Pistons' Monroe Reminds Detroit's Basketball Yoda of Reed, Lanier

Under normal circumstances, I would dismiss the comparisons of a second-year NBA big man to the likes of Hall of Famers Bob Lanier and Willis Reed as so much horsepucky, figuring it to be spewed by an over-exuberant fan who might never have seen Lanier or Reed play a single minute.

I might roll my eyes and lightly smirk at the notion of the Pistons’ Greg Monroe, after just two NBA seasons, having anything more in common with Lanier and Reed other than all three of them are left-handed.

Unless the one making the comparison is Ray Scott.

If you’d ever like to go NBA brain-picking, you could do a whole lot worse than to talk to Scott, who some around town remember as a one time NBA Coach of the Year with the Pistons, but who fewer remember as being one of the best and most consistent big men of his time, playing for the Pistons in the 1960s. Today Scott, 73, is as close to a basketball Yoda as you’ll find in this town.

Scott was a leaping, rebounding, and scoring big man out of Portland University, but he was really a Philadelphia kid. The Pistons nabbed him fourth overall in the 1961 draft, and for most of the decade Scott produced double-doubles (points and rebounds) every night like a Pez dispenser.

One year for the Pistons, Scott averaged 13.5 boards a game, snatching basketballs away from the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Jerry Lucas while the rest of his teammates fought gamely but usually ended up on the wrong side of the scoreboard.

That was Pistons basketball in Scott’s day—the losses piled up like dishes in the kitchen of a diner during the lunch rush.

So when Ray Scott says Greg Monroe reminds him of Willis Reed and Bob Lanier, you ought to listen, because Ray played against the former and coached the latter.

Ray was waxing the art of big man play in the NBA last week on “The Knee Jerks,” the weekly podcast I co-host with Big Al Beaton. Ray, always the gentleman, was on hand to help us celebrate our third anniversary of doing the show.

It was then when Scott said something that would have caused me to bop the speaker in the mouth—had the speaker not been Ray Scott.

“With Greg Monroe, we finally have a big man in Detroit who we can throw the ball into for all four quarters and make something happen and we haven’t had that since Bob Lanier,” Scott said of the kid from Georgetown who just finished his second season for a bad Pistons team, which Scott and Lanier know all about.

For full disclosure, Ray wanted us to know that he serves on the board of Monroe’s charity foundation. That’s OK; what he said didn’t smack of shilling. Ray doesn’t roll like that.

Monroe, to hear Scott say it, might become the best NBA center from Georgetown since Patrick Ewing. No less.

It was already galling to hear Ray make the comparisons to Reed and Lanier—until you thought of how many nights Scott and Reed jostled under the boards at Cobo Arena or Madison Square Garden, leaning against one another, waving a hand in each other’s face. And then you just had to think of all the practice sessions with Scott the coach and Lanier the player from 1972-76, when Ray coached the Pistons and Lanier was depositing those 10-foot hook shots over the likes of Kareem and Nate Thurmond and Dave Cowens.

Monroe survived a drama-filled rookie season with the Pistons in 2010-11 under the disrespected coach John Kuester. The 6’10” center/power forward didn’t get off the bench much in the first couple weeks of the season, but by the end of it, Monroe was starting and showing the tender skills that made him attractive to president Joe Dumars.

Year two was when Monroe took his giant leap for mankind.

The numbers shot up, from 9.4 points/7.5 rebounds per game to 15.4/9.7. Even the free throw percentage went way up, from .622 to .739. The confidence soared with the numbers. The team didn’t exactly soar with Monroe, but a 21-21 finish after a 4-20 start was something to build on for next season.

Entering Year three, it’s not crazy talk to call Greg Monroe one of the Pistons’ leaders—on and off the court.

Ah, but there is one area in which Monroe gets dogged a little—a criticism that has followed him like a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shoe.

It’s whispered that he’s not as tough as an NBA big man should be. That there’s a mean streak that Monroe simply doesn’t possess.

Scott, on our show, said that Reed was “as mean as a snake.” Lanier, the coach said, had a toughness that was different than Reed’s but manifested itself in how Bob played through pain and through the turmoil that sometimes beset the Pistons in the 1970s.

It’s unclear, this early in Monroe’s career, whether he’ll develop that nasty edge that is required to be a beast to play against on a nightly basis. Scott, for example, used “easy going” in describing Monroe.

But the strides made in Year Two, combined with the flashes that rookie point guard Brandon Knight showed, makes one wonder if the Pistons have themselves an inside-outside combo in the making not seen since—dare we say it—Scott was coaching Dave Bing and Bob Lanier.

“I like the way (Monroe) goes about his business,” Scott told us this week. “He is easy going but he works very hard and that’s how you show great improvement, as he did this past season.”

Reed’s watershed moment was in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, when he limped onto the Madison Square Garden floor on one leg thanks to a torn thigh muscle, gamely starting against the Los Angeles Lakers and nailing a couple of mid-range jumpers. He only played a few minutes, but his mere presence inspired his teammates to a blowout win for the championship.

