Everything rises and falls on leadership

An article in the Salt Lake paper from May 2007 about Jazz owner Larry Miller, who passed away earlier this week, illustrates the importance of strong team ownership.

The author asks, "How, over more than two decades, have the Jazz produced a consistent winner, albeit one that lacks a championship banner?"

Welcome to the Utah Jazz Construction Co. Bring your hard hat and tool belt. Check your ego at the job site. Do your job whether you're the general contractor or the guy mixing the mud. Punch the clock and collect your pay. And don't quit until the work is done. That's the Jazz way.

The answer, according to Thurl Bailey, who played for Utah for 10 seasons, lies in the people within the team.

"It has to start with where you want your organization to go, how you want to build your organization and what kind of people you want to build it with. We bring our lunch pail. We bring our hard hat and we go to work. Nothing special."

Ultimately, Mr. Miller, who's owned the team since 1986, was the person responsible for the Jazz organization's remarkable culture.

It comes down to leadership, says Pat Williams, a genuinely good man who, among other things, played in the Phillies' farm system and has served as SVP for the Orlando Magic for more than 20 years.

"At the end of the day, everything rises and falls on leadership. It always has and always will. Since arriving in Salt Lake, I give the Jazz an A in the leadership department. Give Larry Miller credit. He hires good people and appears to let them do their jobs."

DEN assistant GM David Fredman, who spent nearly three decades with the Jazz, describes Mr. Miller's management style:

"Larry Miller hasn't panicked. In other words, he's stuck with people and let the basketball people make the decisions. He was passionate from the start, but he hasn't let his emotions take over to the point where basketball decisions are made by nonbasketball people. He's let coach (Jerry) Sloan coach. He's let [GM] Kevin O'Connor do his job.... I think Larry's confidence in his people and his loyalty to his people has ended up paying dividends to him."

Says Jazz center Jarron Collins, now in his eighth season with the team:

"[Mr. Miller's] hands on, he demands the best effort every night you step on the court. He ran the team in a way that fans could truly appreciate, and that defines who he is."

The primary requirement for success

Down in Austin, Texas coach Rick Barnes, whose No. 12 Longhorns lost to Kansas State last night after winning three straight, "said some players don't understand the primary requirement for success."

"I talked about this with the team," Barnes said. "I asked if they were a coach, what would they want to see from their players. It was interesting. They said 'hard work.' I said, 'It's obvious you haven't been coaches because the thing that goes to the top of the list of every coach is consistency. They want to know what they are going to get every day.'"

Your message should be constant

Went back through Nick Saban's 2005 book "How Good Do You Want to Be" last night and came across this passage:

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Let me let you in on a little secret about football coaches: Very few of us have the skill, experience, and education necessary to motivate a group of eighty men merely with a pregame speech. Contrary to what you have seen on television or in the movies or read in books, Knute Rockne was doing something out of the ordinary in rallying the troops with a few words before kickoff.

The truth is, if you have been sending the message all week, then two minutes before kickoff doesn't matter much.

At our level, if your players are not ready to play on their own, then there's something wrong. Of course, all coaches and leaders like to give a few reminders and will occasionally play to the emotion of the game, but sometimes saying little or nothing can be as powerful as saying a lot. It's the repetitive motivating message given daily over the course of the week that has a real effect -- not a few words before kickoff.

Parents will get their message about the dangers of underaged drinking through to their children better with constant reminders than with a speech the night before prom.

Your message should be constant. A well-developed message is more effective than one motivational talk.

When it comes to discipline, it's more important to be right than consistent

Brad Adler's book "Coaching Matters" has a good passage with Bill Parcells and his approach to consistency as it relates to discipline.

It describes Coach Parcells' instense "desire for and commitment to consistency."

According to the author, "he required it in every aspect of the game. You had to practice consistently, play consistently, even rehab consistently. Indeed, as coach of the team, Parcells believed that even he had to be consistent, at least with most aspects of his leadership routine."

"The only thing you don't have to be consistent in is your discipline," Coach Parcells said of his coaching methods. "I know that sounds crazy, but what's important with discipline is to be right. I don't want to be consistent there, I want to be right."

It reminds me of a story a coaching friend told me recently about a high school coach who'd led his team to the state title game.

The night before the game, a group of his players had gone to dinner. On their way back to the team's hotel, one player -- the team's star player and a good kid who'd never had any problems -- realized that he'd left his wallet on the table, and had to run back to the restaurant to get it. He made it back to the hotel a few minutes later, but missed curfew.

According to the coach's rules, any player who missed curfew couldn't play in the next game. So, feeling like he had to be consistent with his discipline, the coach benched him. At the next day's championship game, with his best player in street clothes, they lost the game.

I've searched far and wide for this story online and haven't been able to find it. Regardless, even as a parable, it supports Coach Parcells' point about how when it comes to discipline, it's better to be right than consistent.

You keep hammering away

John Pelphrey's Arkansas team won 12 of its first 13 games of the season before losing their first three games in SEC play.

But Coach Pelphrey hasn't changed his approach:

"Whether we're in the middle of something great like going 12-1 or in the middle of something difficult like being 0-3, you try to be consistent and keep hammering way. You never know what swing it's going to be that shatters that boulder. You just keep hammering away."

Discipline means learning everything that helps us achieve maximum performance

In his 2002 autobiography "Knight: My Story," Bobby Knight writes about how he'd bring in guests to speak with his teams. [The following is an excerpt from the book.]

"I've always had people come in and talk to my teams. I wanted them to hear from successful people their thoughts on why they were successful and what it took to be successful."

