Atkins played for several coaches who have reputations as being among the best in the NBA — Doc Rivers, Mike Fratello and former Pistons coaches Rick Carlisle and Larry Brown. His goal is to take a little bit from each and mix it with his own style. “Ultimately, a coach is only as good as the guys on his team,” Atkins said. “It would be my job to guide and direct them. But ultimately, each guy would have to be a personal contractor to get themselves as good as they can possibly be, but also put it in a team concept. … I would take a little bit from all of those guys’ style and come up with my own formula that would be successful.”
Rick Carlisle Rumors
Okay, Carlisle was no Jordan Stopper. But on this week’s “Hoops, Adjacent” podcast, he was sanguine about it. “If you watch “The Last Dance,” you’ll see that I was actually guarding him in that series – which had mixed results, to say the least,” Carlisle said.
Carlisle put the ball in Dončić’s hands early his rookie season, and has built the Mavs’ offense around the point forward’s prodigious talents, surrounding him with shooters like Seth Curry and a strong second scoring option in the now-healthy Kristaps Porziņģis. Always on top of every analytic trend, Dallas has joined the league’s charge back toward – mirabile dictu – caring again about offensive rebounds, after years of teams prioritizing getting back on defense. Comfortably in the playoff mix when the season was suspended with a 40-27 record – just three games in the loss column behind Houston in the Southwest Division and currently seventh in the Western Conference – Dallas will be a team none of the top seeds will want to face in the first round.
“Our braintrust did a great job of signing guys that fit into what we planned to do with Luka Dončić, with Kristaps Porziņģis,” Carlisle said on the podcast. ” … A lot of this, in the NBA, the success of the team, comes down to who your best players are. With Dončić and Porziņģis, we’ve set ourselves up well from the offensive side of the ball. Coming out of the hiatus, the majority of our emphasis is going to be to continue to improve defensively. We started out the season somewhere in the 20s rank-wise. We’re now up in sort of the middle ranks of all the teams in the league (17th in Defensive Rating, at 111.5, per basketball-reference.com), and we want to continue moving up. And our goal is to get in the top 10.”
But the coaches who’ve spent a couple days with Jackson, in Montana or Los Angeles, say it has had a huge effect on them. “Phil is a longtime trusted friend,” Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said. “I talk basketball at length with him two or three times a year. He’s a great resource and has been extremely generous with his time and knowledge to all coaches.”
Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle responded to his brief, not-so-glamorous appearance in the opening episode of ESPN’s “The Last Dance” with a wry bit of self-deprecating humor. “There must have been an exhaustive search to find footage of me actually PLAYING in an NBA playoff game,” Carlisle wrote in a text reply to an inquiry about his thoughts on the clip that showed him as a Boston Celtics reserve guard being torched by Michael Jordan for a dunk after a baseline spin.
The documentary, showing footage from Jordan’s 49-point performance in the 1986 playoff opener at Boston Garden, quickly cut to a clip of Carlisle awkwardly scratching the back of his neck while lining up for a Jordan free throw. (That was after a foul by Carlisle that was actually committed the next possession.) “I mean, Carlisle just wants his mommy,” the color commentator said.
