Yesterday, he won his 10th NBA championship as a coach (in just 18 years of coaching in the league), the most all-time. To me, the more staggering numbers are this:
- He has won more than 70% of the games he has coached (and he has coached almost 1800 games)
- His teams have never had a losing record in any season.
- In a best-of-7 playoff series, his teams have won the first game on 50 different occasions. His teams have then gone on to win all 50 of them.
It would've been fun to watch Auerbach and Jackson coach against each other, the former fussing and fuming and pacing the sideline, the latter sitting there with that Zen-like calm, calling his timeouts according to some inner clock, running the game with a seeming caprice that actually comes from a fundamental plan. There would inevitably come a time when they would torch each other in public, Auerbach with a straight-to-the-point rant, Jackson with a witty, circuitous insult. But winners almost always respect other winners, and, my best guess is, if they were pressed to tell the truth, here's what each would say about the other: He's a great coach.Prior to winning the 10th championship, Eric Neel of ESPN.com also did a piece on the man with some background from his early years.
2 comments:
I am keen to see Jackson retire now - and then see if a successor coach can coax anything resembling this season from Kobe, Gasol and the crew next year....
...also, insinuations that Jackson had teams with good players and so all he had to do was to manage egos to take them to victory - made by several worthy incl the one and only late Mr Auerbach - are patently disingenuous. For every Jordan and Pippen, Jackson also elicited uniquely brilliant performances from the likes of Jud Buechler and Bill Wennington. Also, Mr Popovich had Duncan and Robinson in his lineup before he won anything and my other favorite coach of the 90s and early 21st century, Sloan, could not despite having Malone and Stockton suit up for him.
Likewise George Karl with Payton+Kemp (and now with Billups+Anthony), Jeff Van Gundy with so many stars in NYC and Houston, and so many other coaches have failed to climb the same high pedestal that Jackson's teams have scaled 10 times in the last 20 years.
For all those reasons and more he is one of the best coaches I have seen. I just cannot fathom folks who say, very simplistically, that he had the best players of the time with him.
The interesting thing is that MJ, Pippen, Shaq, and Kobe had never won a championship before he coached them and of them only Shaq has won without him (albeit mostly because of Dwayne Wade and the NBA referees).
I do not like telling people when to retire as it is no business of mine but I will be happier if Jackson decides to hang it up rather than put up with another season.
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