Curry hits every right note on Day One

To those who thought Joe Dumars was less inclined to shake up his roster now that he’s given them a different voice at the top of it, think again.

“It doesn’t change my stand on what I sat here and said last week,” Dumars said Tuesday after announcing Michael Curry as his head coach – a week to the day after dismissing Flip Saunders as his head coach. “I still feel the same way I felt last week.”

And if that didn’t get the full attention of the veteran players Dumars has declared available in trade, Curry fired another shot across the bow to those that survive the shakeup in the very first question put to him, when he went out of his way to address the “flip the switch” issue that dogged the Pistons during the Saunders era.

Curry said he hoped he would “never get the chance to read one of you all say the team didn’t play hard, they pick and choose when they want to play, they play up to the level of their competition, the regular season doesn’t mean anything.

“For me as a coach, that’s a direct relationship to me. That’s a stab to me. That hurts me more than losing in the conference finals, because that’s something you directly control. And that’s one of my goals, personally, to never let that be said about a team that I coached and a team that represents this organization, because you don’t get that nowhere else in the organization. Everybody else in the organization works every day.”

A few questions later, somebody wanted to know how you keep players motivated. Curry fairly pounced on that one, too.

“I don’t think you make anybody play. I think you substitute. Put somebody in there that wants to play. The way you have a motivated team, you remove the ones that are unmotivated. That’s pretty simple.”

Well, it is and it isn’t. The best coaches – the coaches whose entry into a room is sensed before it’s fully realized, the guys with aura, a short list that starts with Phil Jackson and Pat Riley, and once surely included Chuck Daly – sure make it look simple. Many make it look chaotic.

I go back to Daly, whose 1989 NBA champions brought guys like Vinnie Johnson, Dennis Rodman, James Edwards and John Salley off the bench – off the bench! It was a team of headstrong, mule-tough SOBs, who all wanted to play 40 minutes a game. Daly would manage to stay blithely above it all, folding his arms, his breast pocket square and his hair impeccably in place, and when asked about it, he’d shrug. “I don’t determine playing time,” he’d say. “Players determine playing time.”

I haven’t heard a coach say something quite so concise, elegant and telling until I heard Michael Curry say in his first 10 minutes as an NBA head coach, “The way you have a motivated team, you remove the ones that are unmotivated.”

Somewhere in there is a brilliant marketing campaign.

When I asked Curry, who a few weeks ago said the transition to assistant coach was an easy one, if he anticipated the transition to head coach to be smooth, he never skipped a beat.

“I don’t think it will be a hard transition. I thought it probably should have happened when I retired. Three years ago, I thought I probably should have been a head coach. I did.

“I look at being a head coach just like I did as an assistant. I prepared as an assistant as if I was the head coach. I was a role player my entire career. I prepared as if I was going to be a guy that played 48 minutes. When you prepare that way, any role you find under that, you’re prepared for. Now that I’m a head coach, I can’t prepare more than I’ve prepared.”

From afar, it would appear Dumars is sticking his neck out with this hire, entrusting a team he fully expects to compete for the 2009 NBA title to a first-time head coach. But Dumars goes into this coaching hire, his fourth, with a greater comfort level than he’s ever had. He didn’t hire Michael Curry because he knows him so well – after 23 years in the league as a player and executive, he knows a lot of people equally well – but he hired him with confidence because of everything he knows about him.

That was a process that started 13 years ago when Curry arrived on a 10-day contract but acted like he intended to stay forever.

“Some people just have the qualities you see in a leader,” Dumars said. “I knew he had the qualities to be a coach, but more so he had the qualities to be a leader. He could have chosen any profession and he would have been one of the top people. He commands respect. He’s very disciplined, very organized, very well prepared in whatever he does.”

After Curry talked about his zero-tolerance policy for those less than fully committed to an honest day’s work, Dumars took a whack at it, too.

“You don’t want that said about your team at all,” he said. “Michael is right. That’s not something you’re proud of when you hear that. When we wake up and we hear our team shows up when they want to or they turn a switch on and turn the switch off, that’s not a compliment. That was never a compliment to me. Mike and I are on the same page with that – we want guys to show up every single day. You don’t take days off. You don’t turn the switch off. You don’t turn the switch on. When you walk into The Palace and they turn the lights on and throw the ball up, you’re playing to win. You’re playing to win every night. That’s what I believe in and that’s what he believes in. If we got away from that a little bit, going forward that’s not going to be the case. If you don’t show up every night and play, you can’t be rewarded for that. That’s where we stand. We stand together on that issue.”

Now go back to something Dumars said a week ago at the Saunders press conference: “I just want to make sure that we as a team, as an organization, are all on the same page and that wasn’t always the case, I felt, this year. It was too scattered at times. It really doesn’t matter how strong you are in this seat that I sit in. That one voice has to make sure we keep everything and everybody on that same page.”

That one voice now belongs to Michael Curry. It’s not easy carrying out those marching orders, keeping everybody on the same page. But the best ones make it look easy. And on his first day on the job, Michael Curry sure hit every right note in making it sound easy.

• A few other interesting tidbits. Dumars said he’s talked to about 10 teams since smoking out interested trade partners last week with his “everyone is in play” proclamation and the rumors – as Dumars knew they would – have been flying ever since.
  
  “I knew the phone was going to start ringing and I knew following that the rumors would start,” he said. “I’ll say this – we’re not talking to teams about their second- or third-best player. If I’m going to put these types of guys on the market, then don’t waste your time talking to me about guys you don’t like. Nothing is imminent. … They know we’re open.”

• Curry said Dave Cowens will be back on the staff. Terry Porter, of course, was named Phoenix’s head coach on Monday. There’s a chance he’ll take Igor Kokoskov with him. As for filling out the staff, Curry and Dumars said they have reached out to assistants currently working for other teams and have a working list that they’re comfortable will produce what they’re looking for – a mix of veteran coaches and young ones who’ll bring experience and vitality.
  
  “We’re just going to be a hard-working staff, from top to bottom, and we’re going to have a lot of responsibilities,” Curry said. “And I think that’s good. Any time you have accountability and you’re going to stand on that, your staff will be really hard working. And once your players see that, they usually follow suit.”

• Dumars said he had yet to talk to Lindsey Hunter about his future. Hunter signed a two-year contract two years ago with the understanding that he would have a role in the organization upon its completion.

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