Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal reports that after sacking Marc Iavaroni on Thursday, the Grizzlies have decided to hire Milwaukee assistant Lionel Hollins to take over for the season. Most interesting to many will be the footnote: deposed 76ers coach Maurice Cheeks will join Hollins as an assistant.The Cheeks move scrambles the other summer vacancies a bit, though it'd be hard to estimate just how many of the 6-10 teams seeking new coaches come April and May would have targeted Cheeks. But the decision to bring Hollins back really sticks out as odd considering the circumstances and the history.
Hollins has filled in as the Grizzlies' head coach twice before. In Vancouver in 1999, Brian Hill got fired a few weeks into the season and Hollins stepped in. (The team didn't get much better under Hollins.) Hollins filled a gap between Hubie Brown and Mike Fratello in 2004-05; the team -- 5-7 under Brown and 40-26 under Fratello -- didn't win any of the four games Hollins coached. And as has been noted, at the one opportunity in which the empathetic, positive Hollins might have made a difference -- when the team canned dictatorial Herr Fratello early in 2006-07, once the players tuned him out -- a personnel guy, Tony Barone, got the job instead.
That's why this is all so weird. Hollins seems far more like a trusty standby than a real agent of change and improvement. And as Commercial-Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins surmises, this reeks of continued cheapness on the part of team owner Michael Heisley.
Why pay an extra penny when the franchise is going to lose three out of every four games anyway? Why talk to Avery Johnson or Jeff Van Gundy or any other coach who might cost more than the minimum?Really, Cheeks is the Rosetta Stone to all of this. Tillery hasn't reported if Hollins' contract will be only for this season or will extend into 2009-10. Having followed Heisley and Memphis for the past three seasons, I'll bet on the former. So why is Cheeks here? Solely to work on developing Mike Conley, Kyle Lowry and O.J. Mayo? To audition for the lead job for 2009-10? If it's the latter, why is Hollins here?
A coach like that might ask the team to spend actual money on players, too. There's no telling what sort of trouble that could cause.
Heisley is no stranger to odd decision-making, but the particularly weird line of succession involved here is, well, particularly weird.
