Cheeks a Fearless Leader

Keep thinking, Mo, it’s what you’re good at.

Back at the Hole in the Wall, or wherever the Portland Trail Blazers rode off to after Sunday’s disappointment against the Lakers, the little outlaws are planning their next job, er, game.

It’s hard to be a Trail Blazer these days, what with their reputations, inherited and/or merited; with impulse control that runs the gamut from acceptable to absent, and their high-risk approach to the game, not to mention public relations.

In real life, they’re a basketball team, not as big or scary as some they’ve had but still good enough to rally from 13-18 and finish sixth in the wild West under rookie Coach Maurice Cheeks. They’re a decided underdog in this NBA first-round playoff series but, as they showed the mighty Lakers 10 days ago in Portland, capable of surprises.

Of course, with the Trail Blazers, surprise is a way of life.

“I always thought they were nuts,” says guard Steve Kerr, who arrived last summer after three years with the low-key San Antonio Spurs. “This just confirmed it, that’s all. But in a good way.

“I’ve had a great time, getting to know a lot of the guys. And I wasn’t sure if I would fit in. I felt kinda weird coming to this team, especially having been with the Spurs the last three years, a team that’s so opposite....

“In a weird way, it’s been one of the most fun years I’ve had, just because it’s so nuts. It’s such a new experience for me. I’ve seen it all this year, water bottles flying through the air, chairs, balls flying into the stands, people throwing Bill Walton dolls onto the floor....”

Remember that last Laker game at Portland.... Rasheed Wallace, who plays Sundance Kid to Cheeks’ Butch Cassidy, getting upset at a call, while the Trail Blazers were wiping out a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit.... Rasheed coming back to the huddle and kicking a chair so hard, the TV replay showed Kerr, sitting on the bench but facing the wrong way, ducking.

In Portland, one learns to stay alert.

All but forgotten in the ongoing High Jinks Chronicles is the fact this remains one of the league’s deepest and most versatile rosters.

If Arvydas Sabonis’ retirement means they’ve gone from big and imposing to slight and overmatched in a conference dominated by huge teams; if General Manager Bob Whitsitt concedes their championship window might be closed for the moment; if the pieces don’t quite fit--or come close--they still rose from 13-18, when everyone was writing them off with their rookie coach, and went 31-8 from the start of January to the end of March, playing so well with such esprit, it was not uncommon to hear people from other teams saying they were the best team in the NBA.

“I mean, you have to take people for what you see them,” says the soft-spoken Cheeks, who prefers to stay positive in a job in which he’s destined to be forever asked about the negative.

“I don’t believe you can keep getting it from third parties, fourth parties. Certainly, I was getting it from 25 parties about my guys [before taking the job] but I didn’t take that at face value.

“I didn’t know how they would be ... so I had to come in and give ‘em a fair shake.... And they gave me a fair shake. And that was pretty much the way we regrouped ourselves as a team, because we believed in one another.”

Calming this madcap crew that, as another West coach noted, “would have driven Dean Smith out of coaching,” is now considered one of the season’s most impressive coaching jobs.

By all accounts, Cheeks has become their steadying influence.

The problem is, they require a lot of steadying and he’s just one man.

Sins of the Jail Blazers

“We were always adding players to try to match up with Shaq [O’Neal] and beat the Lakers. Maybe we added one or two too many. The mix was a little different than the norm. You had a guy like Dale Davis who went to the finals [with Indiana] and had an All-Star year and was used to playing big minutes and we asked him to take a backup role. That was difficult for him. And [Shawn] Kemp, he was a guy who was capable of helping us but there was the conditioning factor....

“You know, every year, we took steps to get better and for three years we did. Then it just fell apart at the end.”

Former Trail Blazer assistant

Tony Brown to the Detroit News

Everything about these Trail Blazers is a high-wire act, reflecting their challenge and the risks they’ve run to surmount them.

Despite owner Paul Allen’s bankroll, superstars don’t put them atop wish lists, as O’Neal did with the Lakers. Nor did the Trail Blazers finish badly enough--they’re the only team that has never been in the lottery--to luck into Tim Duncan and David Robinson, as the Spurs did.

So Whitsitt grabbed talent at every opportunity, however immature, expensive, overweight and/or incompletely thought-out.

In the transition from the Clyde Drexler era, there were consequences, centering around J.R. Rider’s adventures. Throw in Gary Trent’s incarceration for fighting outside a club, Wallace’s unfriendly public persona, a drop in the standings and the disappointment felt throughout their doting community and you had the “Jail Blazer” era.

This was addressed by the acquisition of such solid guys as Brian Grant and Steve Smith and their climb back into the elite, cresting in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference finals when they took that 15-point lead over the Lakers....

Of course, they lost it and everything else, it seemed.

The players turned on Coach Mike Dunleavy. Wallace thought he should support him more with referees, rather than telling him to quit getting technicals and ejections. Veterans like Scottie Pippen wanted Dunleavy to be tougher with the volatile young players.

