Rick Pitino, Headed to HOF, Remembers Celtic Years Fondly

That makes one of us. He says he learned his lessons in the pros? Yeah, the lesson was "go back to coaching college".


http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/09/06/rick-pitino-says-celtics-years-were-great-experience/qUqEcgEhOLqz51k8EJ0KqO/story.html


Rick Pitino, headed to Hall, fondly recalls Celtics years

By Gary Washburn | GLOBE STAFF SEPTEMBER 06, 2013

Decorated college coach Rick Pitino said he learned his lessons in the pros.


Decorated college coach Rick Pitino said he learned his lessons in the pros.



The man in those pristine white suits, looking like a descendant of Colonel Sanders on the sideline of the KFC Yum! Center, is headed to Springfield this weekend for induction into theBasketball Hall of Fame.

Those suits are an indication of Rick Pitino’s passion for the University of Louisville. So is the Pitino who stood at the foot of Kevin Ware’s bed with the Midwest Regional championship trophy after the Cardinals forward awoke from surgery to repair a horrifying broken right tibia suffered in a March victory over Duke.

The Pitino we see now is quite different than the one who strutted into Boston coming off a national championship and NCAA Finals appearance at the University of Kentucky, personally anointing himself the man who was going to change the fortunes of a declining franchise that was quickly becoming insignificant.

He had NBA success with the New York Knicks in the 1980s and admittedly assumed he would exceed those accomplishments when he took over the Celtics. It was four mostly miserable years, a period in which the organization was attempting to compete with the Bulls, Lakers, and Spurs while deep in an organization upheaval and devoid of talent.


Pitino has led three schools — Providence, Kentucky, and Louisville — to Final Four appearances and is one of the most decorated and respected coaches in NCAA history. His induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame was hardly a surprise, but the 60-year-old Pitino, hair graying, 35 years into his coaching career and coming off an impressive national championship run, reflected on his four-year tenure in Boston as the turning point in his career.

It served as a warning for college coaches that the NBA is a different species, with salary caps, disgruntled players and their posses. It taught Pitino he is better at convincing parents in a rural Kentucky home to allow their child to start his next phase of life at Louisville than crossing his fingers for good luck in the NBA draft lottery.

Turning point

Although Pitino’s years with the Celtics are viewed as an abject failure for the organization and coach, one the Celtics would not recover from for a half-decade, Pitino considers that period as one that humbled him and prepared him for the success he now enjoys at Louisville.

In three-plus seasons with Boston, the Celtics were 102-146, missing the playoffs in his first three seasons. Pitino resigned after a 112-86 loss at Miami on Jan. 6, 2001. He retreated to his Miami-area home and never returned to Boston, as promised, to address the media.

Two months later, he accepted the coaching position at the University of Louisville.

“I think it sort of defined me in the end because there [were] probably two things missing in my life as a coach,” he said Thursday in a phone interview from New York. “One was humility and the other one was failure. We took over a 15-win team before we got there and I banked everything on getting Tim Duncan [in the draft]. And when that didn’t happen, you failed them. But I left there understanding that there’s nothing wrong with failure if you learned the lesson of why you failed, and the other thing is it taught me great humility of why you win and why you lose.

“I think I wouldn’t be complete today if I didn’t learn that. To me, Boston was, although it wasn’t the success stories of all the other programs, it was probably the most lessons learned in my life. To me, it was a great experience.”

Bad bounce

The word “great” is relative. For Pitino, the Celtics experience taught him that even the most brilliant and astute coach can’t single-handedly lead a franchise to prosperity. He needed help, he needed luck, and he needed patience. And he had none during that time, partly because he pushed away those who wanted to aid in the resurrection of the Celtics.

“You pick yourself up, you don’t blame anybody and you don’t point any fingers and you say ‘OK, what can you do better this time around?’ and that’s exactly what I did,” he said. “For about a couple of months, I blamed the Ping-Pong balls, I blamed it being on unlucky, I blamed it on everything but the truth.

“The [fact of the] matter is I didn’t do a good enough job as an executive. It also taught me about wearing a lot of hats, focusing on what you can do. It was a class organization. They treated me great. I [had] nothing but great things to say about it when Brad [Stevens] got the job. It’s just that it didn’t work out for me, but it did work out for me because without the Celtics, I wouldn’t have learned all about failure and all about humility.”

Being general manager and coach was too much responsibility. Coaching, working with young men and wrapping up his game program in his right hand, smacking it on the floor and pushing his team to increase the fury of his full-court press was his passion.

“Being at Louisville going on 13 years now, and it feels like it was yesterday,” he said. “That means you’re having a lot of fun.”

