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NBA FINALS: CLEVELAND VS GOLDEN STATEJune 4, 2017David FogelHubie BrownAl AttlesRick CarlisleOakland, California DAVID FOGEL: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We are happy to be back in the Bay Area for the 2017 NBA Coaches Association Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award. My name is David Fogel, and I'm the Executive Director of the NBA Coaches Association. As many of you know, the Coaches Association lost a dear friend and its iconic leader, Michael Goldberg earlier this year. For 37 years, Michael guided the Coaches Association and raised the profile of NBA coaches both domestically and internationally. Michael advocated relentlessly for NBA coaches and was one of the driving forces behind the league's global growth. The awards and accolades that Michael recently received are a great testament to the fact that Michael lived his life to the fullest and gave so much of himself to others. Michael always loved celebrating the extraordinary accomplishments of our great NBA coaches. He was especially proud of the Chuck Daly Award named after the legendary coach who was a great mentor to so many coaches and players in our league. So without further ado, I would like to turn it over to Coaches Association president, Coach Rick Carlisle. Thank you. RICK CARLISLE: Thank you, David. Adam, thank you very much, as always, for this platform to give this important award. Mark, Brian McIntyre, who is has helped us every year on this, I want to recognize the committee, the selection committee for this award, Billy Cunningham, who is a Hall of Famer, who Chuck worked with in Philadelphia for several years, Bernie Bickerstaff, Joe Dumars, who played for Chuck for those great Detroit teams, the '80s and '90s, Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, Lenny Wilkens, who was a long-time president of the Coaches Association, Donnie Walsh from Indiana, and Pat Riley. And when you have eight guys on the selection committee, it's an even number there's always the chance you could have a tie. And so this year we are very much blessed to have two great recipients. I'm going to introduce our first award winner first, Al Attles. And by the way, this is the most crowded the room has ever been, Al. Al Attles really needs no introduction here, but I'll give you a little rundown on his career. He was drafted in 1960 by the Philadelphia Warriors who then became the San Francisco Warriors and eventually the Golden State Warriors. Al played for 11 years. During his ninth year, he was called in by the owner and asked if he wanted to be the player coach. Al just told me the story. He continually said no, no, no, no, and Coach finally said, We'll see you tomorrow, and let's just give it a shot for 30 games. And so Al got into coaching that way. He was a player coach for an additional year and then became the full-time head coach in the '71-'72 season. Championship basketball got its start in the Bay Area under this man, who in 1975 guided one of the real Cinderella stories in the history of sports when the Golden State Warriors beat the Washington Bullets 4-0 in the Championship Finals. And it was a historic Finals for a couple of different reasons. Number one, Golden State was a team that kind of came out of nowhere and got really hot, and Al did an amazing job. And at that time, Al was the second African American head coach in NBA history to win a championship, the first being Bill Russell. Al coached 13 years until he joined the front office in 1983 on a full-time basis, and has been in that capacity for his remaining tenure. Now, we did some math on the way over here, and this is Al's 57th year with the Golden State Warriors. Which is just an amazing run. And so David and I were figuring up, well, you know, Red Auerbach had to be close to that. So Red came to Boston in 1950 and passed away in 2006, so that was 56 years. So as far as we know, Al is the longest tenured. AL ATTLES: They haven't caught up to me yet. RICK CARLISLE: They haven't caught up to him yet. Part of a franchise probably in the history of the NBA and probably in the history of any sport. So it is my great pleasure to present Al Attles with the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award. (Applause.) AL ATTLES: Rick, stand up. Give that man a hand. Give that man a hand. Wait, wait, wait. Can you do better than that? Give that man a hand. Rick, stand up. Rick? Stand up. (Applause.) RICK CARLISLE: If you could make a few comments, that would be great. AL ATTLES: The first comment I would like to make is for my grandson, who is a pretty good basketball player in his own right. Isaiah, nice to see you, son. But on another note, I would like to thank everyone. There's someone who is not here any longer who I really, really think is responsible for me being here, his name is Mr. [Franklin] Mieuli, who was the owner of the Warriors many, many years. And he called me in one day and said he wanted me to coach, and I turned it down three times. And he said, well, I can't really go home yet until I until you receive the recognition to coach. And I said, well, Mr. Mieuli, you'll never go home again. And so finally the next day he said, well, okay, it's too late, we can't be on television, so go home and think about it. And finally talked to my wife, and she convinced me to do it. And I said I would do it for 30 games, and I coached about -- a long time. In fact, some of you here used to boo me. I remember you. (Laughter.) No, no, I'm only kidding. But I really appreciate this award. Growing up in New Jersey, going to college in North Carolina, playing in Philadelphia, and then moving to the West Coast, it was a great, great meeting for me to come out here. And I really appreciate this award because there's only one team in the NBA, and I want all of you to do me a favor, everybody just close your eyes, everybody raise your hand, everybody raise your hand, everybody in the room raise your hand. Put your hands down and open your eyes. They were all Warrior fans, and I really appreciated it. But I think a few of you used to boo me, too. So I really appreciate it. But I