Net Worker

They call him Coach?

That didn’t occur to anyone in the ‘80s, Byron Scott included.

He was the Laker you saw but didn’t know, whose quiet demeanor belied an exciting dunk-over-you game, who accepted his role so completely and promoted himself so little, he flew under the radar, their stealth shooting guard.

That’s what people thought he was, a shooter, period, but he was sound and tough too, the one they’d put on Michael Jordan (gee, thanks), the blunt one who got right to the point, so while Magic Johnson would note that young Vlade Divac needed to turn it up, Scott would say:

“Some days Vlade comes to play and some days he doesn’t.”

Johnson was smiles and long answers. Scott was succinct and if reporters didn’t ask his opinion, just as happy.

Laker fans adored Johnson, respected Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, admired James Worthy, marveled at Michael Cooper’s Coop-a-Loops and one season even voted A.C. Green, who was more devout than charismatic, into the All-Star starting lineup ahead of Karl Malone.

Magic, Kareem and Big Game James, of course, were perennial All-Stars, but Scott never made it, not even in 1997-98, when he averaged 21.7 points and shot 53%.

But, as Scott noted recently, good things come to those who wait.

And really good things come to those who wait and watch and listen....

It’s fall, 2000, just like the good old days, or as close as Scott, newly hired to coach the woebegone New Jersey Nets, can make them.

In his first training camp, they’re dropping like, well, Nets. A friend, who has flown in to help Scott kick off his coaching career, thinks it’s hilarious.

“Byron has got Pat Riley written all over him,” Johnson says. “Has his notes right in his shorts. I hollered out, ‘Junior Riley!’

“I was at the first practice and Kendall Gill came out and said, ‘Man, this is the hardest practice I’ve ever been in!’

“I said, ‘What’d I tell you?’

“Three guys dropped out. One--[Evan] Eschmeyer--went over and started throwing up.

“I said, ‘That’s Junior Riley.’”

Of course, in the old days, Scott rolled his eyes at Pat Riley as much as any of them. Now here’s Byron, giving his fledglings a taste of the lash, or at least more laps.

Then there’s the famous Byron candor. Even Riley played that game, covering for players--or blaming the media for criticizing them--even as he criticized them.

Scott still just lays it out.

Last season, in what turned out to be a promising and disastrous debut at the same time, Scott zinged them all publicly, even Stephon Marbury, who was doted on and feared by everyone else in the organization.

“He will say some things,” Jason Kidd, Marbury’s successor and the franchise’s savior, says of his new coach. “He say something bad?”

Not recently. This season, in one of the bigger turnarounds in NBA history, the Nets lead the Eastern Conference by 41/2 games.

“Well, he speaks his mind,” Kidd says. “As a player, I never thought of him as a guy who shoots straight from the hip and so it took some time to get used to.

“But I think the big thing is, you have to look at it as, he’s telling the truth.”

Of course, Scott always shot the same way. This is just the first time he has been in a position where anyone noticed.

Last season, the truth was painful, but for the moment, at least, the Nets are the best team in the East. Scott just made his All-Star debut, as a coach.

He’s a star in the new wave of coaches, outspoken, up-from-the-ranks guys such as Orlando’s Doc Rivers and Seattle’s Nate McMillan, who won’t have to worry where their next job, at $3 million a year and up, is coming from.

Of course, these are the Nets, so you don’t want to ask what could go wrong now.

In Which His Dues Are Paid in Full

“I’ll tell you what Earvin did for me.... I thought playing in high school and college that I was a leader, probably by more of an example. Where he taught me not only to do it but act it and be it and talk it and walk it and everything else....

“I wouldn’t say I got out from under his wing, but I took a little bit of Earvin with me.”

--Scott

Five seasons in the league, four appearances in the finals, three rings, what was the hard part?

That didn’t come until later.

Acquired in 1984 from the San Diego Clippers for the popular Norm Nixon, Scott first had to prove to Norman’s co-Musketeers, Johnson and Cooper, that he could take anything they could heap upon him.

After that, it was a purple and gold fairy tale.

“Magic and Coop were the tough ones on me,” Scott says. “It wasn’t Riles. Magic and Coop were a little upset at the fact I had taken Norm Nixon’s spot and so they made it hard on me the first couple weeks of practice....

“One day Coop and I got into it. Magic looked at me the next day, just kind of said, ‘You know, you’ve got heart. You didn’t back down from us, you took everything we gave you, you just kept coming.’”

Depending on who’s telling the story, the process took weeks or months, but after that, Scott came on as the new Third Musketeer and the glory days rolled on.

Then, they ran out.

The day before the 1989 NBA Finals, an eagerly waited series between the twice-defending champion Lakers and Detroit, which had won 63 games to the Lakers’ 57, Scott tore a hamstring in a typically rugged Riley rebounding drill. Johnson tore a hamstring in Game 2 and the Pistons swept them.

None of the Lakers actually said they shouldn’t have been running the drill, then or thereafter. It was just what they did.

Of course, who knew the program had only a year left?

In 1990, the Phoenix Suns upset the Lakers in the second round and players muttered darkly that Riley had gone too far. Taking his cue, Riley, who was as drained as they were, accepted a buyout and left.

A year later, the Lakers were back in the finals under Mike Dunleavy, but the Chicago Bulls dispatched them in five games.

A year later, Johnson retired, saying he had tested positive for HIV.

A year after that, Dunleavy left for a better offer in, of all places, Milwaukee.

A year after that, Scott’s contract ran out and the Lakers let him go. At 32, he was already in his twilight years: two as a Pacer, one in Vancouver, one back with the Lakers, one in Greece, ballgame ... almost.

