Bird Watching Read online

  I couldn’t wait until Dick and Rick showed up. I was really chomping at the bit to get started. If there was one thing I was concerned about with my coaching, it was drawing up plays. For one thing, I didn’t like to draw, so I knew that would be a problem. But I don’t worry about it at all anymore, because I’ve got the guy that’s the best I’ve ever seen. We were sitting in our new office before the season, and Rick was showing me how to draw up these plays when I said, “Listen, you’re really good at this. You should do this for our team.” I could tell Rick wasn’t sure if I was serious or not. I told him, “Look, I’ll do it, but I don’t have a problem if you do. If you think it will hurt you, by people asking, ‘Why is Rick drawing all the plays,’ guess what? I don’t care. My main goal is to get this team to win. I want to win this whole thing.” The only other worry we had, I guess, was how the players would react to it. As far as I knew, there was no other assistant coach in the league drawing up the plays in the huddle. But why would I insist on doing it when I knew someone else right next to me who was better at it? The players understood that. They didn’t care.

  I knew I was giving my assistants more authority than anyone else in the league, but I was proud of that. Dick and Rick were two intelligent guys who lived for the game of basketball. Why wouldn’t I give them input? That’s not to say we didn’t have a difference of opinion now and then. A lot of those differences would present themselves in the middle of a game. For instance, if a defensive player had three fouls on him, Dick was always saying, “Hey, he’s got three. Let’s go right at him. We’ve got to run a play.” You can run one at him, but if you don’t score, why keep hammering away at it? I think it makes your offense get out of sync if you do that. The truth is, most fouls are picked up off the ball anyway, or from a guy coming over to help out. In that situation, I have to make a quick decision on how I want to go for that particular moment, in that particular game, but then it’s something that Dick and I will go back and talk about later.

  Naturally, when you have three guys having a lot of input, they aren’t all going to agree. Early in the year I know I was doing some strange substitutions that had Dick and Rick scratching their heads. One day Rick said to me, “Larry, we’ve got to talk about these substitutions.” But that was one thing I felt strongly about. I knew I was playing too many guys, but it wasn’t hurting our team at that point, and I wanted every guy that had worked his butt off to feel like it was worth it. I also knew I saw things in a guy like, say, Fred Hoiberg, that maybe others didn’t see.

  The other thing I had a little disagreement with Rick and Dick about was time-outs. There were stretches when our guys were playing really bad and it would seem sensible to call a time-out and let them have it, but my urge was often to let them play through it. The upshot of it was I wasn’t calling very many time-outs. Dick and Rick weren’t the only ones who noticed. Reporters were asking me about it all the time. I told them the same thing I told Rick and Dick: coaches overreact too much in this league. I knew as a player that there were times when we’d go through a couple of rough minutes, but if the coach stuck with us we’d straighten it out. Sometimes calling a time-out just draws more attention to the fact you are struggling. It can get guys thinking too much about what they are doing wrong, instead of what they are doing right.

  Anyway, we were sitting there one night, and it was a close game. I can’t remember who we were playing, but Rick was sitting next to Dick and I was sitting between them and the players, and I pulled Jalen Rose over and said something to him. We were up by about eight points at the time, but the other team got hot and made a comeback. All of a sudden, we’re coming down the court, and Dick and Rick are saying to me, “Time-out! We need a time-out!” I don’t say anything. They start hollering at me again. “Larry! C’mon now, we got to have time!” Reggie Miller was sitting right next to me, and I was mad. I was mad at our team because they blew the cushion we had built up, and I was mad at Dick and Rick because they kept yelling at me to take a time-out. The third time they did it, I turned around and said, “Shut the fuck up! Relax!” Reggie’s eyes just about popped out of his head. He couldn’t believe it. All the guys on the bench were just looking at me with their mouths open, because they never heard me use language like that. In fact, I usually go out of my way not to swear too much. Anyhow, on the next play there’s a jump ball, we win the tip, and we go down and score. Then we get a steal and score again. I turned around and smirked at my two coaches. I couldn’t resist!