really, really want to thank you for this award. Anytime you could win an award, you always have to remember you won it based on what other people did. And there's nothing but great things. Rick Barry is here, and I really appreciate it. RICK CARLISLE: Thanks, Al. Our next recipient is a guy that is a living legend, a high school, college, ABA, NBA coaching career spanning the better part of six decades. He was a three-year assistant coach with Chuck Daly at Duke University under Vic Bubas from '69 to '72. Went on to become an assistant Milwaukee. Was a head coach of the Kentucky Colonels only ABA championship in 1975. Went to Atlanta, became Coach of the Year in '78. Moved on to New York, brought them back to playoff prominence in the early '80s. And in 2004 was hired to lift the Grizzlies franchise, which had been struggling, and Hubie got them to their first Playoffs in 2004, first 50-win season, and a second Coach of the Year Award that happened 26 years after his first Coach of the Year Award, which is just an amazing accomplishment. And I doubt that that's ever happened in any other sport. He was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2005. He is a giver, a great mentor to so many of us, myself, so many other coaches, a great ambassador to our game and a trusted friend. My pleasure to announce Hubie Brown as the co-recipient of the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award. (Applause.) HUBIE BROWN: In order to hang around for as many years as we have been hanging around, you have to have a family that will handle the nine moves. So your wife and your children have made plenty of sacrifices in order for me to be able to stand in front of you today. And also from a professional level, I cannot thank enough the 12 assistant coaches that I had that enabled us to go into the different places and create a style of play. And also fortunately, for us, we had some success. But I just want to tell you about why this is so meaningful to me, because I was a high school coach in New Jersey, at Fair Lawn High School, and it was 1965, '66 in the summer, and I'm coaching a summer league, I have six teams in here, and they're playing on Monday and Wednesday night. And in comes a number of college coaches, because there were quite a few players that were in out of these six teams that were being highly recruited by all Division I teams. So the two people who come in are Chuck Daly and the other assistant at that time, Tom Carmody. So I strike up a friendship with them, and all of a sudden within a few years the Five Star Basketball Camp opens up, and Chuck and I are at the Five Star Camp for years and years. And so we had a relationship. And I was offered a freshman coaching job at William & Mary. I was there one year, and in that April of the year I received a phone call from Chuck Daly. And Chuck said, Tom Carmody just accepted the Rhode Island job. And he said, I'm putting you in to be the assistant, but you have to have a meeting with Vic Bubas up in Allentown where they had six states where all the great high school players were playing in a tournament. So I went up there and I interviewed, and fortunately he offered me the job. But if it wasn't for Chuck Daly, I never would have been able to make that move. And I can't thank him enough for he and his wife, Terry, for how they welcomed my wife and my family to Duke, but more important, broke down the enormous -- when you're a freshman coach, you're also the head of recruiting. I went from being a recruiter in the Northeast and Southeast to a recruiter for the entire United States. And Duke at that time was right at the top. They were playing great basketball, and Vic Bubas had been in the Final Four three years in a row. So I'm on the job a week, and I'm in the office, and we all know what a great dresser Chuck Daly was. All right? So he comes in to the office, and he says, listen, you have terrible ties. I said, so what does that have to do with this job? You know? He goes, no, he said, I'm going to have you come over to my house today, and he said, you have to work on your ties. I said, Chuck, I have a wife and three little girls, my wife is pregnant, I'm making $7,000. Believe it or not, I have other things to worry about other than ties. Okay? He takes me to his house, honest to God this is true, we were both living in these little three-room ranch-type houses with carports, no garage. I'm making 7,000, he's making 12. We walk in, there's a master bedroom and a bedroom for his daughter, and then he opens up this side bedroom and we go in and he closes the door, and I look at the door and there were racks like this (indicating) across. And he looks, all ties. All ties. On these four racks. You thought you were in a men's store. Okay? So I look at him, he goes, no, I got to shape you up here right now. So he goes over and he picks out 15 ties. And he gives me the 15 ties, and the price tag was on every single one of them. And I just said, this guy is a -- unless you're around him, he was a humble guy, he helped a lot of people, he never looked for credit, and he was the type of a guy that when I first met him, he was one of the best offensive minds that I had known at that time in offensive basketball. He was a joy to be around, and I can never thank him enough for the opportunity, because he opened up to me a whole new avenue of lifestyle as well as coaching. Thank you, Chuck Daly. (Applause.) Q. Al, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that you didn't want to coach at the beginning. Why was that, and did you like it right away? Did you feel a connection with the coaching game immediately when you began? AL ATTLES: Well, growing up in New Jersey, attending college in North Carolina, I had some very, very good coaches. I never thought that I had the necessary equipment to be a coach. A man who here, Mr. Mieuli, convinced me, but I had some fairly decent players. I had a guy named Rick Barry, Nate Thurmond, some others. So I didn't really have to do a whole lot of coaching. They did really good playing. And I really, really got into it, and my grandson turned into a pretty good player, and so I really appreciate that. Q. Both you