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HARDCOREKNICKSFAN
Posts: 26191
Alba Posts: 28
Joined: 6/24/2002
Member: #263
USA
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Posted by CanadianKnicksFan:
Posted by HARDCOREKNICKSFAN:
Turn to 1050 ESPNRadio. Get some KNOWLEDGE.
Listening to basketball critiques from a station in a boondock, HOCKEY town. Okay.
No wonder you are hating on Lenny. That backwards media only promotes backward thinking.
Next thing we know, you'll be rooting for the Raptors.
No one is stopping you... Be my guest.
Boondock 5 million people live in Toronto
About 10 Million live in NYC.
Where's the Boondock? Yeah... I know. 
Read what this says about NYC B-Ball KNOWLEDGE:
Izenberg: No doubt about it: Isiah picks a winner
Thursday, January 15, 2004
BY JERRY IZENBERG
Star-Ledger Staff
The kid from Brooklyn finally comes home. Lenny Wilkens, who learned the game in the Police Athletic League and the CYO gyms, who learned the joy of the dribble from a parish priest who had him dribbling around chairs and learned the city-tough side of it on the blacktop playgrounds returns to the city as its coach of all coaches.
That means the Garden and the NBA. It means the basketball schizophrenia of the country's toughest fans. It means their vocal demands and their loyalty and no guarantees which hits the hardest.
From Our Advertiser
It means in a city where basketball courts outnumber the playing fields of football and baseball, and the sports IQ is its most knowledgeable in that milieu, Lenny Wilkens is supposed to put together the pieces of a shattered team that has become a municipal embarrassment to New York's sports psyche.
They couldn't have made a better choice ... not because he has won more NBA games as a coach than anyone else ... not because he and John Wooden are the only two men ever voted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach ... not even because he once helped coach the Dream Team, a group that earned more money than the gross national product of any banana republic and whose locker room housed more runaway egos than the auditorium on Oscar night.
Isiah picked the right man.
Yes, he has the basketball skills and the talent recognition that make for great coaches. And, yes, again, he knows this city where as a kid with just a half season of basketball at Boys High, he earned a scholarship to Providence University and lit up the New England sky with his style, his shooter's eye, his I-see-the-court-and-I-know-where-the-open-man-is instincts.
His success as an NBA coach has been spectacular in won-lost records and the ability to make chicken salad out of chicken gizzards.
But with all his qualifications, the biggest thing he brings to this job is character. Despite the prevailing fawning over the wunderkinds and superstars, etc., Lenny Wilkens lives and coaches by a single credo:
"Nothing comes for nothing."
I remember a week during the Games of Atlanta in 1996 when Lenny was the coach and the Dream Team decided all it had to do was walk on the floor and Brazil would surrender. The Dream Team won, of course, but this is the way I remember it.
They played that game on a Tuesday, and on that day Lenny Wilkens was furious because of his team's casual approach. The coach didn't scream, didn't stomp his feet and didn't throw a chair. He just sat there, arms folded, eyes like two lasers. But deep within him a full-fledged Vesuvius was boiling.
The next day, nobody had any doubts that this team was going to have to play for its coach or be forever embarrassed -- a circumstance he would not permit to happen.
He juggled the squad and matched Karl Malone with Charles Barkley. They understood what he wanted and what he was after. They elbowed, they shoved, they shouted.
Then Gary Payton began to talk trash, and soon everyone else was.
"We had one hellacious practice," Wilkens told me the next day. "Bodies flying from everywhere ... slamming into each other ... the assistant coaches running over to me to tell me to stop it before somebody got hurt, but I turned my back because I didn't want them to see me laughing.
"Someday the Dream Team will lose a game and then all that won't come down on the players. It will come down on the coach. I am making sure this week that I will not be that coach."
The new man will not engage in public outbursts, although he will tell the truth. The new man will use his solid basketball background and instincts. Eventually, he will get the most of them. And what you won't see, but he will look for, is character.
Along those lines, consider a single event that was a reflection of the way his single-parent mother raised him. She taught him to take what comes and make it better rather than whine about it.
In 1960, he was an All-American at Providence. He was the NIT MVP at a time when it really meant something. He was the MVP in the East-West College All-Star Game. But when the Olympic roster was announced, he was not on it.
At the time, I worked for the now defunct Herald Tribune across the river, and my assistant sports editor was a man named Irving Marsh. Together we opened up a telephone assault on the selection folks. We got nowhere. One of them said that at that moment, the roster was racially split -- six whites, five blacks and he said, "It ain't going to six and six."
And with the naming of the 12th man it wound up seven and five.
Wilkens' disappointment was surely huge. He had earned that spot. But he didn't know that story until we spoke decades later, that week during the Olympics of Atlanta.
Back in 1960, he was rebuffed in the cruelest way. He did not dwell on it. He never looked back. He went out and became a hell of a pro player and a hell of a coach and Hall of Famer.
And 36 years later, he was the one chosen to lead America's most prestigious basketball team in the world's most prestigious games.
Isiah got the right man.
Jerry Izenberg appears regularly in The Star-Ledger.
Another season, and more adversity to persevere through. We will get the job done, even BETTER than last year.
GO KNICKS!
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1/15/2004 8:17 AM