Recently, I looked back at the Olympic men's basketball team lost the olympic games two months ago, the Chinese men's basketball team lost to the Greek team, in the first quarter, Hu Mingxuan stopped the Greek team with a fast attack score, at this time, I noticed that the head coach of the Greek team was actually an old acquaintance of the Celtics - Rick Pitino, I have not paid attention to this man for a long time.
In May 1997, Pitino was hired as Celtic head coach, just after the Bostonians had finished one of the worst seasons in franchise history.
Pitino is very serious and has a strong connection with the Boston local area, he played for the Massachusetts University team, also coached at Boston University and Providence College, and then got his first NBA head coaching job , starting in 1987, he coached the Knicks for two seasons, leading the team to a 90-74 record. He then returned to the NCAA as head coach at the University of Kentucky for seven seasons, while in 1996 he won the National NCAA Championship and again reached the final in '97.
With such brilliant coaching achievements, you and I take it for granted that this young but extremely talented head coach will be the savior of that Boston team.
The Boston Global Times published the following report immediately after Pitino joined the Boston Celtics as head coach:
"(Hire Pitino) that day. The Garden Arena was like a coronation ceremony. ”
"Pitino is coming, and I know when Pitino was coaching the Knicks with limited talent, people thought he was coaching very well. Even if he later went to the University of Kentucky as a head coach, everyone would imagine that one day he would become the head coach of the Celtics. If Pitino returns here to coach the Celtics, no one seems surprised. You know, this team's record at that time was terrible. M.L. Karl did two things well, first, he put the team at the bottom of the record, and second, he developed some good young players that the new coach can use. He did all this without knowing that Pitino would succeed him. So Pitino entered the team with great fanfare, holding two lotto signings and generous salary space. ”
Antoine Walker, a super newcomer on the team at the time, also expressed excitement: "For me, I just had a season with only 15 wins. I was so excited when I heard the news that I felt like Coach Pitino was coming and he was definitely going to get the team on track and make us better. So everyone was excited. I was really ecstatic to be able to play for my college coach again. We used to be successful together and won the national championship, and I still remember that feeling of excitement. ”
However, this did not turn out to be the case.
Pitino's first twist on the Boston Celtics was the team's own draft pick — the worst NBA record of just 15 wins and 67 losses in the 1996-97 season, and the talented rookies of the 1997 Draft could change the team's fortunes.
The Bostonians have two lotto picks and the highest chance of winning the pick, and if they're lucky, the Celtics will have a chance to pick up tim Duncan, the most promising rookie of the time — knowing that they have a 36.3 percent chance of getting the first pick, but the Celtics only got the No. 3 pick and the No. 6 pick.
Pitino misestimated the Celtics' pick picks — he thinks the highest probability means that the top pick has arrived, which makes his preparations before joining the franchise in vain, but in the eyes of the media, the Celtics at this time still have the possibility of innovation, after all, they have Walker, the top five and top ten picks, and a lot of salary space.
But Pitino did not seize the opportunity.
According to reports at the time, the Boston media had always believed that Pitino had used means to separate the team from the meritorious coach and manager Auerbach from the beginning of entering the team, and Pitino wanted to dominate his position and wanted to control the life and death of the players from the beginning. But Pitino, at this time, did not even understand how the NBA salary space worked.
"He wanted to be the new Auerbach, but he didn't get along with the real Auerbach." —Boston Global Times
Perhaps It was Pitino's own high starting point that led to the team falling apart after the start of the new season's pre-season.
On August 22, 1997, Chris Mills had just signed a seven-year, $33.6 million contract with Boston, and the team had just lost a preseason game in which the whole team was defenseless and ended up losing 20 points. But it was the game itself that made Pitino throw things and curse in the locker room in anger – you know, it was just a preseason game.
Maybe Pitino was showing his players how eager he was to win, but this time directly led to Pitino losing the support of his veterans before the start of the regular season, and just two months later, Mills was traded by Pitino. This was just the beginning, as Pitino drove out a number of veteran players before the end of his first season in charge, including Rick Fox, Eric Williams and Dee Brown. Even Chansi Billups, who is still in his rookie season, was traded after playing just 51 games in exchange for Kenny Anderson.
Walker said: "He doesn't have a lot of patience, I think it's too much pressure to be both a manager and a general manager, and all the decisions are made by him. And he expects everything to be perfect, he makes a lot of demands, and that's right, but there are 82 games in the whole season and sometimes you have to accept that there's something commendable about bad things. He can't tolerate the team losing three or four or five games in a row, so he will shout and blame the players. Doing so will obviously affect his relationship with the players. ”
Barros also said: "All the players in the pre-season training camp who have conflicts with him, or those who he thinks he may have conflicts in the future, are traded before the official training camp starts. I think what he wants is a team where he can transform players as he pleases, like the university team. ”
Not only is Pitino impatient with his players, he even scolds his own game videographer in front of everyone for his small mistakes.