guys are very competitive and went head-to-head I would think many times. Could you each talk about the other and your impression of him as a coach and share any particular memory you might have. HUBIE BROWN: They didn't call him The Destroyer because he was a pleasant man, okay? (Laughter.) We all know that in the old days when the fights would break out and when I joined the Milwaukee Bucks, I was an assistant to Larry Costello and that's where I got my master's and doctor's degree in basketball. Believe me. Larry Costello was way out there and a tremendous teacher. But we had a big rivalry with Golden State, and we had a -- the coaches had to separate Rick Barry from Bobby Dandridge every time we played, right, Al? So something would happen. But anytime that a fight would break out in the days he was there, you knew that your guy was going to be taken to the floor gently, but you're going to the floor so that you cannot land any blows against a Golden State Warrior. Never mind that, but we all know that he was a great coach, they had terrific teams here back then at that time, a lot of great basketball was played in the Western Conference because Milwaukee at that time was in the Western Conference. It was a fun time, and Larry Costello and I always enjoyed the battles with Al, because the team would be terrifically coached, running great continuity offenses, and then backed up by outstanding pro players that could deliver under pressure. AL ATTLES: Well, there were three players that were fairly decent. One guy's name was Wilt Chamberlain, the other guy's name was Nate Thurmond, and the other guy's name was Rick Barry. We had to win, because my job was on the line if we didn't win. And then there was a guy here sitting right up there, he's kind of looking at me saying, what about me? His name is Jim Barnett. It's a pleasure to be here, and I really, really want to thank those who are responsible for having me here. Q. Al, any memories of Hubie's teams? AL ATTLES: Yeah, you know, we grew up in New Jersey. HUBIE BROWN: There you go. AL ATTLES: And Hubie was a little ahead of me, but we had playgrounds and parks that we would go to, and we would see each other. And Hubie was a terrific coach. And as we got further and further along with this journey, I had an opportunity to see him and steal a few things from him as a coach. Q. Al, curious to get your thoughts. When you got into Washington after you beat the Bulls in that amazing Western Conference Finals in 1975, the Bullets were a prohibitive favorite, and I remember you telling a story once about I think some local sports announcer dissed your team on television, and can you kind of pick it up from there? Because it sounds like the Washington media didn't really give your club much of a chance in that series. AL ATTLES: Well, present company excepted, the one thing that we always talked about is they can say what they want to say, but they don't play. And so whatever the media said about us, we didn't really care about it too much. Because I played with some fairly decent players, and some of them you remember, a guy named Wilt Chamberlain, a guy named Rick Barry, a guy named Nate Thurmond. But there were a lot of players, Jim Barnett and people like that, who were good players who didn't care what the media said, present company excepted. We believe in what some of you say now, but there was some of us that we would go back and say, did you see what they said about you today? Right, okay, so let's make them take it back tomorrow. And I was very, very fortunate because we need you, with the media, but the players need to do what they do. And I thank you because sometimes what you do really works in coaches' benefits because you say, did you see what that guy said about you the other day? He says, yeah. I say, I don't believe it, I don't believe it. And then they go and play well, and then they say I told you what they said about you was not right. But I really appreciate all you being here, because if it hadn't been for you, Al Attles would not be sitting here right now. Q. Al, I wonder, the Warriors had had a few decades where things weren't going so well. How gratifying is it for you now to see them get back to the level where they were when you were coaching? AL ATTLES: We knew it was an only a matter of time when they got rid of me as a coach. I said things are going to get better. (Laughter.) No, but I really appreciate the opportunity with Mr. Mieuli and of course Jim Barnett, who was an outstanding player for us. He now works for us. But there's an old saying, growing up in New Jersey, what goes around comes around. And we really, really knew that this was going to eventually happen, and I really, really am amazed sometimes when I go out and see how these guy play, because I knew when I played, we didn't play like this. But I had some pretty good players, a guy named Wilt Chamberlain, who you may have heard of. HUBIE BROWN: I would like to tell a story about him. I grew up in Elizabeth, and he was in Newark, Rick Barry grew up in Elizabeth and played at Roselle Park High School. We go back a long way. But I'm a high school coach. I'm sitting on my couch. And you remember the ABC had the Wide World of Sports, and Howard Cosell is on, and he's interviewing Wilt Chamberlain. And he goes, you know, I wish I could do it like Howard did. And he said, Wilt, he said, is this true, that you are challenging Muhammad Ali to a heavyweight championship fight? So Wilt just is standing there, and he looks and he says, Howard, absolutely. He said, you know we're talking about it right now. How could you challenge the number one heavyweight championship and bada-bada, he's going on and on and on. And Wilt goes, just like this, this is great, he puts his hand up, he says, Howard, there's only one guy that I would never fight, and he says, that happens to be The Destroyer, Al Attles. (Laughter.) I almost fall off my chair. (Laughter.) That was good. A great tribute by Wilt. Pretty good. MODERATOR: Congratulations, Al, Hubie. Thank you everyone for joining us today. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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