Micheal Curry never played for Chuck Daly. But somewhere, ol' Daddy Rich is smiling.
Anybody who recalls the heyday of the Bad Boys remembers Daly staying blithely above the fray whenever the subject of playing time for one of the NBA's all-time deepest rosters would arise.
"I don't determine playing time," he would say, in perfect earnestness, "players determine playing time."
So as Curry enters his first season as an NBA head coach with a roster of similar depth, especially in the context of the 30-time NBA, he's putting it squarely back on players to fight for every available minute.
"Guys either accept their roles or they don't play," he said after Monday's practice, the clock now down to two days before the Pistons open the 2008-09 season under their first-time head coach, "and I think guys want to play. So guys accept their roles. But you've got to reward them for their role and you've got to stay true to them playing when it calls for them to play that role."
In other words, as Curry has said over the course of camp, if he's selling Arron Afflalo on being his perimeter stopper and then Michael Redd or Paul Pierce is torching the Pistons, Afflalo had better get the chance to show he can cool them down. If not ...
"That's where problems come in," Curry said. "It never comes with guys accepting a role. As a staff, and especially for me as a head coach, I have to be able to use guys with a situation calls (for) them and I have to put them in a situation to be successful. Other than that" - and here's where Daly's ears would surely perk up - "playing time ... when you compete every day in practice, guys know who should play in front of each other.
"Guys get to compete every day. We didn't have a camp in which we had our top five guys on one team and the next five on the next team. We mixed guys up. Guys got to compete, play in a whole lot of different roles. All these guys can rank the top 10 players on the team right now."
And in case there was any chance for ambiguity, Curry met individually with all 15 players on Friday to discuss everyone's roles in all of their specifics.
So everyone knows going in exactly how he fits in the grand scheme. And Curry rates each player's every possession for each game. So there shouldn't be many surprises over the course of the season if roles change, either. A player consistently grading out in the 90s isn't going to have to worry about a diminished role, but getting frequently downgraded for missed assignments or lapses in effort or judgment will show up on the grading sheet in advance of a role suddenly being diminished.
Joe Dumars said last summer that communication was the most important aspect of being a head coach in today's NBA and Curry so far is hitting it out of the park on that score. As Joe D said in the Q&A we're posting today and Tuesday on Pistons.com, while Curry isn't bashful about pointing out errors, neither is he miserly with his praise. Case in point: Even as Amir Johnson's preseason statistics didn't leap off the scoresheet, Curry was lauding the way Johnson was fulfilling the role as Curry had explained it to him since July. Then, when Johnson got sloppy in the preseason finale and fouled out in 15 minutes against Atlanta, he unequivocally said that a young player could not afford such regressions.
With the opener approaching, Curry said there's a sense of readiness about his team.
"We're ready to get into it," he said. "You kind of get tired of practicing and playing against the guys. You're ready to get into the real game situations and that's natural. But we're ready to play and we'll see on Wednesday where we're at."
There's not a hint from Curry that anything about the job has him awestruck as tipoff draws near, though he admits that he deals with anticipation a little differently as a coach than he did as a player.
"The night before games, a ton of things are going through my head as a coach and I just grab my paper and pen and start writing different things down," he said. "As a player, I was OK. All you had to do was go out there and hit somebody one play" - though this generally works better for football players - "and your butterflies go away. Now when I get anxious at night, butterflies, I just grab my pen and paper and start jotting things down."
Kwame Brown, recovering from a right shoulder strain suffered a week ago, went through his first full practice on Monday and should be good to go on Wednesday. Indiana got bigger over the summer when it traded for Rasho Nesterovic and drafted Georgetown's Roy Hibbert, so it could be a game when Brown is the first big man off of Curry's bench instead of Jason Maxiell.
The Pacers will be missing Mike Dunleavy, who had a breakout season for the Pacers a year ago. Dunleavy played only 12 minutes in preseason while experiencing knee tendinitis.
Chuck daly is one of the pistons' best philosophers ever served the motor city. i believe mike will use the same thing. kwame brown? maybe he will be the next prodigy sun of detroit AKA Ben Wallace.
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