Tonight Kentucky coach John Calipari returns to New Jersey, where he only had enough time to grab a cup of coffee as an NBA coach. So what went wrong with Calipari and the Nets? We look back.
Prior to Calipari’s arrival in New Jersey in 1996, the Nets were a perpetual joke in the NBA. In 22 seasons, New Jersey had six winning campaigns and won just one playoff series. The organization’s first major move prior to its inaugural season in the NBA was to trade away Julius Erving – and it only got worse from there.
Calipari already had experience turning around one wayward program. When he arrived at UMass in 1988, the Minutemen had suffered through ten consecutive losing seasons. It took Calipari just four seasons to win his first conference title. He then reached the Final Four in 1996, which was played in East Rutherford, NJ.
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Wrote Mike Lupica: “This is the best day the Nets have had since they got rid of the punk Derrick Coleman.”
To entice Calipari, the Nets paid him a contract of $15 million over five years, a deal that was second only to Pat Riley. Not only that, but Calipari was named “executive vice president” and had final say on all personnel moves. No coach in the league had even that power. The fact a man with zero NBA experience was given so much power and money ruffled some feathers in the coaching community.
Coach Cal’s first season with the Nets was nothing less than a disaster, as Calipari’s own players were frustrated with the coach. Calipari’s bombastic personality — the yelling and shouting and intensity — worked well with 18 and 19-year old kids. NBA players, on the other hand, wanted to be treated like adults.
Said one of his player, Robert Pack: “It tears you down. When you make a mistake , it’s a constant diet of yelling and cursing. And you’re out there, a grown man, and he’s screaming at you like a child. That’s the part guys can’t take.”
Pack wasn’t the only player to make his displeasure known. The team’s best player, Jayson Williams, publicly complained to the media and even stopped talking to Calipari for several months. Not surprisingly things on the court weren’t much better and New Jersey finished 26-56.
But that wasn’t even the low point of the season. That came in March when, upset with a line of questioning from the Newark Star-Ledger’s Dan Garcia, Calipari called him a “(expletive) Mexican idiot.” The league fined him a record $25,000 and the publicity hit he took probably cost him more in the long run. Columnists from Selena Roberts to Mike Lupica ripped Calipari apart because of the incident.
To his credit, Calipari didn’t just come back for year two; he got better. During the offseason, the organization changed its look while Calipari campaigned for, and got, modernized practice facilities. And even while the team floundered during his first season, Calipari pulled off a nine-player trade that brought the Nets Sam Cassell, Chris Gatling and Jim Jackson. Calipari improved the team again right after the draft when he acquired the No. 2 overall pick Keith Van Horn.
In year two, the Nets played much better and with wins came a change of tone in the locker room. Before Calipari had players undermining him in public. Now they were praising him.
Said Don MacLean while the team was winning: “He gets guys to play. That should be the main focus of every NBA coach, and he does it better than any coach I’ve ever played for.” In Sports Illustrated, Sam Cassell called him “the perfect player’s coach.”
The good feelings carried all the way to a post-season appearance, a seemingly impossible goal just a year earlier. While Calipari clearly had a long way to go to completely erase what happened in the first year of his tenure, the playoff appearance went a long way. The Nets didn’t stand a chance against Michael Jordan and the Bulls, especially with their assortment of bruised and battered players.
But Nets fans now had something they weren’t used to having heading into Calipari’s third season: high expectations. Even the league had high expectations. According to Jayson Williams, following the Bulls’ series clinching win, Michael Jordan said:
“You’ve got a good young team here. But the problem is, management never keeps (it) together. Right now, you have a team that’s energetic. They run. They play hard. We’re breaking up. This team here can be the team of the future.”
But in the NBA, the future is only as deep as the evening’s box score and the Nets got off to an awful start in 1998. The team went a dismal 3-17 to start the season. All the goodwill built from a improbable playoff run was lost, at least to the owners. After just 20 games Calipari was fired.
Without the wins from before, Calipari’s in-you-face style of coaching became an issue again, alienating some players. In the end, the owners believed they were doing what was best for the team and Calipari personally.
Said one of the owners Lewis Katz during a press conference: “He was trying so hard to change his style. I don’t know that there was a determining factor, but it was pretty obvious that he was in his misery as he watched the season slip away when there had been such high expectations at the start of the season.”
Calipari’s failure in the NBA didn’t affect the rest of his coaching career. Since his time in New Jersey, he’s taken Memphis to the Final Four and a Mario Chalmers shot away from a national title, and he has Kentucky two games away from Houston.
He could become just the second coach to ever take three teams to the Final Four. And he could end up doing it in the same state of his biggest career flop.
