feckless father in a sitcom, unable to stop his sons from breaking the furniture, rather than the architect of the “Jordan Rules,” an armor-plated defense that doubled and tripled Jordan and gave him a strategic shove or elbow even when he didn’t have the ball. “Chuck’s ego,” says Rod Thorn, an NBA executive who helped pick the Dream Team coach and players, “was not as big as his team’s.”
In short, Daly didn’t have warts—“He didn’t bring any baggage,” as Thorn put it—and, in the end, the committee decision was an easy one. On Valentine’s Day, 1991, a limo picked up Daly before a game in Milwaukee and whisked him to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where he was told that he was the choice to coach the 1992 Olympic team. Daly said he was surprised, but who knew if that was true? He was a poker player of the first order. He was also told that Lenny Wilkens was the choice for first assistant, and that was fine with Daly, too.
As an organization, the Pistons took the official position that they were happy for Daly. The reality might’ve been something else. The team had clearly lost its edge over the Bulls by then, yet there was Daly getting a “promotion” that had nothing to do with Motown. Isiah Thomas was battling a wrist injury that kept him out ofaction for ten weeks, and several weeks after Daly was announced as the Dream Team coach, the Pistons’ captain went off on everyone. “Nobody gives a shit around here anymore and that includes the coaches,” Thomas said after a home loss to the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers. “We’ve become comfortable with losing.”
Perhaps that was Isiah’s audition for the Dream Team, an effort to demonstrate how important winning was to him. Perhaps it was legitimate anger. Perhaps it was both.
USA Basketball wanted to announce a team by September 1991, ten months before qualifying competition would begin, and felt comfortable that it had gotten the right man as coach. Quite early in the process it was decided that the time-honored Olympic tryouts—those enervating ordeals that enabled tyrants such as Knight to rage and fume and hold the stage for weeks on end, and which in the U.S. track and field world are still held sacrosanct—weren’t going to happen.
Listen, Michael, could you get in that layup line over there? We wanna get a good look at you
. There was a lot of work to do to fill the roster, and the committee charged Daly with creating a list of the players he’d want, broken down by position, a half dozen or so in each category.
For Daly, that was the easy part. That was the big list, and anyone could’ve made one with the usual suspects—Jordan, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Malone, Stockton, Mullin, Drexler, and so on. Daly included four of his own players on that list—Isiah (obviously), Joe Dumars, Rodman (just coming into his own as a player who would become one of the greatest rebounders of all time), and Laimbeer, who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making the team but was an exceptionally smart player who had been a big part of Daly’s two championship teams.
Seeing all those names on the board—players such as James Worthy, Kevin McHale, and Dominique Wilkins, all of whom were unlikely to be chosen—had a profound effect on the college guys on the committee. In casual conversations, the idea of a team with sixNBA players and six college players had gradually given way to an eight-and-four breakdown. The college guys prepared to dig in at eight and four.
Then the hard reality set in. “I’ll never forget the day we put the names from the big list on the board,” says C. M. Newton, one of the college guys on the committee. “We were talking about eight pros and four college kids at that point, and then you looked at the NBA names … and there was literally no one to leave off. We all knew at that point, and it was pretty early, that it was just about all over for the college kids.”
The more interesting list that
In short, Daly didn’t have warts—“He didn’t bring any baggage,” as Thorn put it—and, in the end, the committee decision was an easy one. On Valentine’s Day, 1991, a limo picked up Daly before a game in Milwaukee and whisked him to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where he was told that he was the choice to coach the 1992 Olympic team. Daly said he was surprised, but who knew if that was true? He was a poker player of the first order. He was also told that Lenny Wilkens was the choice for first assistant, and that was fine with Daly, too.
As an organization, the Pistons took the official position that they were happy for Daly. The reality might’ve been something else. The team had clearly lost its edge over the Bulls by then, yet there was Daly getting a “promotion” that had nothing to do with Motown. Isiah Thomas was battling a wrist injury that kept him out ofaction for ten weeks, and several weeks after Daly was announced as the Dream Team coach, the Pistons’ captain went off on everyone. “Nobody gives a shit around here anymore and that includes the coaches,” Thomas said after a home loss to the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers. “We’ve become comfortable with losing.”
Perhaps that was Isiah’s audition for the Dream Team, an effort to demonstrate how important winning was to him. Perhaps it was legitimate anger. Perhaps it was both.
USA Basketball wanted to announce a team by September 1991, ten months before qualifying competition would begin, and felt comfortable that it had gotten the right man as coach. Quite early in the process it was decided that the time-honored Olympic tryouts—those enervating ordeals that enabled tyrants such as Knight to rage and fume and hold the stage for weeks on end, and which in the U.S. track and field world are still held sacrosanct—weren’t going to happen.
Listen, Michael, could you get in that layup line over there? We wanna get a good look at you
. There was a lot of work to do to fill the roster, and the committee charged Daly with creating a list of the players he’d want, broken down by position, a half dozen or so in each category.
For Daly, that was the easy part. That was the big list, and anyone could’ve made one with the usual suspects—Jordan, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Malone, Stockton, Mullin, Drexler, and so on. Daly included four of his own players on that list—Isiah (obviously), Joe Dumars, Rodman (just coming into his own as a player who would become one of the greatest rebounders of all time), and Laimbeer, who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making the team but was an exceptionally smart player who had been a big part of Daly’s two championship teams.
Seeing all those names on the board—players such as James Worthy, Kevin McHale, and Dominique Wilkins, all of whom were unlikely to be chosen—had a profound effect on the college guys on the committee. In casual conversations, the idea of a team with sixNBA players and six college players had gradually given way to an eight-and-four breakdown. The college guys prepared to dig in at eight and four.
Then the hard reality set in. “I’ll never forget the day we put the names from the big list on the board,” says C. M. Newton, one of the college guys on the committee. “We were talking about eight pros and four college kids at that point, and then you looked at the NBA names … and there was literally no one to leave off. We all knew at that point, and it was pretty early, that it was just about all over for the college kids.”
The more interesting list that
Similar Books