Pro education

Pitino says the Louisville experience is challenging. Convincing recruits to stay in school past one season and dealing with teenage support systems who are banking on the player’s NBA success is stressful, as is the pursuit of the nation’s top talent.

“That’s probably the thing I learned most about Boston; I had to throw darts at myself that I was very impatient because I wanted to win, wanted to win, wanted to win,” he said. “You don’t learn. The NBA is a very impatient way of doing it and you have to look at the way you make trades, the way you draft, everybody wants it now. That was one of the things I took away was patience.”

Pitino admits his lack of patience and arrogance caused him to trade Chauncey Billups after just 51 games, a move that eventually exemplified the hastiness of the Pitino era. Yet, he was faced with a similar situation at Louisville, when he recruited a high-scoring guard out of Franklin High School in Seattle named Peyton Siva.

Siva arrived at Louisville with more Allen Iverson in his game than Rajon Rondo and a troublesome freshman year sparked those Billups memories.

“When you’re young and not as good as the other people, it takes time and it takes patience,” Pitino said. “Looking back on it today, if I could live in the past, I would have said I’m going to be patient and make this young man into a point guard. [For Siva], I said, ‘He’s going to be a point guard someday. We’re going to be patient.’ Those are the lessons that I learned from the Chauncey Billups thing.”

Pitino arrives in Springfield a made man. He will be greeted by a large group of his former players to celebrate his accomplishment. Winning never gets old, especially with kids too young to remember Providence, the Knicks, Kentucky, or even the Celtics. Pitino’s incoming freshman class was 6 years old when he began at Louisville.

And Pitino is proudly not the man he was 15 years ago. He has been rejuvenated — and humbled.

“I’m probably more passionate in the last three years than I’ve ever been since working at age 24 at Boston University,” he said. “But I’m passionate for the right reasons. I’m actually at a really good place right now and I understand that my window is closing but passion is probably as [high] as it has ever been.

“Humility is what makes teams great. I’ve preached it for a long period of time.”



bob


.

One of the top 50 or so, greatest basketball coaches ever.

Just not in the NBA.

He simply belongs in the college game. A deserving addition to the HOF.

We'll just forget about that part in green...

If I don't have something nice to say about someone....

Not sure why he even bothered to mention his tenure with the Celtics. That time didn't reflect very well on his coaching and decision-making ability.

Some guys can coach grown men, and some guys can't.

KJ

Boneheaded move to hire the wonderboy and give him all that power. We should have hired Larry Legend to run things, he knows patience, perssonel, commands respect. If hes talking any phase of hoops, whos not listening and learning?

I was disappointed not to find the part where he talked about learning not to be so arrogant. This reads like a carefully choreographed, self-serving regurgitation of excuses cloaked in a few token mia culpas.

Sam

....and he wouldn't even take any advice or have a group of different people to bounce things/ideas off of, he was a real egomaniac while he was here, alot of his trades sucked. He knew he was going to a rebuilding program and instead of teaching and developing, he got rid of alot of good players real fast.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/09/08/rick-pitino-takes-green-eyed-look-back-upon-basketball-hall-fame-induction/YF10pie1NXvC4nS5SeWumL/story.html


Time to forgive Rick Pitino for Celtics era

By Gary Washburn |  GLOBE STAFF     SEPTEMBER 09, 2013

During his speech, Rick Pitino touched upon his BU and Providence days, and even those dismal ones with the Celtics.


During his speech, Rick Pitino touched upon his BU and Providence days, and even those dismal ones with the Celtics.

SPRINGFIELD — It took nearly 13 minutes into his speech during Sunday’s induction ceremonies at the Basketball Hall of Fame before Rick Pitino addressed his three-plus seasons coaching the Celtics.

Pitino initially gave the impression he would rather skip that forgettable period, as he jumped from talking about his tenure at Kentucky — calling it “Camelot” — to his current job coaching the University of Louisville.


It was understandable if he wished to omit the Celtics years. They weren’t pretty. There are still many Celtics fans who are bitter about the decisions he made during that time.

Pitino devised a brilliant way to discuss that tenure. He said he was taking pictures at Symphony Hall before the ceremony when Larry Bird walked in, and Pitino couldn’t pass on the opportunity to acknowledge the coincidence.

“He finally walks through the door,” Pitino said, in reference to his infamous March 1, 2000, postgame speech after a loss to Toronto, when he chastised Celtics fans for glorifying the past. “And I said, ‘What took you so long to walk through that door?’ And he said to me, ‘You don’t want me now.’

“You may wonder what I learned about the Boston Celtics. I am really, really grateful to them. I learned more than I gave. I didn’t give too much except leaving Jim O’Brien to master the helm. But I learned patience, humility, and a lot of people think it’s because of losing that you learn humility and it’s a major factor. I gained the humility because I had the greatest treat for four years.”