You know, 20 years ago, when there was probably only vcr recording, once, the videographer's computer crashed. The video analysis meeting would have been a meeting full of reprimands and accountability, but the computer could not be used, and as a result, he turned to the videographer, and Pitino yelled at him: "What the hell is going on with you?" You flipped all night's worth of footage, and it turned out that none of this worked? The videographer could only stand aside, knowing that he had been trying to fix the computer, trying to get all the video files to play properly, but Pitino kept blaming him in a cold tone.
Oh yes, one more thing, the videographer is now the Los Angeles Lakers' championship coach, Frank Vogel.
Pitino has never fully understood the professional league, he has not been integrated into it — he tried to impose a curfew, he prepared a pamphlet to send to the players, which stipulates when the players will go back to the house to rest and when to eat. In such a big city, the players are all young people in their 20s, with a lot of money, and his mentality is still stuck on the college campus, and the Celtics players are laughing at him behind his back.
... Pitino's unsuccess with the Celtics is absolute, but it doesn't affect his illustrious coaching career.
He has won two NCAA national championships, he has led the team to five final fours, he led the Greek team to win the Greek League Championship and the National Cup in 2019, he is a brilliant coach, his coaching style seems to be very much in line with today's NBA - fast attack, three points, extreme fast play whirlwind, D'Antoni even said that his fast attack is faster than his own "in 7s". But Pitino recalls his NBA experience, either endlessly failing or complaining after the game of his own classic.
At the 2013 Hall of Fame ceremony, Pitino himself talked about it, which was a big deal for Boston, no, the whole of Massachusetts, and he said he hated Vince Carter even a lot during that time, because if it wasn't for his three-pointer, he wouldn't have said that quote to the thousands of media after the game.
"We've been playing hard all year and we've tried to keep a positive mindset. You are the negative people, you and some of the fans are. Larry Bird wouldn't have walked in through that door, and the fans, Kevin McHale, wouldn't have walked in through that door, and Robert Parrish wouldn't have walked in through that door. Even if you expect the three of them to walk in now, they're gray-haired and old-fashioned dragon clocks. And our team is young, passionate, hard-working, and we're going to get better. People don't realize it. Once you realize that the three of them won't walk through that door, the city will be a better place. Because those young people have been playing as hard as they can on the pitch. I want the team to have $90 million in salary space, and I hope we can buy good players from all over the world, but unfortunately we can't. The only thing we can do is work hard. The negativity of the city is too frustrating and disgusting. I saw how Jim Rice was booed, and I knew how Yazemsky was booed, and that was just too bad. This will make the world's greatest city look ugly. The only thing that can be done is to be as optimistic and aggressive as the players in our dressing room. It's just that we don't have Bird, McHale, Parrish, Cussi or Russell around us. What we have is just a group of young players who want to improve, who want to play well, and we will keep a positive mindset and keep it going. If you think I'm going to succumb to this negative emotion, you're wrong. You misunderstand the man who leads the whole team. ”
Looking at this passage today, we still can't imagine how upset Pitino was at the time, which can even be seen as the trigger for him to become unpopular with the NBA, in January 2001, Pitino resigned, the Celtics let assistant coach O'Brien take over the position, the following year, under pierce and Walker, the Celtics reached the Eastern Conference Finals, and it was not until 2005 that Antoine Walker, the big disciple of Pitino's disciple, shook hands with Pitino.
Pitino did not intend to say that this file was actually happening, but in the 2013 ncaa final four, Pitino couldn't help but think of these pasts.
In the final four between Louisville and Duke, Pitino's disciple Kevin Weir broke his leg alive in front of Pitino's eyes, white bones, and blood.
Everyone present was stunned at first, and some of Will's teammates began to cry, and some even felt sick.
"My mind went blank." Pitino said, "That scene was so tragic. To be honest, I've never been in a situation like this in my career, and I just don't know what to do. ”
But it's not over yet, and the game is going on.
"I have to gather everyone together and say something." Pitino said he walked up to Will, who said to him, "I'm all right, it's important to win the game." Pitino said for a moment, he didn't know why he was reminded of his fiasco in Boston, and later in Louisville in 2012.
It's hard to rebuild a broken team, it's even harder to rebuild a person's career. Pitino didn't say anything else to the players on the spot, he looked into Will's eyes, and then all the feelings eventually turned into a repeating sentence: "For Kevin, we have to win this game." Pitino is telling the players, in fact, he is also saying to himself, to his own failures. After the game, Pitino followed Ver to the hospital. The oncoming doctor congratulated him on winning the game, but he only cared about the other half: "Will be all right." ”
"Because of my love for the sport, I became the head coach. But that's only part of the reason. Pitino sighed, "These experiences have taught me a lot, on one level, I hope that young people can become a brilliant and successful person, and now on the same level, I think he has also carved me into a person who is on the road to success." ”
(Edogawa Kabei)