  Dick and Rick never forgot it, and of course they got me back. They went out and bought some walkie-talkies, and they planted one of them in my office before the game. Then they went back into the equipment room with the other one. So I’m sitting there in my office going over something, and all of a sudden I hear this voice saying, “Larry. Call a time-out.” I’m looking all over the room, but I don’t see anybody. I probably wouldn’t have caught on for a while except those guys started cracking up. Rick I expected that from, but Dick? I didn’t know he had it in him.

  I can still remember the first time I sat down and talked to Dick Harter. It was during his interview for the job. I talked to this total stranger for ten minutes, and I said, “Where have you been my whole career?” Isn’t that strange? He started telling me about defense, and he was trying to be professional and all, but the more he talked, the more fired up he got. I don’t know how badly he wanted the job, but I was impressed with his passion for the game. That’s one thing all three of us share. When you love what you are doing, you don’t care how long it takes to get it right. Sometimes parts of coaching can be long and tiring, but I’ve never felt that way when Dick and Rick are with me. We can be breaking down tape together and going over things, and all of a sudden I’ll look up and three hours have gone by.

  That’s one thing all three of us agree on: how valuable the tape can be as a learning tool. Most people don’t know this, but when I was a player I used to go home after a game and watch it all over again on tape. It wasn’t so much to watch myself. What I’d do is zero in on plays where I had the ball, and see where my teammates were positioned. That way I could tell if I could have made a better play, or if there was someone who was open that I hadn’t noticed on the floor. It also helped me make sure my teammates were going to the proper spots on the court. You can’t believe how many times I’d be sitting home replaying a game I had just played, and I’d watch myself come off a pick, and I’d see Danny Ainge, wide open in the corner, and I’d say to myself, “Geez, how did I miss him?” Then I’d go in the next day and say to Danny, “Hey, you were wide open on that play last night in the third quarter. My fault. Call for me next time, and I’ll get you the ball.” I figure our players can benefit from the same kind of thing. I know all twelve of my guys aren’t going to go home right after a game and watch the whole tape. I don’t expect them to. We can show them what they need to see. Coaches can talk and talk and talk about something, but if you get it on tape and show it to them, it is so much more effective. Let’s say we want Reggie to shoot the gap better than he has been. You mention it a couple of times, and he does it for a while, but then he falls out of the habit again. Because of all the video technology we have, we can break down tapes of the previous two months and put together a highlight tape, or in this case a lowlight tape, of every time Reggie didn’t shoot the gap the way he should have. When you put it all together like that, it tends to catch their interest.

  What I like best about Dick and Rick is that I don’t have to stress to them how well prepared I want our team to be. They’re stressing it to me! And we pass that kind of mentality down to the players. I’ve been talking to Rick about basketball for a long time. I did it that way before I became the Pacers coach—pretty much ever since he played with me. Rick is very organized. He works the game, every little detail. That’s what I wanted. I wanted someone who would go after every little possible edge. When we run a play, I want our guys to know exactly what is happening. On every play. Rick feels
the same way. He’s not going to leave out anything. He has every angle figured. He’s done booklets of information for us similar to the one he sent me when he worked in Portland. We have one booklet that tells us that if you turn a certain player toward the baseline, he will hit 28 percent of his shots. If you turn him to the middle, it’s higher, like 35 percent. You show the guys all these numbers, and then you convince them that if they turn that player to the baseline he’s got a lower chance of scoring than if they turn him to the middle.

