They Call Him Coach : Dunleavy Takes Pressure of First Season in Stride

Training camp was training camp.

Everybody was upbeat, optimistic and if the Lakers were curious about the young successor to Pat Riley, they were polite enough not to mention it, though they would still be looking him over for . . .

How long?

“A little while,” Magic Johnson says. “Like a month or so--season-wise.

“Training camp, coaches--it’s all right. But actual games, when you have got to make decisions, move people around, now you’re coaching.”

When the Lakers started 2-5, did they watch him for signs of fear?

“Oh, yeah,” Johnson says. “See, he’s going to be the key. A lot of times it’s going to be the coach more than the players.”

And if Coach looks wobbly?

“Then you’re going to go into the tank,” Johnson says, laughing.

Cool Mike Dunleavy from Brooklyn survived the scrutiny, the comparisons to Riley, the graduation from assistant, the transition to a new system with a team breaking in five new Lakers and had an impressive rookie season. He put his imprint on a veteran team--the Man Who Turned Out the Lights on Showtime--turning the Lakers into defensive aces.

However, the scrutiny has barely begun.

The Lakers will open the playoffs Thursday night against the Houston Rockets and now there’s no more, “We just want to be ready for postseason.” From now on, dreams are realized or dashed.

It may also be noted that at this point in his career, Riley was universally beloved, en route to the first of the four championships his teams won in seven seasons.

By the mid-1980s, the stakes had grown externally and internally and writers covering the Lakers regularly nicknamed Riley “Norman Bates.”

By the ‘90s, strain showed in Riley’s relationships with players.

“I can’t say it was bad,” Byron Scott says of their last season together. “We won 63 games. It was just getting to the point where both sides needed a change. The players needed a change. He needed a change.”

Despite announcement of his resignation, Laker insiders still argue whether Riley left of his own volition, by mutual agreement or was fired.

Whatever the reason, the Lakers were ready for a lower-key leader.

When they got one, would the inmates try to run the asylum? The Lakers started 1-4 and conditions were as ripe as they were ever going to be for unraveling.

The Lakers seemed to teeter.

On Nov. 15, James Worthy was arrested in Houston. Sam Perkins, booed in the Forum, made his first Laker start and scored 29 points in a victory over the Rockets.

They moved to Dallas to play the woebegone Mavericks.

“If we don’t win tonight,” said a Laker official, “we’re back to Square 1.”

They lost, falling to 2-5.

Afterward, players talked about the awkward new defensive rotations, made necessary by double-teaming the opposing centers to help Vlade Divac.

Confided Dunleavy, “After one month, I’ve learned one thing: Pat Riley was a defensive genius.”

They came home. Dunleavy camped in front of his TV set, watching game tapes.

Says wife Emily: “When things are going bad, he’s quiet. Like at the beginning of the year, he was quiet. But never temperamental.”

They went back to work on the defense.

They went 56-19 the rest of the season.

Dunleavy would never be tested so severely again . . . until now.

Dunleavy’s buoyancy is remarkable, not to mention necessary.

As a player, he was an afterthought, a No. 6 pick who made the Philadelphia 76ers even though there were 13 players with no-cut contracts and more physical gifts ahead of him. He played in 11 seasons for four teams, once leading the league in three-point shooting, once setting a record with 48 points off the bench. If there were a Hall of Fame for hanging in there, his plaque would be over the door.

“Let me put it this way,” Dunleavy says, laughing, “I played for Del Harris in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.”

As a hot prospect, he was a surprise.

Recruited back from Wall Street by Milwaukee’s Don Nelson, Dunleavy coached for three seasons under Harris. He might have been considered a comer by general managers, but he was junior on the Milwaukee Bucks’ staff to Frank Hamblen, who took over when Harris was ejected. When the Lakers asked to talk to Dunleavy last summer, Milwaukee writers were caught by surprise.

But Jerry West had his eye on Dunleavy for years.

Coincidentally or not, in 1989, Dunleavy, in town for the summer league, asked West for career advice and was caught short at the response.

Says Dunleavy: “Jerry said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, in two-three years if I’m looking for a coach, you’re one of the first guys I’m going to talk to.’

