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So much of the basketball life is based on luck and whimsy. You get on a run. You land on the right team. A ball bounces this way. A call goes that way. So much of Mike Woodson’s life has been about chasing after a championship, and so often it has been a fruitless pursuit.
It is a journey almost 40 years in the making, going all the way back to his senior year at Broad Ripple High School, the Rockets favored to win the fabled Indiana High School title in 1976 but sabotaged by a fight in the sectionals that cost them their second-best player. Woodson’s career at Indiana from 1977 to 1980 was tucked neatly between Bob Knight’s first two championships in ’76 and ’81.
And the NBA?
The NBA was especially cruel to Woodson, who played for a string of teams for which mediocrity qualified as overachievement. He played 15 playoff games in 11 years as a pro. He lost 14 of them. Across his career, there was always one word Woodson’s coaches associated with him:
“Mike is a winner,” Knight said a few years back.
“A winning player,” no less a source than Red Holzman gushed about his rookie guard in the fall of 1980.
Yet rarely has a winner been forced to swallow losing so often. It’s why of all the things Woodson has accomplished in the game, the one thing that stays closest to his heart occurred nine years ago, when he was an assistant to Larry Brown for the 2003-04 Pistons team that stunned the Lakers and won a title.
And it’s why he relishes so much the opportunity he has now.
“Winning a title, that’s the most beautiful thing a coach can ever go through,” Woodson said yesterday, after running the Knicks through their final dress rehearsal of the season, the playoffs arriving for good this afternoon at 3 o’clock with the Celtics awaiting them at Madison Square Garden. “That year there were so many ups and downs, and we wound up walking away winning the title.”
He smiled.
“That’s all I coach for,” he said. “It can happen here.”
It is worth remembering just how proficient he has become as a coach, too. The Hawks improved in each of his six years on the job in Atlanta. The Knicks went 18-6 on his watch last year. They won 54 games this year, most in 17 years. Only four Knicks coaches have ever won an Atlantic Division title; the first three — Holzman, Pat Riley, Rick Pitino — are all in the Hall of Fame.
This isn’t someone who just fell off a turnip truck on 33rd Street with a winning lottery ticket in his hands. There are many things about Woodson that set the internet boards abuzz, from his ultra-hyper switching defensive philosophy to his use of Chris Copeland to his willingness to allow Carmelo Anthony to dictate so much of the offense.
There is also this: in 104 games as Knicks coach, he is 72-32, which is a winning percentage of .692. Riley’s was .680. Holzman’s was .558.
None of that will matter as these playoffs progress, of course. For starters, he will match wits with Doc Rivers in this series, and Rivers owns one of the most impeccable coaching reputations in the sport. He took Mike D’Antoni to school two years ago, has completely taken apart lesser men throughout the Celtics’ six years atop the NBA’s elite. You won’t find many series matchups that don’t put the check mark next to Rivers’ name.
But it’s funny: back in 2008, the very first playoff series of the Celtics’ latest run, Rivers’ 66-win team found itself in a life-and-death first-round struggle against Woodson’s 37-win Hawks. Ask any Celtics fan which series in that title run terrified them the most, it’s unanimous: the grim seven games with the Hawks. Woodson’s Hawks.
And in many ways, that was a perfect representation of Woodson’s basketball life: trying to drag a team up, above itself. Too often Woodson has played and worked for teams that didn’t have the goods, didn’t have the talent, didn’t have enough winners. He believes that’s different now. And just in time.
“Our clocks are ticking,” he said. “I’m 55. The urgency of winning it right now is now. Is there pressure to do it? Maybe. We’re like 15 other teams trying to sniff it. And we have as good a chance as anyone to get it done.”
The chase continues anew for Mike Woodson, starting today at the Garden. He plans on keeping it going for a couple more weeks. If not a couple more months.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com