  One day Rik Smits asked, “How do you know the guy shoots only twenty-eight percent?” I told him, “Rik, come here.” I showed him the equipment our scout, Dan Burke, uses to do our film. I told Smits, “Our staff takes every frame of a game and they break it down to a science. They go through every shot every player takes. It’s a lot of work, but it’s going to make us prepared.” Rick goes through all that stuff after every game. He charts every single play on the offensive end. After two or three games, he’ll say, “Okay, Larry. When we run this certain play, and we end up with a post-up for Mark Jackson, we score sixty percent of the time off that.” Once I took one of Carlisle’s sheets into the locker room and I went over to Mark and said, “Study that.” It was every play we had in those three games. He looked it over and said, “Wow.” I said, “That’s right. You’re our best option.” The only thing you have to be careful about is getting enough tape to make sure you have a pattern. You have to throw out the nights when the guy who normally gives you 10 points and 5 rebounds a night busts out for 30, just like you have to eliminate games where your most reliable player doesn’t show up mentally to play that night.

  Even with all this information that we have and pass along to the players, I don’t want them to ever lose their instincts. There are times when things happen on the floor that nobody can predict. There are situations that come up that require a split-second decision that can’t be coached. I don’t want to take away that kind of freedom from our guys. Rick Carlisle has devised a lot of plays—hundreds of them, actually. He’s very good at calling the right ones. But sometimes I do feel we take away from Mark Jackson. Mark wants to call his own plays. I told him, “Mark, if you have something in your mind that you want to run, I don’t care if us coaches are screaming at you. You just go ahead and run the play.” Coaches do get caught up in the game, and we overdo it a little bit. When it gets down to the end of the game, I don’t mess with the players. I’ve got a lot of confidence in Mark, and so does Rick. If Mark Jackson sees something he thinks is going to work to win us the game, then it’s his call all the way.

  While Rick is charting all our offensive possessions, Dick is doing the same thing for the defense. He’s got all our players listed. He knows where we’re vulnerable as a team, and what their individual defensive deficiencies are. He brings it in to me before practice, and we go through all of it, then we sit down and talk about what we need to work on that particular day. Just like with our offensive tendencies, we’ve got to be careful not to jump to conclusions. I remember one particular game when we played Detroit. Joe Dumars, who it seems has been around forever, killed us with four jumpers in a row. He posted Travis Best with the same move every time. Dick and I were talking about a change, but I decided to stick with what we had. I yelled out to Best, “Hey Travis, suck it up. He’s just hot.” Here’s why I didn’t alter our coverage: Travis was doing everything we asked of him. He was turning Dumars baseline and making him shoot high, which should have meant a low-percentage shot. But when a guy like Dumars—with his history and experience—gets hot, you just have to tip your hat to him.

  One of the things I told Rick and Dick, and I think it took them some time to get used to it, is I wanted everyone on our team to feel like they had the green light in terms of shooting the ball. It makes Rick nervous. I know it does. My feeling is, it’s so hard to get an open look in the NBA these days, if you’ve got one, you better shoot. It’s a completely different approach than how Rick and I were taught when we were players. I can remember one of our early games against Chicago, Travis Best came down a couple of times, pulled up for the shot, and missed both times. The next time down he had a wide-open three and—boom—misses again. Rick and Dick were sitting there all bothered by it. I was sitting there saying, “We’re going to win this game.” When he missed those three shots, it was because he wasn’t being aggressive enough. But the point was, the shots were there.

  Another time, we played Milwaukee, and it was going right down to the wire. We were playing horribly, but we were still in it. Chris Mullin had four wide-open three-pointers at the end of the game that would have put us up by three and never made one of them. Here’s one of the purest shooters in the league, and he’s not even close. We were in a time-out, and Chris is looking at me, and I said, “Chris, are you ever going to make a shot, or what? This is ridiculous. Just make a shot, and the game is over.” Sometimes you’re sitting there, and you know you’re the coach, but you have this little thing about being a player again. When Reggie or someone misses three or four shots, you find yourself saying, “Hey, are you ever going to make a shot tonight? If not, why don’t you come over and sit by me?” Even so, I still don’t tell them to stop shooting.

