40 years ago, Daddy Rich was Pistons' third (at least) choice

Current GM Troy Weaver is at a crossroads as he prepares to make the most important decision of his Pistons career.

Coach Chuck Daly is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He authored, without question, the best era of Pistons basketball, capturing two championships and nearly a third. His name is on a banner in the rafters of Little Caesars Arena. He coached the so called U.S. “Dream Team” in the 1992 summer Olympics to a gold medal.

Yet he was hardly the first choice of Pistons GM Jack McCloskey back in 1983, when Jack was looking for a new coach.

Hard to believe that 40 years have gone by.

In fact, there was little to suggest that Chuck would become what he was in Detroit for the Pistons, back in the summer of ‘83. I’ll go one step further. If anything, Chuck Daly seemed destined to be just another Pistons coaching casualty—to be swept away in a couple of years, never to be heard from again.

The Pistons were good at that.

Ever since the franchise was dropped on Detroit’s doorstep in 1957, a kicking and screaming refugee from Fort Wayne, the Pistons specialized in hiring coaches, giving them two years (maybe) and kicking them to the curb. Few of them were seen on an NBA sideline after leaving Motown.

There was nothing about Chuck Daly that necessarily gave Pistons fans any hope or excitement.

He came from the Ivy League (Penn) and ended up as an assistant for Billy Cunningham with the 76ers in the late-1970s. Then he did some radio work for the team. Impressed yet?

And that’s before I mention the debacle in Cleveland.

Looney tunes owner Ted Stepien, when the Cavs were nicknamed the Cadavers, presided over one of the darkest era of Cavaliers basketball. Swept up in that time was Daly, who was hired by Stepien in 1981 to coach his dysfunctional team.

It didn’t go well.

Daly’s record was 9-32 before he was given a mercy ziggy in 1982 by Stepien. But Daly did manage to coach, for a time, a brazen, snarling third year center named Bill Laimbeer from Notre Dame. And a young veteran big man in James Edwards.

A harbinger of things to come, as it turned out.

So that was Chuck Daly’s basketball resume when McCloskey tossed him a basketball at the intro presser in May 1983 at the Silverdome and said, “Go get ‘em.”

The search to replace Scotty Robertson was hardly done in a vacuum. In fact, it was one of the more public and transparent coaching searches I’ve ever seen in Detroit, and I’ve seen a lot of them in 53 years of following our teams.

McCloskey’s dream candidate was Dr. Jack Ramsay of the Trailblazers, but the Portland franchise told McCloskey to get lost; they wouldn’t allow Ramsay, under contract to the Blazers, to even take calls from Trader Jack.

So McCloskey moved on to another Jack—-McKinney, who was coaching the Indiana Pacers, also under contract. McKinney and McCloskey were old coaching buddies from their time together in the east (the former with St. Joseph’s, the latter with Wake Forest) and in NBA circles after that.

The Pacers told McCloskey to get lost.

Someone not named Jack—-Phil Johnson, was considered. Johnson coached the old Kansas City Kings from ‘73-78 and in 1983, he sat on the Utah Jazz bench as an assistant to Frank Layden.

Something didn’t quite mesh with Johnson and McCloskey, though.

There were even whispers that McCloskey himself might take the job. He told me in a 1989 interview that he considered it, but trying to do both jobs—coach and GM—was simply too taxing.

All this was being played out in the papers and on TV & radio.

Meanwhile, Chuck Daly’s name was always mentioned in these discussions—sometimes as an afterthought. The 9-32 run in Cleveland didn’t spark a lot of optimism, even though Billy Cunningham lauded Daly as an assistant with the Sixers. Besides, the Cavs were a disaster.

As the other names fell off the radar, Chuck Daly’s became more prevalent.

On May 17, 1983, Jack McCloskey tossed the basketball to Chuck Daly. Literally.

Dressed nattily, as would be his trademark (“Daddy Rich”), Daly spoke to the Detroit media.

“I’m excited about the opportunity,” Daly said, his words preserved thanks to Newspapers.com. “I’m fully aware of the Pistons’ situation after watching them over the years, and I know of the job that Jack and the owner have done to upgrade the team. It’s a club of the future.

“This is a much better club than it was when I was involved (in the NBA) before,” Chuck added in a not-so-subtle dig at the awful Pistons of years past.

Chuck Daly’s first Pistons coaching contract was for three years at $120,000 per.

He’d end up making a little more money than that before all was said and done.

Chuck Daly is introduced as Pistons coach by GM Jack McCloskey on May 17, 1983

Daly’s hiring was met with the usual ho-hum attitude when it came to anything involving the Pistons, who were (and still are) the redheaded stepchild of Detroit sports. Especially when it came to coaching hires.

If you subtract the nine wonderful years Chuck Daly spent with the Pistons, you’ll find a litany of 12-24 month tenures of men preceding and following him.

Some 40 years after Jack McCloskey stumbled into the best coaching hire in franchise history, the Pistons are looking for their next man. GM Troy Weaver inherited Dwane Casey, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t appreciate the coach, who resigned his position last week in favor of a move into the front office. In fact, Weaver interrupted Casey’s farewell presser to heap praise on the job that Casey did in his five years.

You could say that the Pistons sold Dwane Casey a bill of goods when they recruited him hard in 2018. That would be a cynical take. But not without some substance.

Casey, coming off a Coach of the Year Award in Toronto, was fired nonetheless and Pistons owner Tom Gores put the full court press on. At the time, Gores sold Casey on the team’s core three of Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond and Reggie Jackson. It was, in a way, a long time ago. But not really.

After one season and a token playoff cameo, Casey suddenly became the presider over a full-on rebuild. Which isn’t what, at age 62, he signed up for.

But Casey didn’t complain. He didn’t beg out of his contract. He didn’t make veiled comments to the press about how things changed so dramatically and so quickly.

Casey, as Weaver said to the press last week, “took the bullets.” He was a good soldier.

All true.

But it’s time now to hire a new coach, and no one knows that more than Dwane Casey. How many NBA coaches get to commit a self-ziggy and go out on their own terms?

Weaver is at that crossroads that every GM in every pro team sport comes across eventually. Forget the draft. This instantly becomes the most important decision of Weaver’s time as Pistons GM. The team is at a delicate part of their timeline. Young talent, cap space and another lottery pick on the way.

The next coach can’t be a flop. He can’t be the wrong choice.

The good news is that Tom Gores won’t have to do much heavy recruiting here. The Pistons coaching job should be considered a plum one, truthfully.

Even if Troy Weaver doesn’t get to hire his first choice.