Pitino has enjoyed great success since resigning from the Celtics in January 2001. He has resurrected his career, emerging as one of the great college coaches of all-time. His speech mostly addressed those years at Boston University (1978-83), where he said the players called him “POP,” a name he was humbled by until he found out it stood for “Prisoners of Pitino,” describing his unrelenting practice schedule.

He talked about reaching the Final Four at Providence (1987) when it appeared he would never win a game in the Big East with coaches such as John Thompson, Jim Boeheim, Lou Carnesecca, and Rollie Massimino as rivals.

He talked about telling his wife they were going on a vacation to Kentucky after his tenure with the Knicks and sticking around even after athletic director C.M. Newton told him that the program was in ruins after a well-publicized probation. He touched on the 1996 national championship at Kentucky and then skipped to Louisville.

Would Pitino bypass his humbling stretch with the Celtics? But standing less than two hours from TD Garden, in the shadows of murals of Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Bob Cousy, and Tommy Heinsohn, Pitino acknowledged that time, talking about a conversation he had with Auerbach, who was removed as president when Pitino took the reins of the organization in 1997.

“One night I called Red and said, ‘Red, it’s not going well. What advice do you have?’ ” Pitino said in his speech. Auerbach said he would ask his players, such as Russell, Heinsohn, and Cousy, what plays he should run.

Pitino said with a roster featuring players such as Travis Knight and Andrew DeClercq, that was nearly impossible. But he said he did ask Antoine Walker, Chauncey Billups, Ron Mercer, and Walter McCarty.

“ ‘How the hell would I know coach?’ ” Pitino said Walker told him. “ ‘You get paid to coach and we get paid to play.’ Verbatim.”

Pitino said he called Auerbach and he laughed hysterically at that story. Obviously times had changed. Players played. They weren’t students of the game. The strategy stuff was up to the coach.

“But I learned about humility with the Boston Celtics because of that legendary organization,” Pitino said. “When you see the way Bill Russell talks about the Celtics. When you see the way Cousy, Heinsohn, and John Havlicek carry themselves, you learn that’s the way you should act. Although I didn’t give too much to the Boston Celtics, I gained so much.”

Pitino spent nearly one-quarter of his speech on the Celtics. And it may be time for the Celtics faithful who dislike that era to forgive if not forget. The Celtics rebounded and eventually won an NBA championship.

Pitino made some poor roster moves in Boston, allowing his arrogance and impatience to have too much influence on the fate of the organization.

“We had a lot of fun moments; we had a lot of small accomplishments,” said McCarty, who played for Pitino at Kentucky and with the Celtics, and assisted him in Louisville. “But in the end, it wasn’t a fun time. It wasn’t the place for him, but I’m excited he’s found that place in Louisville.”

While the Celtics never got the best of Pitino, the experience in Boston made him a better coach and was critical to his improvement, which eventually led him toward the Hall of Fame. That’s why he spent five minutes on this biggest of days discussing his biggest failure.

Pitino should be commended for that and forgiven for his past Celtics transgressions. It was a painful time, one of transition, but the Celtics were a grand enough franchise to move forward and flourish, as did Pitino, which proves the two sides were a terrible fit but each was strong enough to move forward.


bob
MY NOTE:  I suppose I'm as big a Pitino-hater as anybody, but I have to admit his rosters sucked.  Andrew DeClerq is your starting center?  Stretch 4 Beta version 1.0 Travis Knight is your PF?  What the hell do you expect?  Also, Pitino had three former players of his from Kentucky, Mercer, McCarty and Walker, on his team.  He's supposed to ask players he coached in college what he should do?  Still, Antoine Walker's response is pure gold.  It really reminds me of just how bone-headed a player he was, why he's broke now (he wasn't just hoop bone-headed) and why I'm so grateful he's not a coach now.  It also shows the Grand Canyon-wide difference in quality of the players Red had vs the ones Pitino had.   Red could turn to Cousy, Russell and Tommy for leadership and ideas. Pitino had 'Toine. Damn, I'm actually starting to feel sorry for Pitino and I never thought I'd ever say that. Pitino's only 50 years old, still an active coach and he's in the HOF.  Maybe it's time to cut him some slack.

Rosalie,

Amen.

gyso

PS: basketball wasn't the only field of endeavor in which he made poor decisions.

Rosalie great post

I'll go with cutting him some slack; I already have.

He's one of the all-time top coaches, with a record to prove it; in the college ranks.  Some coaches excel with NCAA players but bomb in the NBA, and the opposite is true too.

Pitino's humility lesson started with his failed NBA attempts, and extended to some poor personal choices.

The bottom line is he didn't have much to work with here, and Jim O'Brien was better able to make use of a few changes that do tie back to Pitino, than Pitino did himself.  O'Brien was a better coach for this level, where highly paid babies need to have their ego stroked; that's not Pitino's style.

