If history serves right, Casey needs every inch of his talent to come through in Toronto.
The billions of dollars and megawatt celebrities aside, at its heart the NBA is a small, strange business, a circle of coincidences and relationships defined by unexpected turns of fate.
It is only by just one of those twists, for example, that newly-minted Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey wasn’t fired by the team already as a sacrifice to some system not implemented or a locker room that somehow failed to fall under his sway.
The 54-year-old was introduced with the appropriate fanfare Tuesday afternoon as the man who put the 'D' in 'allas; the highly respected assistant coach who helped turn the offensive-minded Mavericks into a gang of stoppers who turned back Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant and the Miami Heat’s Big Three on the way to an NBA championship.
But it’s worth pointing out that Casey was very nearly given the Raptors head coaching job in 2004 when the club was in recovery from Kevin O’Neill. The position went to Sam Mitchell instead, the local basketball universe unfolding a lot more colourfully, if not as it should have.
And while Casey seems deserving of the accolades delivered on his behalf Tuesday -- Raptors president Bryan Colangelo said he surveyed everyone from ex-players to agents to owners to make sure he had enough information to make what in the end he described a "gut decision" on his new coach -- the reality is had Casey got the Raptors job in 2004, he’d be long gone by now; such is life in the NBA.
Perhaps even more pertinent is that if things were just a little different 12 months ago it’s quite conceivable Tuesday’s press conference would have been to announce a contract extension for Jay Triano, who instead got Colangelo’s Italian loafer to make way for Casey after leading the Raptors to a 22-60 season and their second straight year as the NBA’s worst defensive team.
Colangelo went to bed one night last July thinking he had a deal in place that would have brought Tyson Chandler from Charlotte to Toronto; even going so far as to send a message to the team’s board of directors that the deal was done. The next morning he put in a request to the NBA offices to hold a trade call -- a formality where the league ensures deals are legal and proper. It was only then that then-Bobcats head coach Larry Brown balked, forcing Bobcats owner Michael Jordan to nix the deal.
Chandler was later traded to the Dallas Mavericks where the agile, active and smart seven-footer finished third in voting for defensive player of the year after giving teeth to the Casey-designed system that meshed so perfectly during the Mavericks' championship run.
Are the Mavericks NBA champions without Chandler making up for slow-footed Dirk Nowitzki’s defensive deficiencies? Are the Raptors 22-60 if Chandler is in uniform protecting the rim on behalf of buttery-soft Andrea Bargnani and the matador, Jose Calderon? Is Casey this year’s version of Tom Thibodeau, the defensive guru who turned success as an assistant with the Boston Celtics into coach-of-the-year honours with the Chicago Bulls this past season without Chandler patrolling the paint in Dallas?
Short answer: Who knows?
But it’s worth raising the questions because for all of Casey’s considerable credentials and his status as one of the NBA’s good guys -- Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle took a moment between beers during Dallas’ victory celebrations to call Colangelo and lobby on Casey’s behalf -- in this league coaching success is a product of talent and expectations meeting halfway.
In that respect perhaps the best advertisement for Casey as the coach who can finally, possibly, potentially turn the Raptors from an awful defensive team to simply a bad one isn’t his work in Dallas. After all in addition to Chandler he could rely on the talents of Shawn Marion and DeShawn Stevenson, not to mention the forever savvy, Hall of Fame-bound Jason Kidd.
Instead a better read on the impact Casey will be expected to have comes from his season-and-half as head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The team was 20-20 when he was fired midway through the 2006-07 season.
Casey said Tuesday that at the time he was disappointed but that it worked for the best. It was during his first extended stretch without an NBA job that the self-confessed workaholic was able to pause long enough to start a family with his wife Brenda. He travelled to Europe and studied with the likes of Ettore Messina. He recharged.
And he benefitted significantly from what happened in Minnesota after he left: the Timberwolves went 12-30 the rest of that season and have gone 87-250 overall since Casey was fired. In his first tour of duty as an NBA head coach, he was in charge of a remarkable gallery of NBA rogues and under-achievers: from Michael Olowokandi to Mike James to Eddie Griffin, just to name a few. His two stars -- Kevin Garnett and Wally Sczcerbiak -- didn’t like each other and the franchise featured a front office staff five-deep, all trying to win favour with owner Glen Taylor.
That Casey was able to make some semblance of chicken soup with that crew might say more about the likelihood of him being able to have a team built around Calderon and Bargnani hold opponents to better than 50 per cent shooting most nights.
There is likeableness to Casey -- he learns people’s names and is more about connecting with them than lording over them.
And we can forgive him his first-day-on-the-job optimism when he talks about injecting a defensive identity into the Raptors locker room. All his schemes -- the traps learned alongside George Karl and the zone looks Dallas so creatively used this past season -- are all just fluff if a team doesn’t develop "a culture of hard play."
Here’s hoping he can pull it off. He says he has a gift to demand the most of players without embarrassing them or alienating them, and he’ll need every inch of it in Toronto, if history serves.
To his advantage the expectations in Toronto seem realistic. With a three-year contract worth about $9 million Casey’s job is to improve a terrible team, not get them in the NBA finals.
But Casey’s not above hedging his bets. This is his second chance as an NBA head coach; without some success it’s unlikely he’ll get a third.
There’s a free-agent-to-be out there this summer; the kind of long, athletic, active big man who can turn a franchise around defensively. Had the NBA universe unfolded a little differently a year ago he might have done so in Toronto already.
You can bet that Dwane Casey will be calling Tyson Chandler about joining him in Toronto next season.
In the intertwined world of the NBA, that’s called trying to close the circle.