In Indiana, he had played for Larry Brown, who had his own way of seeing things. Everyone had always said Scott couldn’t handle the ball; in Byron’s first time back in the Forum, Brown started him at point guard.

Everyone had always thought of Scott as Johnson’s little brother, starting with Byron (or as he put it recently, “Still am.”)

Now, however, Brown encouraged him to think about coaching.

“The thing that I really loved about Larry Brown, when he would come up with a game plan, he would always present it to us,” Scott says. “He would go through it and ask if we liked it or if we wanted to do something differently because we were the ones out there playing.

“So many times, he would say, ‘How did you guys [Lakers] do it?’

“And I would show him. It just got to the point, he looked at me and he said, ‘One day, you’ll make a good coach. If you ever decide to do this, you’ll make a good coach.’

“I mean, from that day on, that’s all I started doing. I started thinking about it and I started writing things down, writing plays

Two seasons in Sacramento as an assistant and he got his opportunity.

Fortunately or not....

Showtime in The Swamp

“This is the franchise synonymous with hideous disaster, rotten luck and worse timing. In previous lives, the Nets married Calamity Jane, vacationed on Atlantis, flew the Hindenburg. But now luck--and results--are changing....

“No one writes, ‘Trade Me’ or ‘All Alone’ on his sneakers (all are tied, incidentally). There hasn’t been a single ‘Whoop dee damn doo.’”

--Fred Kerber, New York Post

Imagine the Clippers in a North Jersey swamp, ritually mismanaged, seemingly cursed, so overshadowed by their “cross-town rivals” that when they meet in their own arena, it’s packed by New York Knick fans, cheering against them.

Imagine, Derrick Coleman of “Whoop dee damn doo” fame, actually making up T-shirts to ridicule management’s $9 million-a-year offer.

Imagine designated savior John Calipari calling a reporter “a Mexican idiot,” and getting carried out feet first 20 games into his third season, with a 3-17 record.

Imagine bringing in Marbury as their long-sought franchise player, only to learn he is a tad hard on the other players and openly contemptuous of Keith Van Horn.

Imagine a do-nothing committee of owners called the Secaucus Seven, which finally sells to starry-eyed Lewis Katz, who hires Rod Thorn at $3 million per--twice the going rate for general managers--then sells control to something called “YankeeNets,” which is headed by (shudder) George Steinbrenner, who puts the basketball team under the operational control of Lou Lamoriello, the boss of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils.

Imagine Scott in his first season, getting them off fast (6-4), then watching them succumb to the usual horrific combination of injuries and egos.

Then, after their 26-56 finish, imagine Thorn being told he has to dump salary: Van Horn’s, Marbury’s, someone’s, as long as it’s big.

Then imagine Thorn, whose accomplishments to date are modest enough (see: Chicago Bulls, where he drafted Ronnie Lester after he blew out his knee, Quintin Daily after the rape charge and Ennis Whatley after his drug incident), makes one of the great trades in NBA history:

Marbury for Kidd.

Kidd had had his own problem, a domestic abuse arrest in Phoenix, but had owned up to it by all accounts, even if it wasn’t enough for the Suns, who were growing desperate, themselves.

As a player, however, Kidd is a wellspring of karma, 180 degrees from the aloof Marbury, and the effect on the Nets has been galvanizing. Throw in a good signing (Todd MacCulloch) and a return to good health (Kenyon Martin, Kerry Kittles) and here they are.

On the other hand, exactly where is that?

Kidd is a free agent in 2003 and there are already signs he and his wife, Joumana, don’t like Lamoriello’s market-the-team-not-the-individual philosophy.

Lamoriello has the credibility that comes with NHL titles, but this isn’t the NHL. Kidd is relatively soft-spoken and low-maintenance, but an NBA star is an NBA star, used to being lavishly stroked and perked.

So it’s not a good sign when Joumana, like Jason a native Californian, tells ESPN magazine’s Ric Bucher she was “counting the days” when they arrived--although she says she’s over it--or that she had to negotiate with the team for premium parking and other details.

Nor does it look good when Kidd didn’t dismiss Tim Duncan’s musing All-Star weekend about one day playing together, although Kidd later noted he’s happy where he is, etc.

But that’s a challenge, or calamity, for another day. The Nets have enough problems in the present, playing the Lakers in the start of a four-game trip, but they’re still on a 55-win pace that would represent a 29-game improvement, fourth biggest in NBA history.

A little bit of Earvin, a little bit of Brown, a lot of Riley ... it adds up.

“I’m a very positive person, always have been,” Scott said recently. “Even though it was real rough last year, you do tend to learn different things about yourself as a player or as a person or as a coach. I learned a lot about myself: Hey, I can take the adversity. I can take it, deal with it and I can grow from it.”

Good gigs, or bad ones, are hard to find. Rick Barry, now a talk-show host in Oakland, campaigns openly for the Golden State job. Abdul-Jabbar himself just took a job coaching the Oklahoma City entry in the U.S. Basketball League.

For better and/or worse, Scott’s got his.

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From Showtime to Sideline

The Lakers of the 1980s were one of the most successful teams in NBA history. Several members of that team have had mixed results in the coaching ranks. A look:

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THE .500 CLUB

Since joining the NBA in the 1976-77 season, New Jersey has had only seven seasons of .500 or better. Byron Scott’s Nets are currently 39-19 (.672):

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*The Nets were 47-29 when Brown left for Kansas with six games to go. Bill Blair took over, the Nets went 2-4 to finish the regular season and were swept in the first round of the playoffs.

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