John Beilein can’t say he wasn’t warned. Last offseason he signed on to coach the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers, after a long, successful run as a college head man, highlighted by two NCAA championship-game berths in 12 seasons at the University of Michigan.
He lasted 54 games with the Cavs, 40 of them losses, and resigned in February.
His tenure serves as a case study of how difficult it is for a college coach — even the best college coaches — to transition to the NBA, and a cautionary tale for Villanova coach Jay Wright. Twice an NCAA champion with the Wildcats, Wright sits atop the wish lists of a great many Sixers fans, after the team fired Brett Brown on Monday. (ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, citing anonymous sources, said the team will at least gauge Wright’s interest, but Woj is among many to report that Clippers assistant Ty Lue, who won a title as Cleveland’s coach in 2016, is the front-runner for the job.)
It is unclear if Wright would even be interested in the Sixers. Mike Jensen of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that those close to the ‘Nova boss are split as to whether this might be the right time for him to try his hand at pro ball, and Jensen himself wondered if it is even that appealing a job, given the Sixers’ many problems (including player accountability, as guard Josh Richardson told reporters after the team was swept out of the playoffs by Boston on Sunday).
Then there’s the matter of connecting with pro players. Jensen touched on that issue, citing Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons as the primary examples, and others have mentioned that challenge through the years — how it’s vastly different coaching 18-year-old phenoms and 25-year-old corporations. Consider these long-ago words from the late Chuck Daly, for example: “It’s a players’ league. They allow you to coach them or they don’t. Once they stop allowing you to coach, you’re on your way out.”
Daly, once a coach at Penn, memorably managed to negotiate the boys-to-men chasm, directing the Bad Boy Pistons to a pair of NBA titles and leading the Dream Team to Olympic Gold in 1992. But most college guys have failed in the Association. Consider Rick Pitino and John Calipari. Consider Mike Montgomery and Lon Kruger. Consider Fred Hoiberg and Tim Floyd.
Yes, Jack Ramsay and Larry Brown are notable exceptions to the rule, as are Brad Stevens and Billy Donovan at present. But more often than not the NBA has proven to be a bridge too far for these guys.
And so it was for Beilein, who reportedly found that his players quickly tuned him out when he used the same my-way-or-the-highway approach that worked so well at Michigan — and who also reportedly made a terrible misstep when he called them “thugs” during a tirade. (He would later say he meant to say “slugs,” but the damage was done.)
Nik Stauskas, the former Sixer who played for Beilein at Michigan and for a time this season, said he had tried to tell his former coach about the nature of the NBA beast, long before he ever took the Cleveland job. While Stauskas stopped short of calling Beilein a control freak on the Big Ten Podcast last month, he said Beilein “likes to have guys that are going to buy into his system, and that’s how it works. Everyone needs to buy into a common goal.”
And, Stauskas added: “I told him, ‘It’s different up there. They’re not going to listen to you and buy in the same way these 18-year-olds coming into Michigan will. … It was more of like an ego-personality thing that you are going to be dealing with once you get to the NBA. You have guys making a lot of money, there’s entitlement, there are all of these different things there that aren’t necessarily at Michigan that you don’t have to deal with. So, I warned him of different things.’”
It could be argued that Wright would face a different situation in Philadelphia than the one Beilein faced in Cleveland. But ego and money trump all in the NBA. That should never be forgotten. And certainly Wright, no dummy, knows that as well as anyone.