Donnie Walsh Severs Ties With Indiana

[Jack.Kerr]

March 25, 2008
Walsh Out in Indiana, but Quiet on Future
By HOWARD BECK

Donnie Walsh severed ties with the Indiana Pacers on Monday, making him the leading candidate to run the Knicks — assuming the job is open and that Walsh is sufficiently intrigued.

Walsh ran the Pacers for the last 22 years, first as general manager and more recently as chief executive officer, and gained a reputation as one of the best executives in the N.B.A. He will probably be courted by every team with an opening, once teams begin their front-office purges.

Knicks officials have spoken with Walsh at least once, and it appears that news reports of their mutual interest helped spur Walsh to make his announcement.

The Knicks could hold special intrigue for Walsh, who was raised in the Bronx. But the franchise first has to fire Isiah Thomas as team president, and while that seems more than likely, it has yet to happen.

James L. Dolan, the Madison Square Garden chairman, did not attend Monday’s 106-91 loss to the Nets. Dolan has not addressed Thomas’s status since December, when he relayed his firm support for Thomas through a team official.

Thomas has said repeatedly, often emphatically, that he expects to be with the Knicks next season. But the very fact that the Knicks recently reached out to Walsh implies that Thomas is probably on his way out as team president and coach.

Walsh, whose departure leaves Larry Bird as team president and the sole authority in personnel matters, did little to shed light on his future. Walsh, 67, did not say he was retiring, but he did not commit to working again, either.

“I have interest,” Walsh said in an interview with the Indianapolis Star. “I can’t tell right now whether it’s a lot, a little or somewhere in-between. But I have interest.”

Walsh said that he had been contacted by a few teams but declined to name them and avoided all questions regarding the Knicks.

“I’m not commenting about anything that I’m going to do in the future, because I’m unclear about it, and I’m just not going to comment on it until the time is right,” Walsh said.

The Milwaukee Bucks, who last week fired General Manager Larry Harris, are the only team with a top front-office vacancy at the moment. The Atlanta Hawks could also be searching for new leadership if, as expected, they fire General Manager Billy Knight.

On Monday, Thomas praised Walsh (who gave Thomas his first coaching job) but declined to speculate about Walsh’s future. But in his response, Thomas implicitly acknowledged the widespread belief that Walsh might take his job.

Asked if he thought Walsh would join another team, Thomas said, “Under these circumstances, I don’t think it’s proper for me to give my opinion on another team’s situation.”

When asked to address another topic he might deem inappropriate — whether Walsh might land with the Knicks — Thomas smiled and chuckled, saying, “I don’t have to answer your inappropriate question.”

“I don’t comment on my job status,” Thomas added, “and I’m sure not going to comment on anything that Donnie chooses to do or not do.”

Also unclear is when Walsh will officially sever ties with his employer of more than two decades. Walsh could finish the season in Indianapolis and still entertain interviews from interested teams.

A number of high-profile names have been floated as potential successors to Thomas — including Jerry Colangelo, Jerry West and Bryan Colangelo — but it is unknown whether the Knicks have reached out to any of them, or whether they would want the job.

The Knicks (19-51) will soon conclude their seventh straight losing season, one of the worst stretches in franchise history. Their roster is cluttered with underachieving players, most of them with bloated contracts that make them hard to trade. It could take years to revive the team, even in the weak Eastern Conference. But all of the aforementioned executives have great track records in building teams and might relish the challenge of fixing one of the league’s marquee franchises.

Mark Jackson, the former Knicks and Pacers guard, called Walsh “class personified” and “a brilliant basketball mind.” But Jackson, who is now a commentator for the Nets and ESPN, would not predict what Walsh might do next. Jackson also dismissed speculation that he might be a candidate to run or coach the Knicks.

Walsh had always intended to hand control of the Pacers to Bird, whom he hired in 2003 to groom as his successor. The only question was when he would walk away. Walsh admitted that his presence made it difficult for Bird to truly take control of the franchise. Agents and other N.B.A. general managers sometimes did not know which of them to call.

