By HARVEY ARATON
The New York Times
Last Updated: March 13, 2002
The scornful smile curling at the corner of Byron Scott's mouth gave him away even as he said he had "no comment whatsoever" regarding George Karl's commentary on head coaching hiring practices, soon to be published in a national magazine but already burning up the pro basketball grapevine.

This turned out to mean that Scott had no intellectualized response because, in his opinion, Karl didn't deserve one.

"It's just George talking," Scott, the Nets' coach, said on Tuesday, considering the source, playing it cool. "I hear what he says and most of the time I laugh at it."

Karl's contention in the April issue of Esquire - that the hiring of players, and especially African-American players, with no coaching credentials amounts to discrimination against others - would be laughable if it weren't so shortsighted, self-serving and insensitive.

Long in love with the sound of his own voice, Karl, who coaches the Milwaukee Bucks, said he intended nothing racially inflammatory when he called Doc Rivers, with whom he has feuded, an "anointed" coach and said Rivers' secure standing in Orlando would result in "four or five more anointments of the young Afro-American coach."

Faulty logic
We'll take him at his word on that, but whomever his target, whatever he meant, Karl made the mistake of linking the emerging black pro coach with the concept of entitlement, with the misguided notion that Rivers and others of the same credentials and color are and will continue to be the beneficiaries of political correctness or, worse, NBA welfare.

Hence, the understandable scorn in Scott's smile.

In his third season, Rivers has been followed into the African-American head coaching fraternity by, among others, Scott, whose Nets have the best record in the Eastern Conference, and Maurice Cheeks, who stepped into a messy situation in Portland and cleaned it up within 50 games.

Which African-Americans so lacking in credentials, exactly, have been anointed since Rivers? Scott, who paid his dues as an assistant in Sacramento? Cheeks, who apprenticed under Larry Brown in Philadelphia? Bill Cartwright, who was given a three-year contract by Chicago on Monday after spending more than enough time as a scout and assistant in preparation for a job that self-important watchdogs like Karl too often liken to brain surgery?

No big deal
Not too many years ago, before basketball coaches became preachers in Armani, the coach was considered so vital that the occasional frugal owner saved a few bucks by having his most erudite player fill both jobs.

"It's more complicated today: younger players, a lot more teaching," said the Raptors' coach, Lenny Wilkens, once a player-coach in Seattle and Portland and now the league's leader in career coaching victories. "I wouldn't think you could do justice to both."

On the subject of a just hiring system and Karl's complaints that Jeff Van Gundy clones are no longer in vogue, Wilkens said he was withholding his response until reading the entire article. "I've got enough problems with my own team right now," he said with a trademark restraint that Karl unfortunately lacks.

Interesting that Wilkens, of mixed race himself and a man who has seen it all in his nearly 50-year career, hesitates to inject race into an equation, to turn a complex and important discussion into another self-promotional, Charles Barkley sound bite.

Mind own business
Like Wilkens, Karl should be preoccupied with his own team, lest people begin asking why someone as well compensated and intense as Karl can't get his underachieving Bucks to play any defense. His suggestion of racial preference for blacks, no matter how benign, callously disregards the decades when the typical black player with hopes of coaching had to beg a white teammate not to forget about him for an assistant's job when the inevitable graduation occurred.

Karl can't seem to remember how a morally challenged system worked for him, as a former white journeyman player who didn't last two full seasons in his first two coaching jobs at Cleveland and Golden State and who still managed to be hired a third time in Seattle. He's right about Doc Rivers. Like Larry Bird, Rivers cut a few corners, with his winning personality and player's reputation, but he is a rare exception, not the rule.

A smart coach ought to know the difference.