The Voice Of A New Generation

The Miami Heat's Pat Riley won the ring (his fifth, by the way), but it was his 2006 NBA Finals counterpart, Avery Johnson of the Dallas Mavericks, who earned the coveted (if unofficial) title of YouTube Coach of the Postseason. A pair of Avery Moments in particular were filmed, uploaded and frequently replayed, giving the 5'11" pepper pot a larger fan base than he had when he sparked the San Antonio Spurs to a championship in 1999.

After victories in Games 1 and 2 of the Finals, Johnson and his Dallas defense were powerless to stop Michael Jordan impersonator Dwyane Wade from leading the Heat to four straight wins. Despite that setback, it is difficult to look back at the 2005--06 season without seeing Johnson stomping and smiling, joking and juking his way to the NBA's Coach of the Year award. And without hearing him, too, enunciating every word in an animated Louisiana patois--tran-ZI-shon defense!--to which only Robert Penn Warren could do justice.

"Let's go, everybody," Brian McIntyre, the NBA's vice president of basketball communications, would say to the assembled media before an off-day practice session during the Finals. "Time for the Avery Show."

The YouTube clips showed the 41-year-old Johnson at his excitable best and his excitable worst. Avery Moment No. 1: Down the stretch of the Mavs' franchise-defining 119--111 overtime win over the Spurs in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals, Johnson frantically ran to the end of the bench to make a quick substitution. As he waved his arms like a drowning man signaling for a lifeguard, he accidentally jabbed forward Josh Howard in a sensitive area. Howard recoiled in pain, but Johnson didn't even realize he had hit him, grabbing swingman Adrian Griffin by the warmup jersey and hurrying him to the scorer's table. (At last check, the inadvertent crotch-chop had been viewed 243,625 times on YouTube.)

Avery Moment No. 2 was excruciating in a different way. It occurred as Johnson stood at the podium after a 101--100 Miami home victory in Game 5, during which Wade shot 25 free throws and hit 21, including two to ice it in overtime. The veteran beat reporter from The Dallas Morning News, Eddie Sefko, asked, predictably, for Johnson's reaction to the foul call that sent Wade to the line the final time. The coach looked around for a moment, stuck out his chin pugnaciously (actually, he does that all the time) and turned the question back on Sefko. "Tell me what you saw," he said.

Johnson went on in this vein, remaining just within the bounds of civility while putting Sefko on the spot. "I want you to give everybody an honest answer," Johnson said. "We got people from Israel and Minnesota, Chicago ... all over, Dallas ... Germany." Who makes those geographical leaps? (At last look, Avery's one-minute world tour had 20,436 hits.)

The rant, of course, was Johnson's way of passing judgment on the call without getting fined for criticizing the officials. It was wrong-headed and unnecessarily confrontational, and as soon as he left the podium, Johnson knew it. Later that night he called Sefko to apologize; he did it again at a press conference the following day. The funny thing was, no one in the media really blasted the coach. Everyone who knew him was sure that he would admit his mistake.

Johnson, you see, is the anti-Machiavelli: He's without either the guile or the been-there-done-that insouciance of his Finals counterpart. (To be fair, Riley has been there a lot and done that a lot.) The championship showdown could have easily been a duel of the dour, especially when Shaquille O'Neal turned relatively uncommunicative after lackluster performances in the first two games. But Johnson gave it life. After Dallas forward Jerry Stackhouse was suspended for a flagrant foul on O'Neal, Johnson was off and running when asked about it: "Well, I guess I've expressed my disappointment. And I don't know--what am I supposed to do? Everybody's so amazed that I disagree with the decision. I mean, what am I supposed to do, go out and have a parade and have a party? Just because the league comes down with a certain ruling, what are we supposed to do as coaches? Say, 'Amen'? I disagree with the ruling, all right?"

When Dallas owner Mark Cuban brought Johnson in as an assistant coach in September 2004, an electric charge went through the Mavericks. The head coach, Don Nelson, was losing his edge. His relationship with Cuban, never solid, was getting worse, and his emphasis on offense, while entertaining, had not gotten Dallas to the Finals. Del Harris, Nellie's top assistant, describes Johnson's arrival this way: "Suddenly, we had this guy with all this energy running up and down the court with the guys, hooting and hollering on every play. Nellie and I would just fill in the blanks whenever we had to. Avery's voice became the voice the players knew." (With that voice, what other option did they have?) The inevitable occurred on March 19, 2005, when Nelson walked away--or was nudged by Cuban--and Johnson took his place.

It happened by degrees, of course, but the Mavs, as much as any team in the league, came to assume the personality of their coach. Instead of talking about tightening up on defense, they tightened up on defense. Instead of talking about accountability on offense, they were held accountable. It wasn't in Nelson to infuse the team with toughness. It was--it is--in Johnson, an undrafted, undersized point guard out of unheralded Southern who had a 16-year NBA career in which he averaged 8.4 points and 5.5 assists. " Avery brings a toughness and discipline that we didn't have before," Griffin (now with the Chicago Bulls) said during the Finals, "and he knows how to bring that out [in his players]."

"It's Avery's spirit," says Howard. "He's never backed down from anybody. That's why he can sell toughness."