'Glory days' not just song to Wolves coaches

David Kahn's swift, summertime Timberwolves makeover has generated many pertinent preseason questions, not the least of which is this:

Might the Wolves' notable new coaching staff be tougher than the team?

"Well," forward Al Jefferson said with a pregnant pause, "they think they are."

Their new head coach won six NBA titles with the Los Angeles Lakers as a player and assistant coach. But in a youtube.com world, Kurt Rambis just might be best remembered for those industrial-strength eyeglasses from long ago and for rising ready to fight after he was clobbered by Kevin McHale in a 1984 NBA Finals game.

Rambis' search for candidates with championship pedigrees as well as both head-coaching experience and aspirations produced a staff that includes Bill Laimbeer, the most insufferable member from the Detroit Pistons' "Bad Boys" teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s, two-time NBA All-Star guard and former Sacramento head coach Reggie Theus and Dave Wohl, an assistant coach on those 1980s Lakers teams and former New Jersey head coach.

The only Wolves coach who didn't play in the NBA is J.B. Bickerstaff, who grew up in the league because his father, Bernie, is a longtime head coach and executive. Bickerstaff is also the only assistant who held that same job last season for McHale and Randy Wittman.

"If the players ask about situations, these guys have actually, physically gone through it," Rambis said. "They've lived through losing environments, they've lived through winning environments. With all our years in the league, we've probably experienced everything and anything that all of these players are going to go through.

"That experience is going to be invaluable."

Of the 12 players who came to training camp with guaranteed contracts, only ancient Brian Cardinal was born when Theus and Laimbeer entered the NBA as players. And Cardinal had just turned 1 when Chicago selected Theus ninth overall in 1978.

Rookie Jonny Flynn had just turned 2 years old when Theus retired in 1991 and pursued television opportunities in a roundabout path that eventually has led him back to the NBA.

"None of these guys have seen us play," said Theus, who apprenticed under Rick Pitino at Louisville and then coached New Mexico State for two seasons before his 106-game stay with the Kings ended with his firing last December.

"What matters most is they know what we've done. They can Google us if they really want to. Or they can just ask us. The best historians out there are the ones who tell the story themselves."

On and on...

Ask and apparently the new Timberwolves coaches will tell.

And tell.

"They always talk about 30 years ago," Jefferson said with a straight face. "I tell them, 'Y'all gotta stop living in the past. Y'all's time is over with.' I think they get caught up in it, especially my man Bill over there. He don't stop with 'I used to do this' and 'I used to do that.' Well, that's over."

Laimbeer elbowed and irritated, flailed and flopped during a 14-year NBA playing career in which he won consecutive titles with the Pistons and reached the All-Star Game four times.

Just as he always did way back when, Laimbeer's face contorted in disbelief when told about Jefferson's claim.

"Gol-lee, that's not true," said Laimbeer, who is coaching in the NBA for the first time after leading the WNBA's Detroit Shock to three championships in his seven full seasons as head coach. "I try not to do that. The players don't want to hear what was, they just want to hear what is. Most of them know what we've accomplished. That gives us about a five-minute head start on credibility."

Rambis said he wasn't necessarily looking for assistants who played in the NBA, but it just worked out that way. He did want coaches who want to be head coaches, and it also worked that Wohl, the top assistant, and Theus and Laimbeer have been head coaches either in the NBA or the WNBA.

"A stroke of genius," Theus said of Rambis' decisions. "We all understand what a head coach needs because we all knew what we needed. Our job, it's all about support. The respect we have for each other and the different areas of expertise, it makes for some interesting conversations, arguments, whatever you want to call them, behind closed doors.

"But when we step out on the floor, we'll be together as one unit."

A winning way

Kahn wanted a head coach who knows what it's like to win championships, so he hired Rambis, who went out and hired more guys who know that winning feeling.

"It's kind of awkward to say we're going to be a championship team," Kahn said, "if you don't have some leaders who know not only what it's like to play for championships but win them."

Jefferson calls the cast Rambis has assembled "an All-Star coaching staff, if you ask me" because of their accomplishments as players and coaching résumés that include Rambis' seven seasons with Phil Jackson in Los Angeles.

Even if those playing accomplishments mostly have been long lost in the mists of time.

"I know Kurt Rambis had those big thick glasses, got clobbered going for that layup and got up ready to fight," said Flynn, who doesn't turn 21 until February. "I know what Bill Laimbeer did with the Pistons and the Chicago Bulls and Reggie Theus. I'm a student of the game. I know a little about old-school basketball. You have to do your research.

"This is my history. I have it right here in front of me."