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.
When we have a home game I get to the arena around five o’clock, and I always read the scouting reports on the opposing players. Then Dick comes in and says, “Larry, anyone can win this game tonight.” A couple of minutes later is when Rick comes in after working out the guys and says, “We’re going to get blown out by fifty.” It’s the same thing every night. The funny thing is, they really mean it when they say it. It’s different on the coaching side than on the players’ side. When I was a player I walked into every game every night thinking we would win by 20. But on this side, you just never know. There are too many variables that can affect how your team plays. I tell our team, “If you put your mind to it, you can win any game, anytime,” but if they come in and you’ve got two guys playing hard and three guys just sort of playing, it makes it tough.
About forty-five minutes before game time I go to the coaches’ office and Dick is sitting there. I grab my chair, so I’m sitting there too. It’s funny as hell. The two of us sitting there, not saying much of anything. It goes on like that for forty-five minutes. It’s horrible. Once in a while one of us might say, “Well, do you think Barkley is going to play tonight?” or something like that. But mostly we’re just in there, nervous as hell, getting ready for game time. At that point Rick is out on the court. When he comes in and announces we don’t have a chance, that’s when I know I should take a shower and get ready. Once in a while, Joe Qatado, my special assistant and equipment manager, will come in and say, “Anybody need anything?” We barely answer the guy. We’re just a bunch of grumpy guys, all ticked off, and the game hasn’t even started yet.
There was one time when our game was televised on TNT, and one of their guys asked if Hubie Brown, their announcer, could come in before the game, around forty-five minutes before, to talk to us and our players about matchups and stuff. I did it one time and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want other people in there, and because I was feeling all sick and nervous like I do, I wasn’t in any mood to talk to somebody. So the next time they came to us I said, “Look, if those guys want to talk to me, tell them to come to shootaround, and I’ll be glad to sit down with them.” The guy says they can’t do shootarounds, because sometimes they’ve got other meetings or whatever, and they can’t be running all the way over to the arena. My feeling on that? Tough! Anyhow, Hubie got mad. He got all worked up. He didn’t say anything to me, but he told Dick and Rick, “I’ve never been turned down by any coach in this league. This is the first time since I’ve started that this has happened.” But it’s like I told Dick and Rick: “This is how I am. You guys have seen me right before a game. I don’t even want to talk to you guys. I told them I’d spend as much time as they need at the shootaround.” For the rest of the season, Hubie didn’t come in and talk to us. It’s too bad, really. I love Hubie Brown. I always did. I thought he was a great, great coach, and I loved to play against his team because they were bulldogs. It’s nothing personal against him. I think Dick, who has known Hubie a long time, has tried to explain it to him. Anyhow, I did notice once we got into the playoffs that they started coming around early to do stuff.
When I first started coaching, I might stick my head in the locker room and try to see whether the guys looked ready or not. I don’t worry about that anymore. But Dick worries a lot. He’ll say, “Oh, look at them. They’re not moving. They’re laying around in there. How are they going to play well if they’re laying around in there?” But I explained to Dick that as a player, one thing I never knew going in was how I was going to play. Never. There were nights I went bouncing in there feeling ready to take on the world, and I couldn’t hit anything. Other nights I’d drag myself in there and then go out and have 25 points and 15 rebounds.
The one part of my job I never really enjoyed was talking to the media. Dick and Rick get frustrated sometimes, and I do too, when people get things wrong. But I understand that talking to the media is part of my job, and really, it’s not as bad as all that. I’ll say one thing: it was a lot different in Boston than in Indiana. When I was with the Celtics, there’d be a ton of reporters in the locker room before the game, looking for a quote. They were very competitive. In Boston, reporters are celebrities, just like the players. The fans know all about them. In Indiana there’s not the same kind of intensity. There might be four or five writers before the games, and afterward I don’t think it ever gets higher than fourteen or fifteen.
I figured out the best way to handle the media while I was in Boston. After a game I’d go in the back to the trainer’s room and get iced down. I’d drink a couple of beers, wait until everyone else got done, and then I’d go out and sit on this table in the middle of the locker room. I’d answer everyone’s questions, and when I could see they were starting to bog down and were running out of things to ask, I’d say, “Got enough?” Then, boom, I was out of there. I used to look at the clock when I went and sat down on that table, and then I’d look again after I was finished, and it was almost always around ten minutes. That’s why I didn’t get worked up about the press too much. Ten minutes isn’t really all that much time. With the Pacers I pretty much did the same thing. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time doing interviews about myself, because I promised my team that this wasn’t about me, and I meant it. What was nice about that first season was that both Dick and Rick got their fair share of notoriety, and they deserved it.
While Rick was already one of my closest friends, I enjoyed getting to know Dick so much. He was so refreshing to me. I loved his work ethic and his enthusiasm. In the Eastern Conference Finals, when we played Chicago, Dick wanted to address the team. I told him to go ahead. He got all geared up and he got very emotional. He told our team, “It’s time we showed the Chicago Bulls—it’s time we showed the world—we are the better team.” Hell,
I
was ready to run out there and play. I know there are no other assistants in the league who would have been allowed to give a speech to the team before a big game like that, but I think every assistant should have input. I could never understand why Boston had any assistants, because they never let them do anything, except maybe a little bit in training camp. But once the season started, you never heard boo from the assistants. It was always the head coach, and I never could understand that. When I took the Pacers job, I told Dick and Rick exactly how it was going to be. I told them I’d like them to be vocal with our team. If they felt uncomfortable about getting in and talking with some of the guys, that was fine. But both of them are so involved.
