Eleven Rings: Soul Of Success (by Phil Jackson)

[nuraman00]

Starting that tonight.

 

[nuraman00]

Finished reading the book.

Having read Sam Smith's book "The Jordan Rules", Dennis Rodman's book "Bad As I Wanna Be", and Phil Jackson's "The Last Season" book, this "Eleven Rings" book didn't cover much new ground. If you've read some of the other ones, and were following the NBA in the 90s, you already know much of what's written. Plus there was more good behind-the-scenes info in each of the above respective three books.

Here are the tidbits I gained or observed:

* Phil Jackson didn't talk much about the 1970-1971, or 1971-1972 Knicks seasons. He detailed the prior Knicks seasons leading up to the 1970 championship, especially with the Willis Reed game. And he said he felt "guilty" for the 1970 championship because he was hurt and couldn't contribute much. And he detailed the 1972-1973 season, especially with the players they had gained from 1971-1972 onwards.

But he skipped the 1970-1971 and 1971-1972 seasons entirely. Surprising, because the Knicks went to the Finals in 1972, so I thought I would have learned more about that season. And they lost a 2 point game 7 to Balitmore in 1971, so I thought he would have mentioned that too.

He stated throughout his book that he hated game 7's.

* He had a lot of trouble coaching Kukoc during Kukoc's first two years, 1993-1994, and 1994-1995. He said Kukoc "went rogue" too often (a term he also applied to Jordan a little, and Bryant a lot), and was too free-wheeling. I was surprised, because I thought Kukoc's passing and shooting would have made him easy to coach, but he said Kukoc did it outside the system. And Kukoc was hurt and didn't play well for most of 1994-1995. But the next year, 1995-1996, Kukoc had become a clutch shooter and was trusted by Jordan.

Hmm, Jackson said Kukoc didn't play as well in 1994-1995, but his PER went up 4.4 points over his rookie year to 19.8, lol.

* His daughter Brooke had been sexually assaulted on a date, and Phil regretted how he handled it. He tried a more distant approach, because the matter was really in the police's hands now and he didn't think he could affect the outcome, and he said Brooke didn't end up getting the support she needed. Later on, when Bryant had his sexual assault case, it brought up the old wounds of how he handled that incident in his life, and he had a lot of quiet anger at Bryant during 2003-2004. He couldn't look at Bryant the same way. He didn't think Bryant had done it, but he also couldn't look at Bryant the same way, and it also brought up the memories of what happened with Brooke.

He was also surprised that Bryant had been in that situation, because Bryant and previously bragged about being monogamous.

I also didn't know Phil had been married twice before, and learned about his relationship with each of his five kids, as well as his siblings.

* Lamar Odom was good in the open court, but never figured out the triangle. He just couldn't grasp what to do, despite his skillset, and so they had to limit his role to rebounding and playing on the fast break.

* Smush Parker's downfall was his emotional instability. His mother died of AIDS when she was young, and when things were going poorly on the court, Parker would crack emotionally and mentally. They gave him a lot of chances because they liked his skillset when things were going well, but after about 1.5 years, they gave up and went with Jordan Farmar in the starting lineup late in 2006-2007. They just couldn't count on Parker to come through during tough times, probably because he'd relive all of the tough moments in his life and let it affect his play and get too down.

* Kwame Brown didn't have confidence in his jump shot, and it got to a point where he didn't want the ball because he didn't want to get fouled. It reminds me of Andris Biedrins the last 5 years.

* Ron Artest's problem with his jump shot is that he'd shoot it a different way every day, he didn't have a consistent form. You didn't know what you were going to get from game to game. He did make timely shots for the Lakers in the playoffs though.

He found the best way to communicate with Artest was to have positive body language.

* When Artest was with the Kings, he offered to forgo a year's salary so the Kings could retain Bonzi.

* Rasheed Wallace scared him the most during the 2010 Finals series with Boston. That was surprising, because I had forgotten Rasheed was even on that team. He didn't play that well, but Jackson thought he could go off at any time and help Boston win, because of the past encounters with Rasheed.

* Before the 2004 Finals started, he was a lot more afraid of Detroit than I thought he'd be. He talked both about all of their talent (Wallace/Wallace/Prince/Billups), and how confident they would be after beating Indiana in the ECF.

* Coaching Rodman was the toughest during 1996-1997, as he seemed unfocused.

* Kukoc had played so well in 1997-1998 that there were murmurs of him replacing Rodman as a part of The Big 3.

* He liked Josh Powell, Sasha Vujacic, and DJ Mbenga a lot as practice players.