Walsh said he had “been here too long,” which was “not healthy for the franchise.”

“What is happening in here today was going to happen for some time,” Walsh said. “I think we were trying to wait to the end of the year, but then there seemed to be some confusion being thrown in it from the outside. And it just got way out of whack. So I think we felt that this was the right time right now to stand up and clear it up for everyone, so there is no confusion.”

[jthig32]

Donnie Walsh was a really, really good executive for a long time for the Pacers.

However, I saw this note on TrueHoop yesterday, and this may have been the beginning of the end.

"The consensus in the Indiana Pacers' draft war room in late June 2002 was to take Tayshaun Prince, the long-armed Kentucky star who was expected to be available when the Pacers were making the 14th pick. The team's scouts were in agreement that Prince, a 6-9 shot-blocking talent with an emerging long-distance game, would be the perfect addition to a team that needed to make defensive strides, coming off its 42-40 season and first-round ouster by the Nets in the playoffs. Prince was the unanimous choice -- until the team's top basketball executive, Donnie Walsh, announced that he was allowing his head coach, Isiah Thomas, to take control of the draft. Weeks earlier, Thomas had settled on Oregon guard Fred Jones after watching him in the pre-draft camp in Chicago. When it came time to make the pick, Walsh stunned his subordinates when he said, 'I'll let the coach make the decision.' Wrong move, as it turned out."

Link

Whoops.....

[Jack.Kerr]

Two thoughts:

1) Re Jeff Van Gundy's opinion, which he articulated during the Mavericks last unfortunate performance, that he did not approve of someone like Donnie Walsh interviewing for Isiah Thomas' job before the job was officially available----Screw Van Gundy. I could easily do with never hearing Van Gundy work another game again. He is one of the most obnoxious, tries-too-hard commentators in the league--tries to show how "in-the-homey-know" he is, and ends up making totally inappropriate comments. Everyone in the league knows that Liesayer is a deadman walking. That was a totally irrelevant and unnecessary swipe at: 1) Walsh; and 2) the Knicks, who, yes, screwed Van Gundy into quitting. Also noted another Van Gundy jibe at the Houston GM, when he talked about how great it was for Cuban the owner and Avery the coach to have such direct and open communication, with no GM interfering. Yeah, right. Which leads me to my next point.

2) Walsh is available. He's probably going to the Knicks. But if he doesn't, would he not be a good (i.e. necessary) addition to the Mavericks front office? What is Donnie Nelson's title again? Are the Mavericks operating without a GM? Is Cuban doing it himself? Given the Kidd trade.....first, I think the trade was a bad idea. But second, the execution thereof was downright keystone kops. It really seems like the Mavericks need a league eminence in the front office. If the Knicks don't take Walsh, ...him? If they do, someone else? Larry Brown?

I have a concern that Cuban may be heading out of his depth, not so much in terms of the business of basketball, but in terms of creating the oncourt product. The Mavericks could use an extra set of eyes, and an additional brain with vast institutional knowledge of the NBA.

The time has come.

[Jack.Kerr]

Warning: The following may not be appropriate for some Mavericks' fans still in shock. Caution is advised.

March 25, 2008
Sports of The Times
For President, Knicks Could Look Nearby
By HARVEY ARATON

If Donnie Walsh, soon to be gone from the Indiana Pacers, is coming home to New York, can we foresee a day when a game between the Knicks and the Nets will be more compelling than Monday night’s matchup of a longtime playoff team in transition (Nets) and a terrible one submerged in the draft lottery tank?

Walsh would not be my first choice to replace Isiah Thomas as Knicks president. Dapper and hungry and outer-borough savvy, Mark Jackson looked the part in Madison Square Garden before the Nets beat the Knicks, 106-91. He extolled Walsh, for whom he played at Indiana, while admitting that coaching or running a team was as much a part of his life’s ambition as playing and announcing.

