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Daly a pioneering legend in the coaching world
Daly, the NBA coaching legend who died from complications associated with pancreatic cancer Saturday at the age of 78, understood he was working in a players' league. But what made him special was a willingness and ability to reconcile this dynamic with his own coaching interests.
So, unlike many coaches who fail to translate this knowledge, Daly realized that no level of tactical genius is more important than a player's ability to function. Even more importantly, Daly figured out that this ability to function can be sabotaged by an exaggeration of coaching input.
He figured out that coaches don't make plays, they only draw them up. They don't defend, rebound or make timely passes. But great coaches do excel at putting players in situations where these manifestations of the game plan are more easily achieved.
This talent for creating reasonable structure while allowing certain freedoms is why Daly was a rousing success at the professional level; in 1996, he was voted one of the top 10 coaches of the NBA's first half century.
The distinction was bestowed upon Daly for coaching the Detroit Pistons to back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990, then presiding over the original, gold-medal-winning Olympic "Dream Team" in 1992.
Interestingly, while serving as a coaching-success bridge between Showtime Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley and Zen Master Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls, Daly managed to avoid being named NBA Coach of the Year.
Such oversight often occurs when lesser talent is unexpectedly cajoled into reaching a level beyond mediocrity by another coach. Daly, who was within a whisker of steering the Pistons to a three-peat, was able to create a championship system built around the offensive gifts of Hall-of-Fame guard Isiah Thomas.
Daly's system was predicated on team defense, a concept that held little NBA relevance until the rise of Chuck's "Bad Boys" in Detroit. Through much of the 1980s, championships were won and lost through offensive artistry demonstrated by the Lakers, Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers.
Oh, there was defense, but most of it was the responsibility of select stoppers such as Michael Cooper, Bobby Jones and Dennis Johnson. Before the Bad Boys, the top contenders would kill you with offense and use one of the aforementioned defensive aces to slow down your best player.
Daly, nimbly massaging his roster into a championship team, can be credited with helping turn NBA defense into a group activity. With Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn bulldozing anyone who penetrated the lane, the Bad Boys moved like five characters connected by one rope. When the ball moved, they moved. When a superstar opponent was moving with enough skill to compromise the victory effort, the Bad Boys moved with a little more aggression than finesse.
It's a style that was adopted by Riley when he moved to New York and discovered that Showtime was not a bi-coastal enterprise.
Inside the NBA
Daly's versatility as a coach really came through when his skill at molding disparate egos into a cohesive team was summoned to lead the United States back to international basketball glory. With USA Basketball assembling the greatest cast of superstar athletes in team-sport history, the coaching act was presumed to require little more than deciding which five to play.
With a roll call that included the names Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, David Robinson and Karl Malone, a certain psychology was needed to turn these names into a blitzkrieg-unleashing unit.
Daly's success at inspiring players at all levels to "buy in" is what separated him from most of his coaching peers. But the fierce nature of their competitive fire came and went without his respect from the basketball world being sacrificed.
When the Bad Boys finally were conquered by Jordan and the Bulls, their notorious early departure from the court inspired relatively little backlash toward Daly. In good times and bad, his teams maintained a coaching imprint without losing individual identity.
With that in mind, the 2009 version of the NBA playoffs have seemed like a tribute to Daly and his Bad Boys.
Boston's Rajon Rondo became a menace to the health of the Bulls. Good guy Dwight Howard and his right elbow were seen channeling Laimbeer. Rafer Alston created a new spin move by using the head band of Eddie House. And the widely respected Derek Fisher went Vince McMahon by blowing up an attempted screen by Luis Scola.
But a greater and more appropriate tribute is being carried out by the coaches' association, whose members wear a "CD" lapel pin to honor Chuck Daly. The association also created the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award.
The achievement of Daly's lifetime can be defined as letting the players play your way.
Within context, as Daly demanded, there's a skill behind this method that most coaches never quite figure out.
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