Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2011 12:47 AM
Mark Jackson could turn out to be a great hire as head coach of the Golden State Warriors. Perhaps the best thing he has going for him is that he is practically a mirror image of his predecessor, Keith Smart.
Which is what makes Golden State’s choice of Jackson not necessarily wrong, but curious … if the Warriors wanted a young, media-friendly, minority coach with a great mind for the game and a lot of potential, well … they just fired him a couple of months back.
About the only difference between Smart and Jackson – both are 46, bright, and were contemporaries as college players and pros – is that Smart has a qualification on his resume that Jackson doesn’t – NBA coaching experience.
Smart led a talent-challenged, rag-tag Warriors club to 36 wins this past season, a 10-game improvement over the mess he inherited from Don Nelson.
As I blogged in this space a few weeks back, that near-miracle alone against a difficult lame-duck backdrop should have been enough to earn Smart the job.
Instead, new owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber stated when they fired Smart they were interested first in bringing in their own guy (understandable to some degree) and, yes, they thought they could do better than Smart right now.
They didn’t, at least in the short term. No doubt they got a sexier name in Jackson, the former Indianapolis Pacers and New York Knicks whose star has risen as the colorful sidekick along former coach Jeff Van Gundy in NBA telecast...
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