Lanier came into the NBA on one leg as well. The St. Bonaventure grad had his leg in traction when the Pistons drafted him in the first round in 1970, the after effects of a nasty knee injury suffered in the 1970 NCAA Tournament.

“Bob had to work hard on a day-to-day basis just on conditioning alone,” Scott recalled.

For 10 seasons Lanier battled his brittle knees, Pistons upheaval and bemusing coaches before being liberated via a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks in 1980. Unlike Reed, however, Lanier never achieved his ultimate goal of an NBA championship, though he came close with the Bucks a couple of times.

Greg Monroe’s greatest moment as a Piston has yet to be realized. Wondering what it might be is enough to warm the cockles of a fan’s heart.

So there you have it. Greg Monroe, just two years into his NBA career, reminds Detroit’s basketball Yoda of a pair of Hall of Fame centers.

Ray Scott is about the only fellow in town who can get away with such hogwash.

Because he’s probably right.

Kuester in Quicksand Coaching These Bratty Pistons

Herbie Brown, when he first came to town in the mid-1970s, was a frenetic, nervous man with wide, plaintive eyes, long curly hair, and a mission.

He arrived in Detroit in 1975 as the new assistant to Pistons coach Ray Scott, who performed the task for two years without any help.

But Ray, one of the finest men you’ll ever meet, did a favor for a fellow coach and long story short, hired Brown to be Ray’s assistant.

That favor would come back to bite Scott in the you-know-where.

“I guess I didn’t see it coming like some others did,” Ray once told me.

You might know Herbie Brown by way of his more famous coaching little brother, Larry.

So Herbie comes to Detroit, joining Ray Scott, and before long it’s obvious to some of the sportswriters in town, like the Detroit News’ Jerry Green, that Herbie is gunning for Ray’s job, the “it” that Scott says he didn’t see coming.

Ray told me of a meeting he had along the Detroit Riverfront with Green, in a car near Cobo Arena, in which Jerry tried to warn Ray of Herbie’s intentions.

In January, 1976, Ray was fired, the Pistons tumbling from first place toward oblivion in the latter part of December and early January.

Herbie Brown’s mission was accomplished; he was the new Pistons coach.

For better or for worse.

The Pistons actually played hard for Brown initially, using a late-season run to squeak into the playoffs. Then they upset the Milwaukee Bucks in a best-of-three series before taking the defending champion Golden State Warriors to six games.

The following season, Brown was still frenetic and manic and he still wore shoes with no socks and open-collared leisure suits. He looked like a reject from Studio 54, coaching the Pistons in Cobo Arena and throughout the arenas of the day.

One day in practice, according to Green in his book “The Detroit Pistons: Capturing a Remarkable Era,” Brown was overseeing a ball movement drill and noticed one of the Pistons being checked in a mismatch by point guard Kevin Porter.

Porter was an angry, simmering player who scowled a lot and distrusted coaches. He and Brown were very similar people, which was part of their problem.

Brown saw the mismatch and implored the bigger player to shoot.

“You got a midget on you! Shoot the ball! You got a midget on you!”

Kevin Porter didn’t like being called a midget by the disco-dressing Herbie Brown.

That was part of the tenuous, stormy relationship between coach and point guard, which at times nearly turned physical in its confrontations.

Brown would sit Porter during games and not call on him for chunks of minutes at a time. Porter would glare and scowl. Herbie would finally call for Porter and it was even money whether Kevin would actually acquiesce and enter the game.

This went on for most of the 1976-77 season, a year in which the Pistons managed to win 44 games despite several key players (like Bob Lanier) holding Herbie Brown in complete disdain.

Herbie was eventually fired in December, 1977.

Herbie Brown rubbed his players raw, like a cheese grater. He yelled a lot, which even back then wasn’t the best way to get through to NBA players, even before they made salaries that would make a lot of corporate magnates blush.

Unlike Herbie Brown, Chuck Daly got it.

Chuck, the Pistons coach from 1983-92, knew his place. He knew that NBA players weren’t seventh graders who needed to be taught basketball and scolded. Rather, they were, in Chuck’s own words, 12 different corporations who responded to diplomacy and empowerment, even if the latter was disingenuous.

Chuck Daly’s brilliance was that he made it seem like the players were in charge more than he was. He let them police themselves, realizing that if you have tough-minded leaders like Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer on your roster, you might as well have them work for you rather than against you.

Once, during the 1985-86 season, the Pistons in a terrible slump, rumors were abound that Daly was to be fired—soon, any day now.

But Thomas went to bat for his coach. He encouraged GM Jack McCloskey to give Daly some more time.

A couple years later, the Pistons were in the NBA Finals. The next two after that, they won them.

Daly would end up as the greatest coach in franchise history, not that any of us saw it coming when he was hired from obscurity in 1983.

I can’t help but think of the cautionary tales of Herbie Brown and Chuck Daly as I watch John Kuester wallow in his tenure as the coach of today’s bratty Pistons.

No one seems to have Kuester’s back, as Isiah and Laimbeer did for Daly, back in the day. Rather, the coach appears to be surrounded by a lot of Kevin Porters.