But if Walsh can play by or make James L. Dolan change his nutty house rules, he is a capable executive, a respected N.B.A. lifer, much like the Nets’ president, Rod Thorn. And be it Walsh or Jackson or one of the Jerrys, Colangelo or West, the new man had better come prepared to ignore the injurious myth that long-term rebuilding is for small-town America, not for win-now New York.

He needs to come planting seeds with the patience to let them grow, as Thorn has again done in the Meadowlands swampland with years to go before the big move to Brooklyn.

Thorn is best known for drafting Michael Jordan in Chicago and for bringing Jason Kidd and the N.B.A. finals to New Jersey. Will last month’s dumping of Kidd on Dallas be remembered as his next great administrative act?

Not one to gloat, Thorn did sound amused Monday when asked if he had broken the news to the Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban: no backsies. Thorn paused and said, speaking more philosophically on Kidd than Cuban: “Sometimes you want something and just want it so much and then you get it and it doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would.”

Thorn said he always wanted Kidd to finish his career as a Net, but Kidd ungraciously broadcast his desire to leave and the headstrong Cuban wanted comparable point guard leadership and instead seems to have wound up with a 35-year-old operator who doesn’t shoot straight.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.......
Even before Dirk Nowitzki fell in a twisted heap Sunday in Dallas against the Spurs, spraining his ankle and knee, it was looking as if Cuban and company had outsmarted themselves, or been fleeced by Thorn. The Mavericks, who strip-mined their future to make sure there was no repeat of last season’s first-round collapse, may not even be in the playoffs when they begin next month.

•

Zing-a-ling Alert.
When Cuban walked out of American Airlines Arena on Sunday, flashing two fingers to reporters, was he signaling his expectation that Nowitzki would miss two weeks or memorializing the two first-round draft picks that he foolishly threw into the Kidd deal?

Important:
If the Mavericks make the playoffs, the Nets would get their first-round pick in June and again in 2010. If they do not, the picks go to the Nets next season and in 2011. Whatever, Thorn said. Whenever. Such chips are the kind of investments that with extra good luck can remake a franchise, define an era.

When Thomas took over the Knicks in December 2003, he bowed to the myth, played to the crowd, made the rash move for Stephon Marbury he will not live down. Historically, panicky franchises overreach for the moment, while the really dumb ones surrender future first-round picks for old superstars. The New Orleans Jazz gave up a pick to the Lakers in 1976 as compensation for signing the free-agent guard Gail Goodrich, who was retiring by the time Magic Johnson took Los Angeles by storm, three years later.

Don’t think Thorn didn’t scour Dallas’s roster, notice age encroaching, the minute Cuban agreed to embellish the deal.

“Nowitzki’s a great player but he’s played a lot of basketball,” Thorn said. “Will he still be a major player in two or three years?” Will the Mavericks be a playoff team in the powerful Western Conference when Kidd is 37 or 38? Those are legitimate questions, and ones whose answers Cuban had better hope are yes.

Devin Harris, a blur with the ball, will never be a visionary point guard like Kidd, but the prime-time Kidd is gone, and not coming back. Given the 10-year age differential, it is difficult to believe that Thorn would have turned down Kidd for Harris, straight up. He somehow got much more.

•

Even if they make the playoffs, Thorn’s Nets probably are not going anywhere, but nor were they with Kidd. Eight games under .500 when Thorn made the trade, they are 11 under now, one game behind eighth-place Atlanta. The Nets have their own issues, beginning with continuing lame-duck status in New Jersey. They have, in Vince Carter, another aging, expensive star.

But they also have Thorn, with his track record, his green thumb. You wonder: why hasn’t Dolan tried to get him to uproot the weeds in his Garden?

[horse900703]

TOP NBA NEWS NOW....

[Dtownsfinest]

I always wondered if Kidd had Harris' contract would he take Harris for Kidd straight up. I knew he would which is why I knew that when Devean George exercised his option I knew the deal would still be done because youth for an aging player is always a plus for a team in a rebuilding mode.