"One of my smartest invitations was to Janos Starker (pictured below), acclaimed worldwide as a cellist and a professor in Indiana's School of Music. What would a man critics around the world have called 'the king of cellists' have to say that young basketball players would benefit from?

Here's what:

I started playing the cello when I was six. At that time, I didn't choose it. My mother did. Eventually, three years later, I realized that, first of all, it was something that I loved. I realized that I couldn't go through a day without thinking, doing, making music.

This is one of the basic principles that I state: that anyone who can go through a day without wanting to be with music or hear music or make music is not supposed to be a musician.

I believe that to be valid for every single profession. If you can go through a day without wanting it or thinking it or living with professionalism in the profession that you are in, you are not supposed to be in it.

Discipline means concentration, and concentration means discipline. The practice is just as important as the moment when you are in front of everybody.

Whether the audience cheers or not, it does not mean anything. If I know that I have done well, whether they liked it or not is not important. Did I do the best I could under the circumstances, with total concentration and dedication to the cause at the moment?

Discipline means to learn everything that helps us to the maximum performance.

Where is the parallel, the musical parallel to basketball?

For a lifetime, we develop skills, so as to find the proper note. That's why you train for a lifetime, to find the basket.

As a cellist, when you are six years of age, eight, twelve, you have to practice three or four hours a day just to obtain the basic skills and the strength in your hand and your arms and muscles, because you do need considerable muscle power. We are hitting strings with the fingers sometimes at the speed of two thousand notes per minute.

There are people who can shoot successfully eight times out of ten in practice. To improve on the percentage, you must consciously know what part of the body functions how. This requires the thinking process. It doesn't mean just that you are following the instructions of the coach. Eventually, you must use your own brain: Why does it work? Why is the coach right?

Until the individual discovers it for himself, it is never going to result in consistency.

The word consistency is key. You have to do everything that we mean when we speak of professionalism. I'm not talking about being paid for something. The professional is the one who is consistent at a higher level than anybody else."

Playing with the same intensity all of the time

Good post on Jonathan Feigen's Rockets blog about Ron Artest.

As Feigen puts it: "Artest just plays. Starting or off the bench, healthy or limping, he shows up and goes to work."

Artest's mantra is simple:

"Just play hard. If you lose, you lose, but I like to lose with dignity. If you lose, lose with dignity. I'm happy when I win, I'm emotional and still playing hard. I try to play the same way all the time."

Never having two bad games in a row over 19 seasons

The SLC paper had a note this weekend about former Jazz stars John Stockton and Karl Malone, who played together for nearly two decades in Utah.

"One became the NBA's all-time leader in assists and steals. The other finished his career as the NBA's second-leading all-time scorer."

Stockton recalls his former teammate's remarkable consistency and work ethic:

"The beauty of Karl was he never had two bad games in a row. And his idea of a bad game might surprise you. In his mind, it might have been 25 points and 10 rebounds. You could not beat him into the weight room in the morning. Here's the best power forward to ever play and he's beating you into the weight room. That was remarkable."

A strong belief in fundamentals

The SLC paper had a good interview recently with Frank Layden, the former Jazz coach whom Jerry Sloan replaced after Coach Layden retired and moved into the front office.

-- On the high level of turnover among NBA coaches: "The way the contracts are structured nowadays, you can't fire the players, so you fire the coach and you hope for the best. Usually, the results don't change very much - - occasionally, they do - - but not very often is the coach really at fault."

-- On Jerry Sloan: "In my mind, Jerry is the best coach, maybe in any sport, not just the basketball. I think he sometimes, because of the market we're in, he doesn't get the credit. He'd already be in the Hall of Fame if he was coaching New York or Chicago or Los Angeles."

-- On Utah's commitment to teaching and the basics: "We believe in fundamentals. We teach fundamentals. We do a lot of teaching. If you look at practice, you'll see the assistant coaches play an active role - - that's not true with a lot of teams, in any sport - - the head coach a lot of times is dominant."

-- On how the Jazz have remained consistent winners: "A lot of times people say, 'Well, how do the Jazz do it?' and I say, 'They're conservative, they're very loyal and they have a plan and they stick to it and they don't vary from it.' They don't panic, which a lot of teams do."

-- On the "best coaches he'd ever seen": John Wooden, Morgan Wooten, Dean Smith and Jerry Sloan.

Holding every player to the same standard

Sixers forward Donyell Marshall, now in his 15th NBA season, had some nice things to say recently about Jerry Sloan, for whom he played from 2000-02:


"He taught me how to play. He taught me how to approach the game, how to eat and sleep; they were my best years, probably with my best numbers all-around. He challenges you; he helps to bring out your best. He taught me how to practice.

I've told our guys, Jerry doesn't double-team the ball. They asked me why, and I said he says: 'I like to see who's getting his butt kicked. When you double-team, one can blame the other. When you play straight up, you know right away.'

My first year there, I was coming from a team where you knew the superstars got treated a little better, and now I was playing with two who were basically in the Hall of Fame already [in Karl Malone and John Stockton].

My first month, we had a game where in the first 2, 3 minutes John and Karl weren't focused. Jerry called timeout, subbed them out, said, 'You're supposed to be our bleeping captains. If you can't come out and play right, sit your butts down until you can figure it out.'

The subs came in and played well. John and Karl came back in and played well, and I said to myself 'If he can do that to them, what can he do to me?' It makes the 15th man feel good to know they're not getting special treatment. And it makes everyone play harder."