WELCOME BACK: Former Knick Mike Woodson was added to coach Mike D’Antoni’s staff, bringing with him a defensive mindset missing from recent Knicks teams. (George Kalinsky)
This was late in the 1981 season, and the Knicks were enjoying a brief, fleeting renaissance during Red Holzman’s second stint on the bench, a 50-win season that actually had some folks comparing Ray Williams and Sugar Ray Richardson to Pearl Monroe and Clyde Frazier — proof that Knicks fans always are a little too eager to see good times ahead.
Mike Woodson was a rookie on that team. He had been a terrific player for the Indiana Hoosiers, one of Bob Knight’s favorites, and it had been his great misfortune that his four years in Bloomington had perfectly sandwiched Knight’s first national title with the Hoosiers, in 1976, and his second, in 1981.
“I had a great coach who was really a teacher in college,” Woodson recalled, “and then I had a great coach who was really a teacher my first year in the pros, too. You don’t win 613 games unless you’re awfully good at both.”
And Holzman liked Woodson, too. Except for one thing.
“Woody,” Holzman told him a few weeks before the playoffs began, “you’re a hell of a player, and you’re gonna have a really good career in this league. But I hate playing rookies. Sorry.”
Thirty years later, Woodson still laughs thinking about that conversation, which all but guaranteed that his first stint with the Knicks would be short, sweet and unremarkable save for one thing:
“I was the last guy on the team (actually, that’s neither fair nor true; he averaged 4.7 points in 81 games) and yet you would go around New York and people knew who you were because they cared so deeply about basketball in this city,” Woodson said yesterday. “That really left a deep impression on me. Being successful at this sport in this city … it is an amazing thing.”
And one of many things that drew Woodson to the Knicks this summer, when coach Mike D’Antoni offered him an assistant’s spot, bringing Woodson back into the game after a one-year hiatus following his dismissal as the Hawks’ head coach. He had taken Atlanta from perennial loser to perennial playoff team, hit a glass ceiling there, spent a year outside the game, and wanted back in.
And the Knicks were looking for something new.
“He’s a good coach,” D’Antoni said. “We wanted another voice. [This staff has] been together three years and he brings a fresh set of eyes into it. Our philosophies are very similar.”
Much already has been made about Woodson’s alleged role as a de facto “defensive coordinator,” and even though D’Antoni says in one breath that Woodson “talks about the defense, I’m going to talk about the offense, I can’t step on his toes too much,” D’Antoni also is quick to add, “this isn’t football, with specialized coaches.”
It would be wise for D’Antoni to maintain that outlook, because it isn’t as if Woodson cut his coaching teeth simply by preaching one side of the ball. In Detroit, as Larry Brown’s assistant, Woodson actually was charged with teaching defensive specialist Ben Wallace how to be more of a force on offense, a task that only helped deliver the Pistons a championship in 2004. Before that, aiding Brown in Philadelphia, he was credited with finally helping bring focus to Allen Iverson’s game, and all that marriage yielded was a satisfying, surprising trip to the NBA Finals in 2001.
A long time ago, two of the very best who ever worked a sideline had made it very plain to him: If you coach, you teach.
“And a good coach,” Woodson said, “can’t be limited to only teaching one thing well.”
His college coach saw that in Woodson years ago, which is why for a man who coached hundreds of players, and dozens who became coaches themselves, Knight always has considered Woodson one of his favorites.
“He has developed a sense of values and an approach to people that is as good as if he had had the greatest tutor in the world,” Knight told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a few years ago. “There’s a character there that’s damned near flawless.”
And a teacher here that is awfully pleased to be teaching again.