The Nba Goes Back To School

If it is true that we have just two real homes in our lifetime, the first being "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," as Robert Frost put it, then surely the second is school; no other place was ever more a haven for our growing up, no other time in our lives more certainly our own. And, for many of us, it is college, of all schools, that evokes the strongest sense of place, the most intense sense of loss when we leave it.

It is little wonder then that professional basketball, after years of taking the college game's best players, has gotten homesick for the campus. "I had the most fun of my life while I was in college," says New Jersey Nets Coach Larry Brown (North Carolina '63), "and if you ask anyone in the pros, they'll say the same thing." With more former college coaches in the NBA than ever before and with fresh, college-like emphasis on teaching and the execution of fundamentals, pro basketball seems about to graduate to new levels of excellence. "No question," says the Houston Rockets' Del Harris, who coached at Indiana's Earl-ham College and was an assistant at the University of Utah before coaxing the Rockets to the NBA finals last season. "My definition of pro basketball the last five years: It's the college game with better players and no four corners."

After nearly a decade of declining fan interest—a decade in which the NCAA championship game has become the centerpiece of CBS's three-year, $48-million college package—the NBA seems intent upon revitalizing its image and its game and, to a surprising extent, it has turned to the campuses for new ideas. "All you have to do is look at the job Cotton Fitz-simmons did in the playoffs last year," says San Diego Coach Paul Silas, referring to Kansas City's surprising victory over Phoenix in the Western Conference semifinals. "He's a former college coach, and there were a lot of college-type ideas in his approach to playing the Suns. It was a great job."

Fitzsimmons, who's looking extremely collegiate these days with his new wavy hair, was on the leading edge of an influx of teacher-coaches when he came to the NBA from Kansas State in 1970, but he has been around so long now that he seems to have forgotten his roots. "The college coaches have had some influence in areas like organization, scouting and use of assistants." he says, "but the NBA has also followed the lead of the NFL in many of the same respects. I don't think anybody in our league is trying to be like North Carolina's Dean Smith. I don't have a blue team."

But that's not the point. Sure—and thank goodness—the college-coaches-turned-pro haven't carried with them every gimmick they used at State U. What they have brought to the NBA are multiple, pressing defenses and playbooks that actually get used. The trend toward such coaches and the style they favor has gathered so much momentum over the past decade or so that they now hold sway just at a time when the league needs a shot of innovative thinking.

At the start of the the 1967-68 NBA season, only two of the league's 12 head coaches had college experience (Cincinnati's Ed Jucker and Los Angeles' Butch Van Breda Kolff); within a year the two had become five, with the addition of Chicago's Dick Motta, Philadelphia's Jack Ramsay and Cincinnati's Bob Cousy. Motta, who came from Weber State to take over the Bulls, had never even seen an NBA game before he coached in one. When the league opened its season last Friday, 13 of its 23 coaches and 24 of its 43 assistants had coached in college. Only two teams, Milwaukee and New York, have coaching staffs with no college experience. The impact of such men has so altered the NBA game that there are times when it almost resembles basketball.

"There has been such a large influx of college ideas into the game that it has revolutionized pro basketball," says Silas. "There's a lot more coaching being done today than just throwing the ball out on the floor." Silas, who became a head coach as soon as his 16-year playing career was over, believes that the NBA's original "college" coach was the Celtics' Red Auerbach, who never worked on a campus in his life. "I don't think these coaches are doing anything that Red wasn't thinking about 20 years ago," Silas says. "In a sense, Red was always a college-type coach. Red thought the whole thing out." No wonder Auerbach teams won nine titles in the NBA's first 20 years, before other franchises took to hiring college men. The present Boston coach, Bill Fitch, prepped for the job at Coe College, North Dakota, Bowling Green and Minnesota before taking over the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1970.

"It used to be that you'd see the same offense everywhere," says Golden State talent consultant Pete Newell, who won an NCAA title while coaching at Cat in 1959. "All these new college coaches represent different thinking." And that has produced a variety of new approaches to the game. Don Nelson, who came to coaching directly from the Celtics' lineup, has given the Milwaukee Bucks a playbook that involves about 80 pages on team defense and another 20 on offense, while Motta—now with the Dallas Mavericks after a four-year term in Washington—says, "We use the same basic offense I've used since I coached junior high school teams. It's proven at every level." Whatever the method, the pros are spending more time looking at videotapes and chalk boards than at any time in the league's 35-year history. "There's definitely more teaching today than ever before," says Utah Jazz assistant Bill Bertka, once the coach at Kent State. "The offenses are much more sophisticated than in the past when it was more a clear-out and one-on-one game."

Phoenix Suns General Manager Jerry Colangelo, who was an early proponent of bringing college coaches into the NBA, says, "When I came into the league 15 years ago, I was appalled at the lack of sophistication at the coaching level. Even former players who are now coaching learned from college coaches, and it has resulted in improved coaching principals."

To most NBA fans the name Doctor means Julius Erving, but to many insiders, the "doctor" is Jack Ramsay, who, most observers agree, started the college-coach trend in Philadelphia 13 years ago. After having been general manager of the 76ers for two years (when the 76ers won 68 games and the title in 1966-67, and the next year, when they won 62 games), Ramsay took over as coach of a team that had traded Wilt Chamberlain, and then lost Center Lucious Jackson early in the season. So Ramsay, who had earned his reputation with short, quick teams at St. Joseph's College in the late '50s and early '60s, reverted to the pressing and trapping defenses that had helped him make his name. The 76ers won 55 games that year. Ramsay, who has a doctorate in education from Penn, thinks Dean Smith of North Carolina and Bobby Knight of Indiana are the college coaches who have most influenced the pro game: "Players from Dean's program know the running game and trapping defenses. Bobby's players are always sound defensively."