Meet the professor
OKC’s NBA team is in the hands of someone who’s made a career of building, teaching

By Darnell Mayberry

Published: October 12, 2008

He has a history of starting from scratch, for taking bottom-feeding programs and building.

But when that becomes your calling card as a coach, as it has with the Thunder’s P.J. Carlesimo, you step into jobs that don’t lend themselves to much success. And no matter how hard you work behind the scenes or how many strides you make, the wins and losses are the only things seen by the outside world.

And when your record is mediocre, 203-284 in 6 1/2 NBA seasons, you become typecast as an average coach by fans and media types. Carlesimo’s demanding and sometimes overbearing style that centers on discipline and defense only adds to the perception.

He wasn’t the sexiest candidate when then Sonics general manager Sam Presti hired him in July 2007. Carlesimo won the job over Larry Brown, Rick Carlisle, Jeff Van Gundy, Dwane Casey and Marc Iavaroni.

But it’s Carlesimo’s style and his history of embracing rebuilding challenges that embodies everything the Thunder franchise seeks in a head coach.

"We really felt like with a core of younger players we needed someone that could really be a teacher,” Presti said. "We also felt that it would be important to have a defensive philosophy. That’s an area of the organization that we wanted to improve upon. And P.J. presented both of those skills.”

Carlesimo, 59, brings 37 years of coaching experience to the Thunder.

He’s was part of three NBA titles as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs, captained his Seton Hall team to a runner-up finish for the 1989 NCAA championship and led the Portland Trail Blazers to three straight 44-plus win seasons from 1994-97.

But he never led the Blazers past the first round of the playoffs. How a tumultuous 2 1/2 seasons as head coach of the Golden State Warriors resulted in a 46-113 record and was marred most by an infamous attack on the coach by Latrell Sprewell.

"I think perceptions are realities for sure,” Carlesimo said. "But I think unless you’ve played for me, unless you’ve worked for me, you don’t really know what I’m like. And I think it’s always in the eyes of the beholder.”

Carlesimo began his coaching career as an assistant at his alma mater, Fordham University, in 1971. In 1975 he landed his first head coaching job at Division II New Hampshire College, now Southern New Hampshire University, and guided the Penman to a 14-13 record and the Mayflower Conference championship in his lone season.

He moved on to Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y., a place viewed by many as a dead-end job. The Seahawks had seven straight losing seasons as a Division II and III school and won just 40 games in six seasons prior to Carlesimo’s arrival. And the school was making the jump to Division I in Carlesimo’s first season.

"I probably didn’t know any better,” Carlesimo said. "I’m 27 at the time. It just turned out that that was the first break.”

After seven wins his first two seasons, Carlesimo led Wagner to a 21-7 record and its first-ever postseason appearance in the NIT. He produced winning teams two of the next three seasons and made another NIT before accepting the Seton Hall job in 1982.

The Pirates were 6-22 in the Big East Conference the two seasons before Carlesimo, and thes job was considered a career killer. He saw it as career move.

"I was pretty young relatively and I’m thinking, ‘This is great. It’s a Big East job,’” Carlesimo recalled, unconcerned about competing against conference powers Syracuse, Georgetown, Villanova and St. John’s.

Seton Hall went 7-57 in conference play his first four seasons. The next three seasons: NIT, the Pirates’ first NCAA berth and 31-7 season ended by a loss to Michigan in the NCAA championship game.

Seton Hall made the NCAA Tournament six of his last seven seasons, including trips to the Elite 8 in 1991 and Sweet 16 in 1992.

"I’ll always remember Seton Hall because Seton Hall stayed with me through some really tough early years,” Carlesimo said.

There is no such job security in the NBA.

With Portland in 1994-95, Carlesimo became the first ex-college coach to have a winning record and make the playoffs in his debut NBA season since Cotton Fitzsimmons in 1970-71. He was fired him in 1997 after the Blazers teams were bounced from the first round three straight seasons.

Carlesimo’s only head coaching job that wasn’t a rebuilding project brought his first bout with win-now pressure.

He went to Golden State and a franchise that had a losing record in four of the previous five seasons. The Sprewell incident occurred a month into his first season, and the Warriors were too young and inexperienced to compete.

"I thought it was going to be one of those, ‘Let’s build it a step at a time,’ situations,” Carlesimo said. "They knew where they were at. They hadn’t been to the playoffs in a real long time and they wanted to get back. But for whatever reasons it didn’t work out.”

After two years out of coaching, Carlesimo was hired as an assistant in San Antonio, where he coached from 2002-07 under Gregg Popovich. It was there that he met Presti and began building a relationship that led him to Oklahoma City.

"The vision here is to build something that’s going to sustain and it’s a long-term vision,” Carlesimo said. "We don’t want to have a good team. We want to have a good franchise where we have a lot of good basketball teams.”

Although Presti was initially non-committal in April when the Seattle media questioned whether Carlesimo would return for this season, Presti now says, "He has my full support.”

After a franchise-worst 20-win season, it’s all up to Carlesimo to prove he deserves it.

But those who know him best point to Carlesimo’s penchant for teaching the game as reason that he’s a good fit for a young team like the Thunder.

Thunder assistant coach Paul Westhead called Carlesimo meticulous and extremely prepared, with "everything broken down like a classroom teacher.”

"He’s very precise,” said Westhead, a veteran coach who won NBA and WNBA titles, coached NCAA Tournament teams at LaSalle and Loyola-Marymount and has known Carlesimo since the 1970s.

"He’s a statistic guy. He’s going to make decisions because he’s done the numbers. He’s not just going to say, ‘I think we should run this pick and roll.’ We’re going to have it charted and we’re going to know what side to run it and who should be doing it.”

Carlesimo’s biggest task is to instruct Kevin Durant and Jeff Green and rookie Russell Westbrook on the intricacies of the NBA. Durant, last year’s Rookie of the Year, labeled Carlesimo as a great teacher, one who has already helped him a lot.

"If you ever watch the games you see me walking to the sidelines a lot because he has something to tell me and some things I can work on during the game,” Durant said.

Joe Smith, who played for Carlesimo with the Warriors, remembers Carlesimo slowing down practices to make sure players understood what to do and how to execute things properly.

"P.J.’s the type of coach that’s going to make sure you have it, make sure you understand what’s going on out there on the floor,” Smith said.

"That’s what you need at this level.”

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