Inept Nets Are Fitch’s Latest Rebuilding Task

He is where he wants to be on this glorious autumn afternoon, inside a stuffy, silent gym talking basketball to people who have learned quickly how to listen.

This is as close as it gets to heaven on earth for Bill Fitch, and it had been his calling for 18 consecutive autumns until last October. Training camp had always led to the regular season, which usually led to the playoffs and, on one occasion, begat a National Basketball Assn. championship.

No active NBA coach has won as much--or lost as much--as Fitch, 55. That mattered little to the Houston Rockets, who dismissed him after a fractious 46-36 season in 1987-88. His successor, Don Chaney, went 45-37 and also lost in the first round of the playoffs.

Fitch stewed for a while between rounds of golf, fishing trips and visits to the bank to cash his Houston paycheck. He also kept his satellite dish and VCR on overdrive, testament to his vigilance and confidence that someone would call again soon. And someone did--the New Jersey Nets.

Friday night, Fitch and his Nets were to meet the Boston Celtics in the Centrum in Worcester, Mass., in the exhibition opener for both teams. It was the first time Fitch and the man with whom he shared an NBA bench for 11 years, Jimmy Rodgers, went head-to-head.

“For Jimmy,” said Fitch last week, “this is an entirely different game than it is for me. He’s got things he wants to look at. I’ve got things I don’t know if I want to look at, but I have to. He’s already been where I have yet to go.”

Over the summer, the movers and shakers of the heretofore hapless Nets surveyed the flotsam on their roster, discussed their hopes and expectations, kicked Willis Reed upstairs and decided on Fitch, the man who helped revive the Celtics and Rockets and who launched the Cleveland Cavaliers from scratch. “It’s one thing to talk about developing a team and another thing to have actually done it. That’s a big difference,” says Nets General Manager Harry Weltman. “We wanted someone who’d done it and someone with toughness who could cope with our situation, where we have to fight for our identity.”

Says Fitch, between practice sessions at Jadwin Gym, “I guess they caught me in the right mood. The situation was right. The timing was right. The people were really, really convincing in wanting to have a major league operation and a major league program.”

Now, Fitch will put his reputation as an ornery Mr. Goodwrench on the line to try and achieve just that. It won’t be easy.

His roster has more question marks than a Dr. Seuss book, and watching the Nets is somewhere between flossing teeth and cleaning the basement on the average New Jerseyite’s list of things to do.

Says Weltman, “Unlike the expansion teams, our problems are different. They at least have a base of community and fan support who will wait for the team to win. Here, we won’t get that support until we do win. It’s all backwards. It’s even more difficult than when we used to draw 3,500 in Cleveland because you knew the fans were out there and hungry for a winner.”

Every NBA job Fitch has taken has been a “there’s nowhere to go but up” proposition. He was in on the ground floor in Cleveland, took over the Celtics after their 29-53 season in 1978-79 and arrived in Houston in time to resuscitate the Rockets after their 14-68 campaign in 1982-83. Although he had impressive rookies to ease the transition in Boston and Houston, each situation also called for the head coach to provide brains, leadership, discipline and direction.

The Nets certainly need all of the above, having put together records of 24-58, 19-63 and 26-56 the past three years. And they have never been known as a model of stability either on their roster or in the front office.

Incredibly, there is only one player, shooting guard Dennis Hopson, who was with the Nets for the start of the 1987-88 season. And he was a rookie that year. Only three players from the 1986-87 team are still in the NBA. The Nets have had six head coaches this decade and, since joining the NBA in 1976, only one coach, Kevin Loughery, has lasted as many as three consecutive seasons.

It could take Fitch that long just to get the Nets breathing air instead of dirt.