* There were 3 series where he felt the other team made an error in traveling (or had bad luck):

A. 1992 Finals. Portland took a late-night flight from Chicago to Portland after game 2, rather than leave the next day. He said Portland came out sluggish in game 3 and helped them take a 2-1 series lead.

B. 1996 Finals. Seattle flew back from Chicago to Seattle after game 2 on Friday night, rather than Saturday, and came out sluggish in game 3.

C. Before the 2008 WCF, San Antonio won game 7 against New Orleans. But they were delayed leaving the airport and didn't arrive to LA until 6:30 AM the next day, and said the Spurs ran out of gas during the 2nd half of game 1 of the WCF, and still looked tired in game 2.

Personally, I don't think traveling should have this much of an affect on the team, as there's still 1.5 days to recover even if you get in early in the morning. And it can't be used as an excuse for both Spurs games. But Jackson puts more weight to traveling.

* His most bizarre ending of a game was the game where Pippen refused to be put back in because the play was for a last shot by Kukoc.

* Jackson's benches both had timely spurts in both clinching games against Portland in 1992 (Bulls), and 2000 (Lakers).

* Jackson liked working with Krause professionally, but their relationship deteriorated. It started with Krause's suspicions that Bulls player Johnny Bach had provided Sam Smith some inside info for Smith's book "The Jordan Rules". He also thought Bach had leaked to a reporter the Bulls interest in George Muresan. Jackson didn't think Bach had done those things, and that was his first conflict with Krause. Other incidents would emerge that they would also be on opposite sides on.

* Pippen once went on a drunken rant about Krause on the bus, while Krause was on it. They had to travel separately after that.

* The Bulls equipment manager accidentally gave the team Gaterlode, a high-carb energy drink, instead of Gatorade, during game 4 of the 1997 Finals. He said that's why the Bulls were sluggish, and that they'd consumed the equivalent of 20 baked potatoes. Malone was the other reason.

* Stockton was the best player to not have won a MVP. (Paraphrase, he said something like that in one of the pages. I checked the index under "Stockton" and "Utah Jazz" and went to those pages, and couldn't find that line anymore, but I'm pretty sure I read something like that.)


* My observation: Jazz double Jordan, and he passes it to Kerr for the championship-clinching shot in 1997 Game 6. In 1998, Jazz single-coverage Jordan with Russell, and Jordan hits the championship-clinching shot in game 6.

* Double-teaming Stockton with Pippen was a key move in 1998.

 

[nuraman00]

You can read the book online for free here. The table of contents in the browser version of the book doesn't work that well for me, though, the download version might be better.

(I had gotten the physical book from the library).

Phil Jackson by Eleven Rings The Soul of Success - read or download the free ebook online now from ePub Bud!

 

[MHSL82]

Landing a punch on Michael Jordan

The Moment is a new ESPN.com basketball series about points in time that reveal a lot about the game.

Steve Kerr delivered one of the most improbable punches in NBA history when he hit Michael Jordan.

Teammates fight.

They fight like siblings, like roommates, like couples. When you see the same people every day, there’s friction. Sometimes frustration away from the court manifests itself on it. Sometimes tempers flare in the heat of battle. As a player, you know this. You know a little confrontation doesn’t have to mean anything.

Until you’re trading punches with Michael Jordan.

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” TNT analyst Steve Kerr says, laughing as he recalls his scrap with the Chicago Bulls legend in the fall of 1995 at Bulls training camp. “It’s Michael Jordan, it’s the greatest player ever, but I was pretty competitive and I kind of played with a chip on my shoulder. I had to or I wouldn’t have made it.”

The two guards were matched up in a scrimmage. It was intense. Jordan had heard the critics after the Bulls’ playoff loss to the Orlando Magic and intended to silence them. He averaged 26.9 points in the final 17 regular-season games after coming out of retirement, but shot only 41 percent from the field. The postseason defeat to the Magic in the conference semifinals, his first series loss since 1990, had some suggesting his best years were behind him. At 32 years old, Jordan was hell-bent on proving otherwise. It was palpable in every drill, every time down the floor.

He and Kerr talked trash on a couple of possessions, and then it escalated.

“I took exception to something he said,” Kerr says. “So I was talking back and I don’t think Michael appreciated that ... and we got in the lane and he gave me a forearm shiver to the chest and I pushed him back. And next thing you know, our teammates were pulling him off of me.”

The 6-foot-3, 175-pound Kerr wound up with a black eye. He threw some punches before it was broken up, too.

“I knew that if we were in an actual fight he could actually probably kill me if he wanted to,” Kerr says. “It was more just I’m going to stand up for myself.”

Kerr and Jordan didn’t have much of a relationship at that point. They’d played together for only two months. Before Jordan left the arena that day, then-Bulls coach Phil Jackson -- who perhaps would have prevented the tiff if he wasn’t in his office doing a media conference call, Kerr suggests -- told the superstar he had to speak with Kerr that night.

