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Sixers on road to success
Updated: Thursday November 16, 2000 11:28 AM
The Sixers' fast start is doing more for their team than giving them a good record. Nothing develops team confidence like going on the road and beating good teams, and Philadelphia has beaten New York, Miami, Orlando and Minnesota in their own gyms. When you judge good teams in the NBA, you always look at their road record and how they did against the better teams on the road, so this bodes well for them. Philadelphia wasn't among my picks at the beginning of the season because I didn't think the team was good enough offensively, but Theo Ratliff and Eric Snow have really turned it up this year. And when you go down their lineup, they're outstanding competitors. They're not only a physical team, they're mentally tough as well. They'll have to play all those teams again, and we'll see what happens the next time around. But I don't think Larry Brown has to worry about his team getting overconfident. They'll come to play every night.
Bird of prayOn the other side of the team-confidence spectrum are the Hawks. Lon Kruger is staring at the toughest job a coach can face. When you have an all-new coaching staff and so many injuries to key players, it's a huge challenge. They lost Dikembe Mutombo, Lorenzen Wright and Dion Glover, and Alan Henderson has been banged up. They had no chance to practice together, then they had to go West and play a difficult early schedule. Atlanta's win against Portland on Tuesday will help in the short term, but the toughest job a head coach in Kruger's situation has is keeping everybody positive. That includes himself. He hasn't coached in the NBA before, and this job is so different from coaching at a good college program. There's a game almost every night, compared with college, where he had only eight to 10 games maximum that he had to worry about. It's tough to stay up. The big key, from a coaching standpoint, will be keeping himself up and keeping the players' confidence up.
Marked manConfidence doesn't seem to be an issue in Dallas, where owner Mark Cuban likes to be seen and heard. I haven't seen a Dallas game yet when he's been shown on TV fewer than10 times. But I like the enthusiasm he's brought to the game, and he's willing to spend money to win. He's created tremendous excitement in Dallas, which was a franchise really on the downside. He's wonderful for the league, just as Pat Croce is in Philadelphia. The enthusiasm rubs off on the fans, and obviously you have to win, but that attitude will help put people in the building. And the league has to love that So that $5,000 fine, which was pocket change for Cuban, wasn't meant to curb any of that enthusiasm just get him to shift his focus a bit. Kevin Loughery is a former NBA player and head coach. He appears each Sunday on CNN/Sports Illustrated's This Week in the NBA.
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