NBA coach rips himself and ex-players: 'It's easy to rebuild' when you haven't won anything
Doc Rivers earned a permanent free pass on criticism of his coaching abilities when he led the Boston Celtics to an NBA championship in 2008, another NBA Finals appearance in 2010, and nearly a third when they had the Miami Heat down 3-2 in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2012 before losing in seven games.
But as he admitted to Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald, coaching is a lot more fun when you have Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Rajon Rondo than it is when you’re in sports’ infamous “rebuilding mode.”
“Yeah, but we’re rebuilding in a little different way,” Rivers said. “And, you know, it’s easy to rebuild when you haven’t won, you know what I mean? We won in Boston, so rebuilding there is tough. We haven’t won crap in L.A., but we’re trying to.
“The goal is to win, and once you win — if you ever do — then I don’t want to rebuild anymore. Then you go to the next one. That’s the way I look at it.”
After all, Rivers wouldn’t want fans to cotton to the idea that while Rivers the coach can win you a lot of games, Rivers the general manager would never have been able to put together the kind of roster that Danny Ainge built in Boston, so better to head to L.A. and duck the inevitable criticism that would surely have followed had Doc botched the Celtics’ rebuild process and underachieved.
Referring to Boston’s rapid rebuild, Rivers knows Boston fans and played to them perfectly.
“That’s Danny (Ainge) and Brad (Stevens) and those guys — and, I mean, obviously the players, too,” Rivers told the Herald. “But they’ve done it as well as it’s ever been done, because all these other teams, including us now, everybody has a plan, but the plan has to work. And if it doesn’t work, then you have to start over again with another plan. And Danny and them have been able to run their plan.
“Now the next step is to try to win it, and that’s the hardest step. We all know that.”
The Celtics nearly did exactly that despite having Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving injured — Hayward was lost just a few minutes into the first game of the season, while Irving was gone mainly after the All-Star break.
Then again, now that Lawrence Frank has become director of basketball operations for the Clippers — and, as if to drive the new-sheriff-in-town point home, traded the coach’s son, Austin Rivers, to the Wizards for Marcin Gortat –Doc has a much more free hand to criticize his own team’s personnel moves.
The Clippers lost Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan to free agency and shipped Blake Griffin to Detroit for Tobias Harris and Serbian giant Boban Marjanovic.
A team that, in Rivers’ first four years as coach, won no less than 51 games and reached the playoffs each of those four years, dropped to just 42 wins last season, fading badly down the stretch and finishing 10th in the Western Conference.
The team is likely to get worse before it gets better, not wanting to get caught in NBA mediocrity hell where you’re too good to get a top draft pick and not good enough to make noise in the playoffs.
As for the four-year, no-conference-final run that was success only if you’re a Clippers fan used to the team’s decades of losing, Rivers didn’t mince words for a Boston audience.
“Yeah, but we had a run and it didn’t work,” Rivers said. “So what do you do? Are you supposed to keep doing it? Like I said, it’s part of the NBA. You go for it and you either do it or you don’t. And if you don’t, then you’ve got to change strides. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
And when Bulpett pointed out that Rivers seemed to have lived five lifetimes out in Tinseltown, Rivers couldn’t help but agree.
“I know,” he said. “It’s called being with the Clippers.”
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