“At which point, I said to him, ‘That’s great, I’m very flattered, but how can you say that? I don’t know you, we’ve never talked basketball, what do you base that on?’

“He said, ‘Does Nelly know you? Does Del know you? I’ve talked to them about you.’ ”

Two years later, West hired Dunleavy. Dunleavy was contacted by two other teams--Nelson reportedly wanted to groom him to take over the Golden State Warriors--but ambition, of which Dunleavy has no shortage, pointed him toward the Forum.

“I looked at this job coming in as a no-win situation,” he says. “I mean, I knew that coming in.

“The expectations were going to be extremely high. If you win, you’re supposed to win. If you lose, what the hell’s wrong? But I still wanted to take that challenge because I look at this team, no matter what anybody says, I know it’s a team that has a chance to win a championship.

“Maybe the chance isn’t as great as people thought they’ve been in past years, but still I think we have a chance. That’s what it’s all about for me. I didn’t want to play it safe.”

He hadn’t.

Dunleavy is no shrinking violet, confident of his ability, often using I rather than we in referring to the Lakers. However, his buoyancy seems genuine, solid and difficult to shake. Players consider him approachable, open and sensitive to their feelings.

“I like his personality more than anything,” Scott says. “He gets along with people. He listens. I think one of the big things everybody likes, he listens to suggestions.

“What was I expecting? I didn’t have any preconceptions. For seven years, I’ve seen it all, the good and the bad.”

Says Johnson: “When we were 2-5, I thought that was some of the best moves he made because he said, ‘Look, we’ve got a good team, we’re going to be all right. Nobody get down. We’re not going to start pointing fingers and it’s going to come for us.’

“He dealt with everybody on an individual basis. When he made the move with A.C. (Green, benching him to start Perkins), he went up to A.C. He talked to Terry (Teagle) when he was in that long slump.”

Slumps?

The transition took its toll on many Lakers:

--Worthy shot a career-low 49%.

--Johnson had his next-to-lowest shooting percentage, 48.4%.

--Scott’s 14.7-point average was his lowest since his rookie season.

--Teagle was lost until the last two weeks of the season.

--Divac had a good November, January and February, which leaves December, March and April unaccounted for.

However, the Lakers became the NBA’s second-best defensive team, one of two--Detroit being the other--to hold opponents under 100 points. At the All-Star break, when they had won 16 games in a row, they were as good a team as there was.

Significantly, Dunleavy passed up a chance to strut around during the all-star activities in Charlotte, spending the break with his family.

“I would say this season was a little harder than I expected,” he says. “I didn’t expect to get off to such a slow start. I had a rude awakening coming in.”

The pressure he is always asked about?

“There’s always pressure,” Dunleavy said. “There’s pressure to win your next game. There’s going to be big pressure come Thursday.

“There’s good pressure and there’s bad pressure. Bad pressure? When things aren’t going good, you’re trying to figure out the answers and sometimes there is no answer. Guys are beat up or they can’t give you any more than they’re giving you. Guys are going bad and you don’t know why they’re going bad. The problem with being a coach sometimes is you don’t have the answers, but you’re always searching for them.”

Doesn’t it dominate his life?

“I’m not so sure for me I’d be any different no matter what I was doing,” he says.

“When I was on Wall Street, basically I got up at 6 o’clock in the morning, got home at 7:30 at the earliest and then I had work to do at home. I was 30 years old starting out in that job and most guys I was competing with were straight out of business school and I wanted to be good.

“I think I see my kids more on this job. I take them to practice with me. They go to games. When I watch film, they sit there and watch it with me.

“Thank God, they’re boys.”

His work is only starting.

He never meant to kill Showtime and spent the last months of the season trying to revive it.

He has to have Divac ready for Hakeem and Mr. Mean and keep Teagle improving.

He has to relocate the defense they played in January.

Maybe it still won’t be enough, ultimately.

Meanwhile, he has all the challenge he ever wanted and Michael Jr., William and James Dunleavy know more about defending the pick and roll than any other kids in Bel-Air.