DENVER — P.J. Carlesimo stood in the hallway outside the visiting locker room inside the Rose Garden shortly after his Nets had obliterated the Trail Blazers Wednesday night, exchanging pleasantries with several former staff and media members as they walked by.
It was in that building — one that opened with Carlesimo roaming the sidelines and shouting instructions as Portland’s head coach — that Carlesimo last led a team into the playoffs as a head coach, in the 1996-97 season.
Over the intervening 16 years, Carlesimo has had a pair of head-coaching jobs — first in Golden State for two-plus seasons, then Seattle/Oklahoma City for another year-plus — along with five years, and three championships, as an assistant with the Spurs, in addition to a year as an assistant with the Raptors before coming to the Nets prior to last season.
But now, Carlesimo is just a few weeks away from taking a team into the playoffs as a head coach, after taking over on an interim basis for Avery Johnson in late December.
The Nets head into Denver Friday night comfortably entrenched as the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference after going 4-1 to begin the Circus Trip and picking up wins in eight of their last 11 games. Carlesimo couldn’t help but admit there’s a huge difference between being the head coach of a playoff team and an assistant, which he was in San Antonio for three championships under future Hall of Famer Gregg Popovich.
“It’s night and day,” Carlesimo told The Post, “and it’s nice to have a team that’s as talented as this. You look a lot smarter when you have players like this.”
After he was let go by the Thunder 13 games into their inaugural season in Oklahoma City in 2008, it would have been easy to think Carlesimo, after three rides on the NBA’s coaching carousel, would be unlikely to get back onto it for a fourth time.
But Carlesimo said he was hopeful, if the Nets had success in Brooklyn under Johnson, he might have been in line for one last opportunity to run a team.
“I really thought there was a chance that, if we did what we’re doing now, and maybe backed it up again next year or took it to another level next year, that maybe then I’d get a shot,” he said. “But it really wasn’t … something I thought about. But I thought it was something that, if it was going to happen, it would happen as a result of our success here.
“I thought there was a chance I’d get back in. If we had success and this is a good story for two years, maybe they’re looking for somebody and they go, ‘Hey, Brooklyn’s good. Let’s look at their assistants.’ ”
Instead, it turned out Carlesimo did get that fourth chance to run a team because he was an assistant with the Nets, but nowhere near the way he expected it to happen. When Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov decided to cut ties with Johnson in late December with the team sitting at 14-14, Carlesimo was the only logical option on the staff to replace him.
Since Carlesimo took over, the Nets are 28-15, good for a .651 winning percentage and the sixth-best record in the NBA over that stretch. They are comfortably in line for holding home court in the first round of the playoffs while still chasing the Knicks and Pacers, who have the second and third seeds, respectively.
“It’s great,” Carlesimo said. “It’s great. These guys are playing well.
“There was never any question how much fun it is and how much you enjoy it. Again, it’s different when you’re an assistant, but the five years in San Antonio were really special. The feeling when we got to Seattle was we were going to build towards something, too, but that’s just the way it goes.”
Now, he’s getting a chance to build something in Brooklyn — one that until a few months ago he wasn’t sure he’d get — and is taking advantage of it.