No Doubt, Phil Is Sitting Pretty

For nearly 30 years, the Mount Rushmore of basketball coaches has had two faces--and only two: John Wooden and Red Auerbach. Wooden’s UCLA Bruins won 10 NCAA championships, Auerbach’s Boston Celtics won nine NBA championships. It was so exclusive a club that no other coach merited consideration, much less membership.

But now there’s Phil Jackson. His teams have won eight NBA championships and by the middle of June that number should be nine, which would tie Auerbach. It’s Jackson who has the best winning percentage (.743) in the history of the NBA and whose playoff winning percentage (.738) is as impressive. It’s Jackson whose teams have averaged 61 victories per season, six more per year than Pat Riley’s teams.

It’s Jackson who was Shaquille O’Neal’s choice to coach the Lakers. It’s Jackson who Michael Jordan refused to play without in Chicago. The other day in Sacramento, when someone asked how the Lakers have been able to maintain their focus and poise through two championship runs and 12 consecutive road playoff victories, Kobe Bryant said, “It comes from Phil.”

Most astonishing, though, is that at a time when young stars are hypersensitive about the slightest criticism, Jackson is able to publicly chastise his stars, who happen to be the two biggest celebrities in the league. Philadelphia’s Larry Brown, a great coach by any measure, was ripped for going public with the most basic criticism of Allen Iverson, that he wouldn’t practice. A few days later, with no prompting, Jackson volunteered that he had initiated a “heated discussion” with Shaq and challenged his big man before the cameras and notebooks.

When it comes to Jackson’s critics, though, time may not do it. Some say that they, too, could have won championships with rosters that included five likely Hall of Famers (Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman in Chicago, Shaq and Kobe in Los Angeles).

Only 10 days ago, as the Lakers put the finishing touches on San Antonio and league MVP Tim Duncan, a completely undecorated college coach, Cincinnati’s Bob Huggins, said what more than a few of his peers are thinking.

“Phil Jackson may be a pretty good coach, I don’t know,” Huggins said at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Luncheon Club. “It’s hard for me to tell. The guy never gets up (off the bench).”

A more thorough and insightful assessment comes, not surprisingly, from Auerbach, who said of having new company at the top, “Look, records are made to be broken. And Phil, he’s a smart guy, a psychologist with these guys. He knows what the hell he’s doing, there’s no doubt about that. He runs the game from the bench really well.”

We’ll almost certainly never know how Jackson would do coaching a team thin on talent because, as one of his former players, Steve Kerr, often has pointed out, not taking a rebuilding job after Chicago “is proof of how smart Phil is.”