Some of the greatest basketball minds that ever coached, might never have cut it in the NBA; Rupp, Wooden, Smith, Knight and Krzyzewski to name a few. Why? Because coaching in the NBA is less involved with player development, where they stand out.  Because in college ball, you expect and need players to follow your blueprint, not their agent's.  The difference between that group and Pitino was either they all knew that and didn't need to feed their ego, or perhaps Rick P had the guts to try.  Pick your own answer there.

I look at Rick Pitino's time here as more that Pitino, and the Celtics, took a chance that failed.  They were both willing to try it and both responsible for the outcome.  The team was willing to give it a shot, so let's name them in the grievance too.  Given the state the Celtics were in at the time, it was worth a try.

If anything, I think Pitino including his Celtic years in his Hall of Fame speech shows his respect and regard for the organization.

I continue to enjoy watching Pitino coach at the NCAA level, where I think his coaching skills better match the faster paced, defense oriented game.

He would have had more to work with if he didn't get rid of Billups and Joe Johnson.


KJ

and Rick Fox and David Wesley, trading a first round pick for Potopenko?

and Pete he was also the president of the Boston Celtics.....still feel like puking, what right did he get for that title? meanwhile Bird, Cowens, McHale were all looking for something to do basketball related.

what a great 4-5, Toine and Potopenko?

I wouldn't ever call Rick Pitino humble, and to me his professions of an epiphany in Boston smack of unmitigated egotism. Perhaps I'd take his talk of spiritual growth a bit more seriously if it weren't for his 2010 affair. 2010!

http://fabwags.com/karen-cunagin-sypher-rick-pitinos-affair/ -

It was pretty sordid, and although he got off easy and his lover went to jail for extortion, it makes me uncomfortable to hear him talk about how much humility he gained in Boston.

Mine too Rosalie.

There's an old Chinese poem wish somewhat captures my feelings for Red and definitely for my parents:

When I consider the sacred liao wo
(a species of grass representing parenthood)
I think of those who begat me,
raised me,
and now are tired.
I would repay the bounty the have given me,
but it I as the sky.
It can never be approached.

Pete,

I hope all is well down your way.  Unfortunately the closest I get to you and Worcester's area this fall is Orlando.

I'll use a response to your post to make sure no-one misinterprets me; I'm not saying I have any fond recollection of Pitino's time in Boston.  What I am saying is the Celtics organization is as much at fault for the way it went as he is. I've laughed for years when fellow Celtic fans complain about him taking the title of President away from Red.  Who gave it to him after all?  The Celtics administrators and owners!  It's not like he pushed poor Red aside and stole it.  It was Gaston and Pond who gave Red the title of Vice-Chairman, and claimed it was a promotion.  They thought Pitino was a better choice to make roster decisions in the modern era and Pitino, of course, wanted the same deal as Pat Riley if it was available.  There was a huge purge throughout the organization that year, in order to try and restore the franchise to a more viable state worthy of it's history.

I'm simply saying Pitino is and has been one of the greatest basketball coaches ever and belongs in the HOF.

That would certainly be apart from his time in Boston.

I'm also saying I agree that it's time to stop laying all the blame at Pitino's feet; Celtic ownership and upper management from that time share in it.  To blame it all on Pitino, to me, is not looking at the entire picture.  The fact that he spent time talking about his Celtics tenure, including some self-depricating lines about it, during a speech that will live with him forever, shows me he has some respect for the organization and it's place in history.  I don't profess to know what's in his heart beyond that, and it's not for me to judge.

Regards

NYCelt

I agree with you that Celtic ownership at that time is as much to blame for the Pitino fiasco as Pitino, but if that was me or any intelligent basketball coach/administrator, if they were offered the title of president from ownership, knowing the teams history he should have turned it down and known the honorable thing to do is leave Red in his respected place....from what I've read he wasn't even offered that title, he demanded it. Whop de damn do, he really needed another title? These were pathetic moves of a guy full of himself who had to invent another title for his ego.

cow

RosalieTCeltics wrote:So true.  There is no way they could ever repay Red for all he had done, he is the beginning of the Celtic mystic, I buy into it and always will.  Like a lot of us here, we remember WHEN......I guess that is why we are still here writing about a team we all love.

Rosalie

I've read numerous quotes from Tommy, Silas, Walton, Hondo how that whole feeling of Celtic pride and Celtic mystique was all Red, and all Red. What I love about Red is hes all Brooklyn, he didn't have no Boston accent, he was a pure street kid from Brooklyn and thats exactly how he fuckin sounded....I used fuckin in reverence to Red as in his interview with Steve he sure was comfortable with that word. LOL