Why Journeyman Head Coach Terry Stotts is Perfect for Rip City

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Jared Wright of partner site Oregon Sports News

Terry Stotts of the Trail Blazers, via Wikimedia Commons

“I’m gonna go have a beer.”

Those words, uttered by Portland Trail Blazers head coach Terry Stotts after Game 6 of his team’s playoff series against the Houston Rockets, immediately endeared him to myself and my dad.

We had arrived home from work just before the fourth quarter started, so we were able to watch the Blazers win in incredibly dramatic fashion after Damian Lillard’s buzzer-beating three over Chandler Parsons. The swings of that game (really, the whole series) had gripped our guts like a roller coaster ride, dragging us up and down, and it couldn’t have been any more comfortable for Stotts. After all, this was his biggest moment as a head coach in the NBA.

Standing at 6-8, Stotts always has a slightly placid, hangdog look about him, a look you associate with old bloodhounds. That calm demeanor is something most players secretly appreciate, since NBA players as a rule tend to tune out coaches that continually get on them. This is why the mellow, laid-back Mike D’Antoni continued to get great jobs well after the league caught on to his offensive wizardry, while a hard-driving coach like Doug Collins--someone who loves the game and knows more about basketball than pretty much anybody--keeps getting booted out the door after two or three years.

Stotts' History With the Blazers

Like most NBA coaches, Stotts sits somewhere in between. When he came to Portland, Lillard had just been drafted, and the rest of the team with the exception of LaMarcus Aldridge was very young--and Aldridge himself was just 27. He came in knowing he had a team that was going to take its lumps, but he had to try to make Portland competitive in order to placate Aldridge. Fortunately, Stotts has ample experience dealing with star NBA players.

After playing professionally throughout the 1980s, a career that took him from Italy, to the now-defunct Continental Basketball Association (where he played for George Karl), then finally to Spain, Stotts joined Karl’s staff in 1990 and helped the CBA’s Albany Paltroons achieve a CBA-best ever 50-6 record. That feat got the attention of the Seattle SuperSonics, who hired Karl as the head coach in 1992. Karl brought Stotts along, and the young assistant was part of a staff that had Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, Sam Perkins, Detlef Shrempf, and others on Sonics teams that still stand amongst the best squads in the underrated, rich history of pro basketball in the Pacific Northwest.

After reaching the Finals in 1996, Seattle unraveled during the following seasons for various reasons; I could fill another column with the details. To be brief, Payton’s ego swallowed the team up, Kemp fell into deep bitterness because of his crappy contract situation (the Sonics stupidly paid a stiff backup center, Jim McIlvaine, more than twice what they paid one of the best players to ever wear that uniform. (Aaaaagggghhhh!!!!), and Karl, in what would become a pattern throughout his coaching career, was unwilling or unable to stop the plunge he could see coming a mile away.

Eventually, Karl left the Sonics in 1998 and was hired by the Milwaukee Bucks shortly after. He again brought Stotts along, and this time Stotts worked with a young shooting guard named Ray Allen, who ironically would end up starring for the SuperSonics later in his career. Allen was the star on Bucks teams that went deep in the postseason in the early part of the 2000s, only to be defeated by Allen Iverson’s Philadelphia 76ers under questionable circumstances in 2001. Karl and Allen were both fined heavily for criticizing the officiating (which, admittedly, sucked back then), but Stotts apparently did well enough as George Karl’s protégé to get noticed by the Atlanta Hawks.

Atlanta gave Stotts his first crack at being the head man in 2002 after firing Lon Kruger, and while I’m sure he did the best he could, Stotts pretty much was doomed from the start. He basically was little more than an interim coach, not even lasting two full seasons before he was let go. Stotts went to the Golden State Warriors as an assistant, then became the head coach at Milwaukee.

Earning a Reputation

All of those stops lasted only a couple of seasons, and Stotts was beginning to get a reputation as a carpetbagger; he hadn’t stayed more than two years at the same position since leaving George Karl. Stotts had plenty of success as an assistant, but he couldn’t seem to stick as a head coach, and it was starting to get to him a little bit. Then he got a phone call from Rick Carlisle, who’d been hired by the Dallas Mavericks in September 2008.

Carlisle was the former coach of both the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers, and had coached against Karl and Stotts often when they were at Milwaukee. When Carlisle was putting his staff together, he considered bringing Stotts aboard to help maximize the talents of Dirk Nowitzki, the Mavs’ franchise player. After getting an endorsement from Karl, Carlisle hired Stotts as an assistant, beginning a partnership that would transform both their careers.

Carlisle was a former member of the Boston Celtics, and a close friend of Larry Bird during their playing days; in fact, Carlisle was the one who’d succeeded Bird as the Pacers’ coach when Bird stepped down in 2000. He knows what it takes to win in the NBA, something you can say about every coach in the league. What separates Carlisle is his ability to communicate that to his players, that ability to get 15 mercurial, individualistic basketball players to trust him unconditionally--a quality maybe five or so coaches in the world have, a quality that Stotts’ mentor, Karl, always lacked.

Stotts was the guy responsible for the offense in Dallas, and after the Mavericks’ out-of-nowhere run to the 2011 championship, he felt the urge to take what he learned from working with Rick Carlisle and try his hand at a head coaching gig for the third time. After the Trail Blazers basically quit on the defensive-minded, demanding Nate McMillian in 2012, Portland decided to go in another direction philosophically in hiring the offensive-minded Stotts…who coached McMillian when the latter played in Seattle. Irony is delicious.

I admit to not being pleased when the Blazers introduced Stotts as the 11th head coach (not counting interim coaches) in their history. (Quick tangent: the Trail Blazers have been around 45 years. Given the extremely high turnover rate of head coaches in the NBA, I find it remarkable that Portland’s only had 11 guys man the big chair. Then again, we are talking about an organization that’s employed just TWO radio play-by-play men in that same time frame.) Stotts seemed like the usual retread hire, a guy you bring in when you can’t lure the big names or strike out on the young, hotshot assistants.

Well, I can also admit to being wrong.

As Stotts sat on the podium after the biggest head coaching win in his career, a win that proved to the NBA that he, finally, was able to stick as a head coach, he said the usual things a victorious coach says. He praised the Houston Rockets as a worthy opponent, noting that Dwight Howard ate them alive the whole series. He highlighted the achievements of his own team. He looked tired, drained, exhausted after the roller-coaster ride he, and all of Rip City, had been on for 48 minutes.

Then, at the end, he cracked a small smile and said he was going to grab a beer.

Terry Stotts can have one on me anytime.

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