheed Wallace

There have been 15 Pistons coaches during the ownership of Bill Davidson, which began in earnest in 1974. Yet only two of them, prior to Saunders, have been allowed to complete a third full season at the helm: Robertson and Daly.

See? The two-and-out pre-dates Dumars’ management significantly. It even pre-dates Davidson.

The Pistons are celebrating their 50th anniversary in Detroit this year, moving from Fort Wayne in 1957. Special commemorative patches are going to be worn on the players’ tank tops and everything. A one-shot logo has been crafted. Only – and I really don’t want to be a party pooper here – this is actually the 51st season in Detroit for the franchise. But they never have counted so good in the Pistons offices.

Back in the days of phantom attendance numbers, that is. And when the team used the two-and-out system of running coaches in and out of town. Ahh, those fabulous ‘60s!

Just about every coach the Pistons hired had the requisite two-year contract, and many didn’t even survive that long. Dumars, somewhat surprisingly to me, had seemed to carry on the tradition, despite significant team success. Out with Irvine, in with Carlisle. Two 50-win seasons with Carlisle, but it’s two-and-out! In with the basketball vagabond Brown. A championship and a runner-up, but it’s two-and-out! So out with Brown and in with Saunders.

Flip kicked things off with a record-setting 64-win year, but the suspected over-use of his starting five – four of them made the All-Star team – led to a flame-out in the playoffs against the Miami Heat in the conference finals. Last season, Saunders eased off a bit and worked some more bench players into the rotation, but the result was the same: sayonara in the Final Four, at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers of all people.

Chances are that Saunders will be allowed to complete his third season, making him only the third man to do so during Davidson’s ownership – and the first during Dumars’s president-ship. Where that will get him is anyone’s guess, here on the eve of the Pistons’ 50th anniversary/51st season in Detroit. But it, at the very least, puts him in an elite group. A SMALL, elite group.

Daly survived nine seasons because he won. And he won because he was smart enough to know that talented NBA players aren’t so much coached as they are managed and empowered. In the history of the NBA, you won’t find many more with such a combustible combo of strong wills and high-strung pedigrees than Bill Laimbeer, Isiah Thomas, and Dennis Rodman. Throw in the petulance of Kelly Tripucka and Adrian Dantley and the antics of Dennis Rodman and John Salley, and the supposed childishness of Mark Aguirre (pre-Detroit) – and it’s a wonder Daly lasted nine months. But the final tally under Daly was two championships, a runner-up, and five straight trips to the conference finals. Amazing what you can do in three years or more!

Saunders has extended the Pistons’ current streak of conference finals appearances to five as well. Yet they’ve only won two of those. The Chuck Daly Pistons won three of their five – and all in succession.

Flip is here for Year Three. But it’s only his two-year anniversary. See how that works?