D-League coach (and DQ owner) Wolf on NBA's radar

Joe Wolf led the Colorado 14ers to the NBDL championship game last season. Garrett Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images

BOISE, Idaho -- The deep fryer hung 6 feet, 6 inches above the floor. Joe Wolf was 6-11. The fryer had him by five painful inches.

"Which is why my wife says I slouch now,'' says Wolf, who played 11 seasons in the NBA. "My brother is 7 feet, and I don't know how many times we've knocked ourselves loopy. But there's no workmen's comp for the owner.''

He would come home to Wisconsin from the Denver Nuggets or the Orlando Magic or any of the other six professional teams for which he played in the NBA or Spain, and he would go to work in the Dairy Queen. He had been talked into buying it by his older brother Jeff, whose seven knee operations had cut short his playing career. Based on that kind of experience, there was no telling when or how Joe might need to find another line of work. So there he was, standing in the heat of the kitchen, banging his head.

"Summers when I would get done with my playing in the NBA, I'd go in there and work the 80-hour weeks and have my 32 employees underneath me,'' he says. "We seat 84 people, we have drive-thru and we're open 10-10, seven days a week except for four and a half days a year. I'd work back in the kitchen doing everything. You make the burgers, you make the chicken sandwiches, the steak sandwiches, the fries, the hot dogs.''

The odor of the grease would seep into him like a tan. "Yeah, isn't that great?'' he says. "But you don't think about it because you're in it every day, and it's not like you take a day off. You're in there, you're working it, you're learning just like I do now. You learn a business by doing it, and that's what I'm trying to do now.''

Now he is coaching the Colorado 14ers of the NBADL, the minor league whose mission is to replenish the NBA with talent. It's much easier to pick out the future players in the D-League than it is to determine the future NBA coaches. Which coaches will be able to command respect while encouraging millionaires with guaranteed contracts to play for one another? You never really know until he's in the job, and even then, as Scott Skiles can tell you, the dynamic of success remains fragile and unpredictable on a daily basis.

But Wolf has a lot of the requisite qualities. Not only was he influenced heavily by his four years of playing for Dean Smith, but Wolf also is part of the Carolina brotherhood that has produced Larry Brown, Doug Moe, George Karl and so many other excellent coaches. He knows what it's like to be a first-round pick (No. 13 overall in 1987, by the Clippers) and to adjust to a variety of roles to fit into a team, as he did until a dislocated right elbow injury ended his career as a 34-year-old in 1999.

"I played with Michael [Jordan] and Sam Perkins in college, then I also played with Shaq [O'Neal] and Penny [Hardaway] in the heydays of the Orlando Magic, so I understood what their life was to a degree by being around them,'' Wolf says. "I understand what a role player's job is and what he goes through every day. I understand being on a non-guaranteed contract because I was there a couple of times, and how much pressure there is every day on everything that you do -- you don't want to do the wrong thing at that level because you may not get a second chance. So maybe trying to figure it out during my playing career has helped me trying to figure it out during my coaching career.''

1 of 2