Nevertheless, Dunleavy kept the balls in the air into March, when they were 42-18, No. 1 in the West, and Whitsitt brought in Rod Strickland. This was said to have upset the old No. 2 point guard, Greg Anthony, even more than the starter, Damon Stoudamire, although Stoudamire clearly gulped at the news.

While Whitsitt discounted the intangible aspect (“I’m not a chemistry major, I’m a sports major,” he said) the bottom fell out in an 18-14 finish, including a loss to the Lakers in Los Angeles, during which Wallace threw a towel in Sabonis’ face during a timeout.

The team would subsequently ask Sabonis to take a pay cut, prompting his retirement, but a towel in the face couldn’t have helped. In his native Lithuania last fall, Sabonis noted, “There aren’t players on the Portland team, just names earning millions,” adding Dunleavy, who had been fired that summer, had failed to “bring the team’s stars down to planet Earth and should have been fired at midseason.”

The postseason lasted three games in a 3-0 sweep at the hands of the Lakers, with Davis suspended for Game 3.

“It wasn’t a professional team,” Pippen later told the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lacy Banks. “There I was, being a captain of a team with players who didn’t want to show up for work or follow basic rules of being on time and giving their all in practice and in the games.

“We had players feuding with each other, feuding with the coach and the coach and players feuding with management. It was an unstable situation where you just didn’t know what to expect every day you went to work. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, and you’d go to work expecting the worst.... It’s a shame that Dunleavy got fired because it wasn’t really his fault. Dunleavy’s a nice guy. But maybe that was the problem.”

Next (gulp) coach.

Sons of the Jail Blazers

Ever imaginative, Whitsitt, disdaining the warmed-over, recirculated pool, asked the New York Knicks for permission to talk to Jeff Van Gundy (denied) and approached Minnesota’s Flip Saunders, who said no, before turning to Cheeks from Larry Brown’s Philadelphia 76er staff.

A John Stockton-type, efficient, self-effacing point guard, Cheeks seems so quiet, it was hard to imagine him sitting on anyone, but there’s a competitor in there, determined and so insistent, embattled as he is at the moment, he can muse that one day he’d like to do what Phil Jackson has done, eight titles’ worth.

Cheeks jumped at the offer. Openings to become a coach are rare and those in which a rookie coach has enough talent to win, however volatile, are rarer still.

The key was Wallace. Cheeks had met Rasheed, a Philadelphia native, a few times. Cheeks’ old 76er Coach, Jimmy Lynam, now his assistant, knew Wallace well, having coached him as a rookie in Washington. Wallace was already showing his penchant for moods and outbursts, but teammates and people around him have always insisted there’s a completely different, actually human, Wallace in private, and Lynam liked him.

“People see the tip of the iceberg and they’re gonna now draw every crevice on it,” says Lynam. “You and I know about one-tenth, one-twelfth is all you see. Yeah, the guy was getting too many technicals. C’mon, give me a break....

“Maurice made it a project to develop a relationship with Rasheed. He wanted Rasheed to know it revolved around Rasheed, plain and simple.”

Wallace now expresses his support of the new coach, succinctly, of course (“Cats really appreciate the way he handles things.”)

Wallace’s thorny persona, more than anything else, which perpetuates the Trail Blazer legend and his disinclination to deal with the media is at the core of the problem. Charles Barkley, who threw a guy in a bar through a window, was entertaining and became a folk hero. In Rasheed’s case, the image is closer to Darth Vader.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t like him the first couple weeks I was there,” says Kerr. “ ... There was a real period there for a while in training camp where I wasn’t sure. He was yelling at the interim referees that were coming in town to ref our scrimmages. You’ve got to be kidding me. But he settled down and I think he seems happy with this team....

“I think Maurice had a profound effect on him, just the way he coached him, the way he treated him and he’s been really fun to be around, ever since that point. Laughs, jokes around, guys on the team love him.”

Not that it was easy for them.

At 13-18 on Jan. 2, they were No. 9 in the West, but Cheeks had just turned the offense over to Pippen, moving Stoudamire off the ball, as Brown had done with Allen Iverson. Bonzi Wells was moving ahead of newly signed Derek Anderson, $49-million deal notwithstanding, and the Trail Blazers were ready to rock.

“I didn’t waver,” Cheeks says. “Even if I wavered, I didn’t let the guys know that we weren’t going to be a good team at some point. I believe that’s what helped us turn around is that I still had belief that we were going to be a pretty good team.... It’s easy, particularly for a first-year coach, to stop and players can stop and give up on him. But they didn’t do that.

“‘Cause I kept hearing all these things about the players I had around me. It certainly doesn’t exist on our team now. The bad stuff that I hear, it didn’t exist and had it existed, you know, 13-18 probably would have been 13-20 or 13-21.”

Or 13-59.

It’s not that their mix can’t be changed or their chemistry improved. Their transition is ongoing; there’s already speculation in Miami that Pat Riley, looking to rebuild, will shop Alonzo Mourning with Portland a likely destination.

But the Trail Blazers have business remaining relating to this season and with them, for better or worse, nothing’s impossible.