  One thing I didn’t know about when I took the job was what head coaches did and didn’t do. I had never paid much attention to them while I was a player. I had my own pregame rituals and routines, and if my coach was doing something special, I can’t say that I ever noticed. So when I was mapping out my game plan for the year, I told Dick and Rick, “Here’s what I want. Before the games I want you guys, and me, out there working with the players.” Right away, Rick said, “You can’t do that. Head coaches don’t go out there and do that.” He said, “You’re going to make every coach in this league pissed off if you go out there.” I was looking forward to that pregame work. I should have just gone out and done it anyway. I really believe I would have had more enjoyment by being able to go out there before these games and work with my guys, then come in and take my shower and get ready. But I knew I had already gotten away with a lot. We had kept it to two assistants, and we didn’t have a minority, and I guess I decided we didn’t need any more trouble in that regard. But I was thinking about doing it for my second year. I think it would be a blast.

  I don’t really care what anyone thinks, and neither does Dick at this point, but Rick is going to be in this league a long time, and I don’t want to do anything that might hurt him from getting a job in the future. I think he’s one of the brightest young minds in this game, and he’s going to have lots of opportunities. Rick has a lot of confidence in his abilities, and the only thing I worry about is sometimes it comes off like he’s too tough. You have to show these guys you are human. When I get into that locker room, I ask them to do stuff, I don’t tell them. Certain guys react to certain people. Like Jalen Rose. Dick and Rick call him in all the time to talk to him about this and that. Then he’ll walk by my office and I’ll say, “How are you doing?” and that’s about it. Jalen is an emotional kid, and he’s still young, and he drives us all crazy at times. I’ll hear Dick and Rick get on him for something, and I’ll wait until they’re done, and then when Jalen walks by my office I pull him in and tell him, “Hey, Jalen, you’re doing a great job. Just stick with what we’re telling you and you’re going to have an excellent year.” There’s no question that he needs to hear what Dick and Rick are telling him, but sometimes I feel it’s my job to smooth it over when they’re through.

  I’m a completely different person on game night than I am in practice. I am not fun to be around a couple hours before a game. Never have been. Dick, Rick, and I have the same routine night after night. Rick goes out, does his stuff on the floor with the players, then he comes in and I ask him, “What do you think?” He says the same thing almost every night: “Aw, Larry, they don’t look that sharp. We don’t have a chance tonight.” At that point we’re in the locker room getting ready. I always put my tie on around my neck, but then
Rick has to tie it for me. I can’t reach all the way back there to do it, because of an old elbow injury I had. It doesn’t let me bend my arm properly.

  When I was a player, I was never nervous during a basketball game, but I’d get sicker than a dog before games. I used to feel like I could throw up at any time. I used to walk out after shootarounds a nervous wreck. Every day. I hated it. I was like that in college too, and it drove me crazy. That’s why I always used to sleep in the afternoons, so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the nervousness. The good thing was, as soon as I walked out there and stepped on that court, it was gone. One of my better memories as a player is when we used to run out of the tunnel at Boston Garden onto the court. It’s awesome. I used to love it on tape, us coming up the ramp, with the camera following us from behind. We’re charging out of that chute, hitting the floor, and Grant, the retired cop who guarded our bench, would be waiting, giving us high fives and low fives. It was the best.

  Now that I’m a coach, it’s the same thing all over again. Before the game I feel like I want to die. But once we get out there and they start playing, I feel great! On home game days I take a little nap at home. I get back from shootaround somewhere between one and one-thirty, and the kids don’t get home until three, so I have time. The older Conner and Mariah get, the more they are getting into the Indiana Pacers. When the Bulls came to town, all the kids were talking about it. So Conner comes home from school and says, “I want to go to the game tonight.” I said, “Well, it’s a school night.” He says, “I don’t care. I want to see Michael Jordan.” Last time Chicago came through, Conner asked me to take him in to meet Michael Jordan, but that’s something I just can’t do. I just remind him again about playing with Michael and his kids in Barcelona. That didn’t seem to be working like it used to, though.