Fashion and Defense Always in Style : Basketball: As Olympic coach, Chuck Daly will not abandon the elements that brought him to the top in the NBA.

The Prince is at it again.

By some accounts it’s grim. An Olympic basketball game is eight minutes shorter than an NBA game. Yugoslavia, when it gets itself together, boasts four NBA-caliber players, players who have experienced international rules. Meanwhile, the United States has about a month to throw together a squad.

Listening to snippets of conversation from Chuck Daly -- years ago dubbed “The Prince of Pessimism” by the Boston Globe -- one might think the U.S. basketball team he will coach in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics next July will be taken apart by the Maldive Islands frontcourt. Or those fast breakers from United Arab Emirates.

But the whole picture for Charles Joseph Daly, 61 and still the league’s top source of sartorial splendor, shows more scale. He’s a man who’s won with defense his whole career, starting at Punxsutawney (yes, home of Phil the Groundhog) High in Pennsylvania in the 1950s and going through back-to-back titles with the Detroit Pistons in 1989 and ’90.

“Anyone associated with American basketball felt a little heartsick” after the 1988 Olympics, Daly said over a quick breakfast between sessions at the league meetings last week. “Anytime you see another country celebrate a victory over us -- it doesn’t matter if it’s the Pan Am Games, or the Olympic Games -- everybody I know gets upset when that happens.”

And Chuck Daly knows a lot of people, from his stints as an assistant at Duke, head coaching gigs at Boston College and Penn in the ‘70s, his days on the Philadelphia 76ers’ bench and in their announcing booth, a brief stay in Ted Stepien’s Cleveland Cavaliers circus in 1982 and, for the last seven years, the Pistons’ job.

“His organization jumps out at you,” said Dave Gavitt, president of USA Basketball, the governing body, a subcommittee of which chose Daly as coach and will be announcing its NBA Olympic invitees Saturday. “He’s always been a real front-runner, even when he was in college, in terms of utilization of staff and planning. When you have a short time frame to prepare, that’s important.”

He also is a world-class balancer of egos, which he will have to do on two levels in the next 12 months. In Barcelona, he will have to find a rotation that will mean two or three NBA superstars will spend much time on the bench. In Detroit, he’ll likely have to console Joe Dumars or Dennis Rodman -- and perhaps Isiah Thomas -- about not making the Olympic team while coaching a revamped Pistons team.

“I have no problem with” the selection process, Daly said. “I think the committee has made a decision to go in another direction. They wanted the coach as a non-voting member. They wanted the committee to pick this team.”

Daly, who claims he has minimal influence on the committee, says he hasn’t spoken to Dumars or Thomas about the Olympics.

“There are all kinds of outstanding players,” he said. “When anyone who’s tried to sit down and pick 10, or pick 11, there’s going to be a problem. No matter who you pick, you’re not going to the post with those players. Hopefully you do. But with the length and the toughness of the NBA, there’re going to be injuries.”

What about Daly, who’s frequently bemoaned the long, long seasons the Pistons have put in the last few years?

“My Olympic duties will not interfere per se with this team,” he says. “Because there’s nothing to do. There’s no meetings and there’s no practices. I’m going to have a meeting Saturday with the coaches after the (announcement), and that will be our meeting. ... Having gone to the Puerto Rican tournament, the tournament of the Americas, and having gone to the European championships and having seen 20 games, I have a pretty good feel for what this team has to do.”

WELL PREPARED

He’s always known -- while growing up in Kane (population 6,000), Pa., playing at Kane High School, taking classes at American University and teaching social studies at Takoma Park, Md., Junior High School -- that he wanted to coach. Even when he got a mere $3,600 his first year at Punxsutawney, he knew he wanted to coach.

Learning basketball was a more laborious process in the days before ESPN and instructional videos. You got in your car and you drove up and down the East Coast, looking for a session you could steal something from. That meant traveling over lots of mountains, drinking lots of coffee, reading Scholastic Coach magazine and writing about matchup defenses. You listened to Clair Bee and Pete Newell, and you speak of them now reverently.

“I was coaching in a town of 10,000 people,” Daly said, “and when your recruiting pool is that small, you don’t think about running up and down the floor. You think defense.

“I attended all the clinics, diverse places around the country where it was hard to get to those places. It was apparent to me ... that we were not going to have the kind of players to compete every night to try to win championships. It became obvious to me that you had to be a good defensive team to overcome fluctuations offensively. It isn’t rocket science; it’s a very simple equation.”

