The Need to Coach Again Swayed Riley

He says he’s ready for the job, eager, passionate as ever. But this time Pat Riley won’t let the passion control him.

It will be a difficult adjustment.

It is as if Pat Riley never coached in this league, although he knows he missed coaching. This is a new coach and new team, and they are unlike anything he had before. There is no Earvin or Kareem in sight to make the coach’s concept of winning fit into the heads of the players.

The only thing he’s sure of is that he’s 46 years old and he identifies himself as a basketball coach with all the trappings and entanglements that broadcasting didn’t give him. “When I worked at NBC, 10 or 15 people on the show worked intensely every Sunday,” he offered as illustration. “The show would be over, we’d watch the game. We’d go off the air and I’d walk out of NBC and get into a cab alone.

“Where’s my assistant coaches; where’s may players? I’d get on the flight to California alone. The next week I’d fly back to New York alone. After being around teams for 30 years, that’s tough. I didn’t like that.”

The concept of the team is what made his Los Angeles Lakers successful and in turn made Riley successful. The likes of Abdul-Jabbar and then Magic Johnson, whom Riley calls by the given name of Earvin, embraced the concept. “You may not believe it,” Riley said, “in all my years I have never been motivated by money. ... Maybe it was Earvin and Kareem, being around them, that came along.”

It wasn’t then, a matter of Dave Checketts’ checkbook convincing Riley to take a job he didn’t want but thought he had to take.

The money is here -- an unannounced contract approaching a million and a half for each of five seasons -- but he’ll have to search for the players who’ll embrace him. There have been coaches who stepped away and then decided they wanted to try again. Don Nelson left the Milwaukee Bucks and returned to the Golden State Warriors and has done well. Vince Lombardi left the Green Bay Packers and soon went to the Washington Redskins and was doing fine when he died.

Others have discovered they really didn’t want to work that hard again. Riley has had his success. He was in the NBA finals seven of his nine years as head coach, won four championships. But, he concedes, it was time to get out after last season. “Whether I jumped or was pushed is irrelevant,” he said. “I felt in my gut it had run its course.”

Perhaps he had pushed his players too hard at the end so that it wasn’t fun anymore, as some of them have said. More likely he had pushed himself too hard so that it wasn’t fun for any of them. Showtime just wasn’t what it used to be.

Then again, it’s hard to play Showtime with a mediocre team. Now that he’s taken the challenge of a team that hasn’t been to the finals since 1973, didn’t win a playoff game this season, didn’t win as many as it lost this season, he said he’s willing to take the workload of practice that goes with the exhilaration of the games. Before he said yes to Checketts, Riley said he consulted Bill Walsh and Bill Parcells, who stepped away from championships.

Riley came away saying he had decided that he’d do away with some things that weren’t important. “Instead of watching six hours of game tapes, I’ll watch one.” He said his thought process wouldn’t be so constricted “because of the other things I have in my life.”

But he may find that trying to bring this team to an acceptable level is more trying than he could imagine. “Players get tired of hearing the truth,” Riley said. It is a repetitous game and the same truths keep cropping up. “When you’re around the chemistry of a team and they get into the spirit of accepting the idiosyncrasies, you’re on your way,” he said.

The idea he has to sell is for players “to get out of themselves” and into the team. It was one of the lethal failings of the Knickerbockers. “The concept of teamwork is so simple that a lot of people don’t get it,” Riley said.

Selling the Lakers was easy because of Kareem and Earvin. Kareem was a leader when Riley became the coach. Magic Johnson came along, watched for a time and then became a leader. “A coach’s greatest asset is his leaders,” Riley said. “They will look at players and tweak them to play better. There are maybe a half-dozen in the league.”

None of them have emerged on the Knickerbockers. Riley will have to find some. Only the good teams have them.

The job drew him. He said he wanted to coach, even if it wasn’t New York. He grew up in Schenectady. His father, the baseball coach, used to take him down to Yankee Stadium on the train. The basketball coach used to bring the team down to Madison Square Garden on the bus as a treat. “We used to go to Tad’s for 99-cent steaks. It was a good steak, baked potato, too.”

Tad’s is up to $4.99 these days, but then coaches’ salaries are up, too.

The Knicks had their lure, but Checketts had to convince Riley. When he took over the Lakers, he had been an assistant coach, a part of the family. He took over a championship team and won championships, which is the most a coach can do. Not only did he have talent to work with, he had that attitude of Earvin and Kareem, the “synergy” that Riley said fueled him. “Players inspire coaches to inspire players,” was how he put it.

Finding that in the Knickerbockers will be an entirely different job.