Jordan made the call within the hour and apologized. They talked some more at practice the next day and moved on.

As odd as it sounds when you consider that Kerr is the son of intellectuals, someone who was taught that violence is not the preferred method of conflict resolution, he believes that getting into it with his co-worker -- getting into it with Michael Jordan -- was the correct thing to do. He says he was embarrassed by how he was being treated and he wasn’t going to put up with it.

“You can’t run away from a fight,” says Bill Wennington, then Chicago’s backup center and now its radio color commentator. “You gotta protect yourself and defend yourself and Steve did just that.”

“It was a totally different relationship from that point on,” Kerr says.

There was mutual respect, with Kerr feeling that Jordan trusted him on the court more in important situations. In Jackson’s new book, "Eleven Rings," he says the punch was a wake-up call for Jordan and a turning point for the championship-winning 1995-96 Bulls who won 72 regular-season games, a record that will likely never be broken. Who knows what the wake-up call would have been if the fight never took place? Who knows if there even would have been one?

“It made me look at myself, and say, ‘You know what? You’re really being an idiot about this whole process,’” Jordan says in "Eleven Rings." He realized he hadn’t gotten in sync with his new teammates after coming back from his baseball sabbatical.

“He became, I think, more compassionate to everybody, and definitely to me,” says Kerr. “He had a different approach than most people and he was such a maniac, the way he would kind of attack the game and the season, that he had to understand that everyone was different and not everyone was as talented as him and not everyone was made up the same way as him.”

That was a two-way street. To be a teammate of Jordan, you’d have to accept that he’d push you sometimes. It just usually wasn’t that literal.

During one practice, Wennington blocked Jordan’s shot. After that, Jordan made a point of shooting over him, daring him to try again.

“It became almost his spark of the day,” Wennington says. “He must have come by me five or six more times in scrimmages. I’m guarding Luc [Longley] and I’m isolated in the corner, he drives through the whole lane, comes out to me, and [says], ‘Block this!’”

If you understood those challenges were all about wanting to win, you could enjoy playing with Jordan. Both Kerr and Wennington say they did. Still, relating and connecting to the most famous people on the planet isn’t simple. It was difficult to have normal interactions with Jordan away from the court because of the crowds he’d attract.

“We understood he lived a different life than the rest of us,” says Kerr. “So everyone respected his privacy away from the court and respected the fact that he needed a couple bodyguards on the road with him and that he was going to stay in his suite and play cards and stuff rather than go out. I mean, that’s probably what everybody else would have done, too, given the life that he led.”

There can be tension when one member of a team dwarfs the rest in attention and popularity. Jackson’s job was to diffuse that, to foster a sense of community. That season he also had to integrate Dennis Rodman and his colorful personality, ask Ron Harper to accept a role as a facilitator/stopper, and convince Toni Kukoc to be the sixth man. While this group’s transcendence might seem inevitable now, it was never guaranteed. A different coach might not have been able to manage them, to keep them in tune with each other.

“On a basketball team, you can have this phenomenon where even though you’re together every day, you’re not really communicating,” Kerr says. “And Phil never allowed that to happen.”

The Bulls couldn’t have been great without their immense talent, but they couldn’t have been historic without coming together. Chicago avoided major issues after the Kerr/Jordan incident and never lost more than two games in a row, taking on the characteristics of its coach and its leader. The same relentlessness that produced the training camp tussle led to arguably the best season of all time.

“We had this incredible sense of drive that came from Michael but that permeated through the whole team,” says Kerr.

There’s no easy road map to cohesion for a basketball team. Every locker room has different personalities, every coach different methods. From afar we don’t see what goes on in practices, and we’re unaware of little day-to-day arguments. Great teams don’t completely avoid clashes; they create an environment in which friction can be dealt with. A scuffle doesn’t have to splinter a squad -- it can be a catalyst for forging tighter bonds.

You could see the chemistry in the way those Bulls operated on the floor. In "Eleven Rings," the chapter about the season is titled “Basketball Poetry.” When the triangle offense is flowing, it’s a thing of beauty. Kerr says the team had a “magical dynamic,” that its energy was “incredible to experience.”

“People talk about the basketball gods,” says then-assistant coach Jim Cleamons. “The gods show up, they reward that type of play. They reward that type of selflessness and ... it’s wonderful to watch. It’s a joy to be around.”

That sort of harmony is all too rare. It’s certainly worth fighting for.

 

[nuraman00]

Why'd you have to post that pic, especially with that hat in the pic? I don't want to see it.

Bad post.