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Uncaging the Grizzlies

Before he was Phil Jackson, he was kicking around the minor leagues of basketball, Albany and Puerto Rico, and he was an assistant on the Bulls’ staff who blew his first chance at a job with the team when he showed up for the interview in a big Panama hat with a macaw feather sticking out.

Before he was Pat Riley, he was a broadcast color man for the most colorful broadcaster in history, Chick Hearn, and a lowly assistant for the Lakers.

Before he was Chuck Daly, he was the a head coach in the Ivy League after six years as a Duke assistant and then toiling at the end of the 76ers’ bench.

So why can’t Tony Barone be the next great coach in the NBA? These guys have got to come from somewhere.

“It’s a thrill, what an unbelievable dream come true,” says Barone, the Chicago guy, a former local high school coach who grew up near Buckingham and Broadway on the North Side and attended Mt. Carmel grammar school in the city and St. George High School in Evanston. “You ask a high school coach about getting a chance to coach in the NBA, you don’t ever imagine it happening. It has been a whirlwind, great fun. I never even though about coaching in the pros. My goal was to be the best college coach I could be.”

Barone was a pretty good one at Creighton and Texas A&M, picking up coach of the year honors in both the Missouri Valley and Southwest conferences in a run between 1985 and 1998 that followed high school gigs in the Chicago area at St. George, Gordon Tech and Mt. Carmel.

Barone hooked up with the Grizzlies, where he was personnel director until landing on the bench when Mike Fratello was fired last month with the team 6-24. But before that, Barone had spent two seasons on the Grizzlies’ bench as Hubie Brown’s right-hand man.

When Barone is here Saturday with the Grizzlies to play the Bulls, he brings with him, suddenly, one of the most surprising and entertaining teams in the NBA. After discarding Fratello’s deliberate pace, the run-and-gun, high-scoring, quick-shooting Grizzlies are averaging 117.7 points per game and playing .500 ball since Barone took over.

“We have not had one shot at the end of the shot clock other than at the end of the quarter for a last shot,” Barone says proudly. “We push on made and missed shots and take the first available shot. It’s a freedom-oriented approach.

“We have not taken bad shots, we’ve taken long shots,” Barone explains. “We’ve impressed on our guys, a good shot is not necessarily an open shot. It’s a shot you’re comfortable with. . . . We try to give these guys the opportunity to play basketball. It seems to me as you move up the ladder from high school to college to the NBA, the game becomes more a players’ game.”

That was clear in Barone’s first game, a 110-104 victory over Toronto in which the Raptors cut a 24-point deficit to one. At that point, the players stopped and looked to Barone for a timeout.

“I said, `Don’t look over at me. Play the game,'” he recalls.

Sure, it’s probably a new coach’s honeymoon period. Pau Gasol is back from injury. The roster isn’t great, a mixture of aging veterans like Eddie Jones and Damon Stoudamire and inexperienced kids like Rudy Gay and Hakim Warrick. And the team isn’t in condition to maintain this pace after playing under Fratello.

But Barone’s presence raises a more significant question for the NBA.

There are perhaps a dozen coaches considered vulnerable this season, yet several teams are reluctant to make moves because of the lack of proven replacements. Where are they coming from? The college movement was a flop. The minor leagues are disorganized, and no one has emerged in the NBA’s NBDL. The assistant ranks have been depleted with few proving exceptional.

So why not hire a guy like Barone, who says he’s going back to personnel in Memphis after this season even though the team is for sale and general manager Jerry West has been talking about retirement.

“It’s a situation where I’ve been so involved day to day coaching I really haven’t projected beyond this year,” Barone says.

Part of his problem is America. Barone doesn’t look like an NBA coach. Barone has more the Jerry Krause visage, a little heavy on the jowls with the hound-dog look. Still, he’s a playful puppy to players, who can’t help raving about him.

Barone trusts his young players, noting they played at major college programs in big games, so they have made big decisions before in games. He has Stromile Swift playing, which hardly anyone has done. He has worked side by side with Hubie Brown and Jerry West, played for Vic Bubas at Duke. He has experienced the game.

When the Grizzlies scored a 2006-07 regulation-game high 144 points under Barone, the players appeared tired late in the game.

“So I asked them, `OK, would you like for me to start calling plays?'” Barone says. “They said, `No.’ So I said, `OK, then start running again.’ There’s no magic in coaching.”

Someone hire this guy.

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sasmith@tribune.com