Don Magnuson, one of Daly’s closest friends from Kane, remembers the travels. “We’re about 100 miles from Buffalo and we always used to go up there for Canisius, Niagara, St. Bonaventure, all those St. John’s teams. (Bill) Bradley and them came into the Aud and we’d go up there many times when the road was pretty bad and we’d get back to Kane when the sun was coming up.”

After eight years at Punxsutawney, Daly went to Duke, where he sat on the Blue Devils’ bench for six years with Bucky Waters and Hubie Brown. He followed Bob Cousy at Boston College, where he went 26-24 in two seasons. Then he succeeded Dick Harter -- who had gone 53-3 the previous two years -- at Pennsylvania.

In six years he never won fewer than 17 games and finished first in the Ivy League four times. It was a glorious time for Big Five basketball. Don Casey coached at Temple. Paul Westhead was putting in a wild system at LaSalle. Jimmy Lynam just started at St. Joseph’s. Daly’s Penn assistant was a guy from Jersey named Massimino.

“Different guys had different ideas,” said Daly. “Casey was basically a zone man. Westhead was a flying circus. Rollie came and we were very defensive-oriented. He hated zones and we used zones. And he became a zone advocate after he became a head coach. That’s all part of a coaching transition, and people that are flexible in this business. It’s important that you become flexible, not only with people, but in the game over the years.”

His home floor was The Palestra, and he never thought he’d be in the pro game.

“Chuck hated the NBA,” said Bullets General Manager John Nash, then at LaSalle. “I had to drag him to the games.”

But Billy Cunningham, then the 76ers’ coach, started selling Daly on the NBA. So he came to assist Cunningham for four years when Stepien, the Cavaliers owner, called. Daly was 51 and unsure if he’d ever get a head coaching job, so he went to work for Stepien.

Daly lasted 39 games before Stepien -- known for making early morning phone calls to his coaches and wreaking havoc with the media -- relieved him of his job. He went back to Philadelphia as a television analyst, and his caring, thoughtful friends dubbed him “the 90-day wonder.”

One year later, Jack McCloskey called from Detroit, where the Pistons had a young Isiah Thomas and some hope, but no structure. Daly brought stability, and deferred to a slew of assistants-Ron Rothstein, Dick Versace, Harter, Brendan Suhr, Brendan Malone -- who brought their lifelong beliefs that defense-always-wins.

McCloskey’s relationship with Daly is not buddy-buddy; occasionally it can be called strained. But the results suggest a symbiosis: two NBA titles, three appearances in the finals and six straight Central Division titles. But now, the Pistons are getting long in the tooth and there’s a new order in the East-with Michael Jordan and the Bulls on top.

“I’ve been flexible since I’ve been there,” Daly said. “We were a very high-scoring team once, and we became a very good defensive team. I think we’ll try to do what the personnel can do to win. That’s what it’s all about. We’d like to get more easy baskets, but that’s not the style that’s going to win come playoff time.”

Defense. Steady as a rock.

WELL DRESSED

Okay, one Daly clothes story, told by Craig Littlepage, a Daly pupil at Penn, now at Virginia.

“I was visiting Duke in 1968,” recalled Littlepage, who was being recruited by the Blue Devils. “I remember the final day of the visit, having breakfast with James Brown (now with CBS, then a DeMatha High senior), and the coaching staff. Coach Daly was assigned to take me back home. We stopped at his house on the way, and he made it a point to show me his closet.

“The impression, that must be strong because I still remember 20 years later, was that I was at a major men’s store in Philadelphia. Endless racks of sport coats and suits.”

Make no mistake -- Daly knows menswear. One black with gold pinstripe suit he wore in the 1990 Finals still has them crying in Auburn Hills.

His musical tastes run to Bobby Short, Nat Cole and Vic Damone-types. The ballads. The standards. Tradition, of a sort. And so it’s no wonder that he’s hung his hat on defense all these years, because it never goes out of style. And so, the next 12 months don’t figure to change Chuck Daly all that much.

“Coming off a season, this won’t be easy,” he acknowledged. “We will have to establish social situations to overcome the competitiveness that endures through a seven- or eight-month season. That’s another challenge.”

Publicly, NBA types give the proper respect to the international competition. Privately, if the NBA players don’t bring back the gold, there will be an investigation. That’s the pressure Daly and Company are under. You look hard, but you don’t see him sweating.

“Rather than worry about them,” he said, “we better make them worry. I think they’re worried about us to begin with, and I think we want to keep working in that vein, and make sure they react to what we’re trying to do. Let’s see if they can handle what we throw out.”