As I write this, the Pistons have played 12 games. It seems like 112. The drama that has occurred so far is enough to keep a soap opera writer on retainer.

Guard Rodney Stuckey, who started yapping in training camp about being tired of not yapping enough previously, has already spent a game tethered to the bench as punishment for not leaving a prior game upon Kuester’s request.

Forward Tayshaun Prince has already verbally sparred with Kuester via the press, then cut out the middle man and sparred with him face-to-face during a game at Golden State last Monday. The coach had to be restrained during that delightful encounter.

The Pistons cannot compete with the league’s elite. There was a sorry blowout loss at home to the Celtics, which was one of the worst efforts I’d ever seen from a Pistons team.

Then the ultimate indictment came on Wednesday night.

The Pistons entertained the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers, and they did so in every sense of the word. The Pistons laid down for the Lakers. They all but brought out appetizers and cocktails before serving them a main course of an easy win.

Afterward, Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who’s been at this NBA coaching thing for over 20 years now, delivered the worst zinger of the year.

“It looked like some of their guys weren’t playing very hard,” Jackson said.

They ought to put that on the 2010-11 Pistons’ epitaph.

It was the worst, cruelest blow. Jackson’s words, coming from a spoiled victor, ought to embarrass the Pistons to no end.

But you want to know the worst part?

Jackson’s charge won’t embarrass this group of petulant Pistons one iota.

John Kuester is no Chuck Daly, but he’s no Herbie Brown, either.

Still, Kuester is likely to suffer the same fate as Brown, eventually.

That’s usually what happens in the NBA, when you can’t get all the corporations that Daly spoke of to play ball—literally and figuratively.

Statues Of Bing, Lanier Overdue At Palace (Or Cobo)

Next Thursday, NBA folks will gather inside David Stern's big top and hold the 2007 draft. The #1 overall pick will probably be the man-child Greg Oden, from Ohio State. Number two will likely be the other man-child, Kevin Durant from Texas. Slight chance it could be flip-flopped, but doubtful.

Nowadays, the order of drafting is determined by powerballs sucked thru a tube. The NBA lottery. The non-playoff teams get assigned a certain amount of powerballs, supposedly weighted so that the weaker teams have a greater chance of their, ahem, balls being sucked thru the tube. It all sounds rather obscene, but there you have it.

Back in the day, they used a different kind of a lottery. It was called a coin flip.

The Pistons and the Knicks were involved in such a game of chance, way back in 1966. At stake was the selection, #1 overall, of the pearl known as Cazzie Russell, who played at Michigan. The Pistons wanted Cazzie. Cazzie wanted the Pistons. Just the year before, the NBA had abandoned the old territorial pick, which enabled teams to choose one player from their geographic region without fear of that player being selected by anyone else. Had Cazzie Russell been available in 1965, he would have gone to the Pistons -- no ifs, ands, or buts. And no coin flips.

The Pistons lost that coin flip in 1966. Or so they thought. The Knicks chose Russell, as expected.

The Pistons ended up with the consolation prize -- othwerwise known as David Bing, the guard from Syracuse.

Guess who "won," after all?

I bring up Bing, not only because of the upcoming draft, but also because I'd like to add to the Pistons' to-do list this summer.

Plans should be underway -- terribly overdue, by the way -- to erect a statue of Bing in one of the main concourses of the Palace. Or maybe it would be more appropriately placed in the Cobo Convention Center, not far from the bust of former mayor Albert Cobo. Regardless, it needs to go up, and sooner rather than later. For if it wasn't for Bing, there's no guarantee that the Pistons would even have remained in Detroit, let alone them becoming three-time NBA champions in Motown.


Bing (left) and Lanier: they should have a date with bronze

While they're at it, they might as well build one in Bob Lanier's likeness, too. Lanier came along in 1970, and with Bing he helped bring the Pistons into the previously unexplored realm of respectability. The 1973-74 team won 52 games, to show you. And it took an angry, bitter, seven-game series loss to the Chicago Bulls to keep them from a possible berth in the Finals.

Bing was grace on the court, with a deadeye shot and slithering drives to the hoop. Lanier was the first great big man the Pistons ever employed. Maybe the only one, with apologies to Bill Laimbeer and Ben Wallace.

Both Bing and Lanier have been noteworthy citizens in their post-NBA playing careers. Bing, for a time, was considered a viable option as Detroit's mayor. His investment in the city -- both financially and emotionally -- has been grossly overlooked by the folks in this town. Lanier now works for the NBA as a sort of missionary and orator -- giving back to the youth around the world.

Of course, both have their numbers retired and raised to the Palace rafters. But that's not good enough. You have to crane your neck to see them, first of all. Reminders of Bing and Lanier's contribution to the Pistons franchise should hit fans square between the eyes as soon as they walk into the building. Or put the statues outside, if that suits your fancy.

By the way, tonight their old coach, Ray Scott, will receive a Brown Bomber jacket in a ceremony at Cobo, honoring him as part of the culmination of a week-long worth of activities celebrating Joe Louis's becoming world heavyweight boxing champ some 70 years ago. Scott is also a recently-announced member of the Class of 2007 of the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

That's an overdue thing, too.