Dick in particular gets really fired up. He’s fired up from the time we get there until the time the game ends, and then he’s fine. Unless we lose, of course. Dick is a veteran. He’s been around, and I trust his instincts. I talk to Dick a lot. I’ll say to him, “Dick, do you think the guys look tired?” He’ll tell me honestly. Even after a win, sometimes he’ll say, “Larry, maybe we better lay off a little. These guys are beat.” He’s got a good feel for that.
It’s beautiful, the way our coaching staff works. I’ve got this young guy who is as eager as hell to do well, and he wants to be a head coach so bad he can taste it. Then I’ve got the guy who’s been there, who was the head coach, who has been in basketball forty-three years and has loved every minute of it. On top of it, those two guys would do anything for each other. Once in a while, when the offense is struggling, Dick turns to Rick and says, “Are you going to score me eighty-five points? Rick, c’mon, I need at least eighty-five.” But it’s all lighthearted. Rick and Dick are in this together, all the way. Last summer, when the league locked out the players, Dick was just chomping at the bit to get back. He lives for this stuff, and he takes his part in it very seriously. Dick is ticked off if any team gets over 90 points on us. And if they get over 100, he’s absolutely livid. He takes great pride in our defense, and that’s why I love him. Dick and I can spend all day talking about defensive principles. Our big thing is we like to stop the pick and roll. The pick and roll in our league is major. Everybody wants to run it. When I was with the Celtics, Robert Parish and I made a living doing it. Our feeling is that if you double-team the guy looking to make the pass and take the ball out of his hands, the other guy has to come and get the ball, and now you’ve got a big man 15 feet from the basket, and what’s he gonna do with it? All of a sudden we rotate by pulling a man over to him. At this point the shot clock is winding down, and they’re stumbling around. If you get proper rotation, you can take that pick and roll away. We have guys that are supposed to sink down, and that’s one of the really good things about our defense that first season. Reggie and Chris were just excellent at sinking down and helping to hold the big guy.
The pick and roll is one of the most devastating weapons in basketball. It murders people. John Stockton and Karl Malone are the two best in the league. They can do it in their sleep. Dick asked me once what I used to look for in a pick and roll, and I told him, “Coming off, I knew I’d have Parish on his way to the basket, but if I had to stay up with the ball, I made sure I was around the free throw line so I’d have a shot.” That was always major. There was also always somebody standing over in the corner, wide open, whether it was Danny Ainge, or D. J., or whoever. Robert was always able to do a little extra, whether it was sticking his butt out, or moving just enough to get the big guys defending him to step out. When Robert went to the basket, all you had to do was throw it up there and he’d always catch it. People never did appreciate how well Robert executed that play.
One of the things I told Rick we needed from day one was an offense against trapping pressure. We found out we needed one during the Atlanta summer league. We played the Celtics, and they were on us. They didn’t have their best players there, but they had some good ones. They just murdered us. We couldn’t get the ball across half court. So Rick and I started talking about how we needed a play to break the press. We’d work on stuff, and I kept telling Rick, “Boston is going to kill us. I don’t like this. I don’t like how we’re doing.” He said, “It’s good. Believe me. We just need some time, and repetition. We’ll be able to handle the press. We’ll put in another one about two weeks before we go up to Boston to play them. They’re really the only team that presses. So don’t worry.” So we put in another play, and it so happened we were playing New Jersey right before the Celtics, and they were pressing us all over. We used both our plays, and we shot 67 percent against them. It was clicking like you can’t believe. Then we got to Boston, and when they put on the press in the second half, we were passing to the right spots and cutting to the right places. Pitino had to back off. For the rest of the season we begged teams to press us. Mully and Mark Jackson were loving it. I said to Mark one day, “Don’t you just love it when teams press us?” He said, “Hey, Coach, are we good or what!”
That kind of feeling became contagious, in our locker room as well as in the front office. When I took this job I hardly knew our team president, Donnie Walsh, at all. I laid it all out to Donnie how I wanted to do things. I told him how I’d like to handle personnel, how I was going to help players, the type of game I wanted to play, what we were going to do in practice. The one question I asked him was, “If I’m on these guys, and they think I’m working them too hard, and they come in here and whine to you about it, what are you going to say? Are you going to back them, or are you going to back me?”
I’ve seen that happen before, and it can be really destructive. I didn’t know Donnie well enough then to know the answer was obvious. He’s with us all the way. He’d listen to the players, I’m sure, but then he’d tell them to go talk to their coach. Donnie told me later the only thing he didn’t really believe was that we had a good enough team to win a championship. Of course, part of that was because Chicago had Michael Jordan. But let’s say Michael gets hurt for five minutes in a playoff game. The whole thing could change. Injuries are part of the game—I’ve always said that. If Rik Smits was down for a long time, or we lost Reggie for six months, it would kill us. But that’s part of the game. It’s what makes you sorry it didn’t happen for us in my first season, because we had everything going for us.