On Pro Basketball: P.J. Carlesimo, Nets Interim Coach, Puts Choke in Past

When Carlesimo was a marquee name, the assailant just went for the jugular. The results could be fatal. Those who had longstanding relationships with him worried that his coaching career, N.B.A. or college, would be forever entombed after he was infamously choked and punched by Latrell Sprewell when with the Golden State Warriors early in the 1997-98 season.

His mother, Lucy, wept on the doorstep of her Montclair, N.J., home after a reporter knocked the following day. His close-knit cluster of nine brothers and sisters — two of them lawyers — rallied around him and advised him on how to defend his reputation. Industry friends and colleagues wondered how Carlesimo could survive a spectacle that, however indefensible on Sprewell’s part, saw a player-coach relationship deteriorate to the point of assault.

Yet here is Carlesimo, still living the itinerant pro basketball life, around long enough to be taking control of his fourth N.B.A. team. Even if it is with an interim tag attached to his big toe, while the Nets owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov considers chasing Phil Jackson or some other hot name.

Jackson to the long downtrodden franchise he once sneered at when it tried to recruit him to New Jersey? We agree it sounds far-fetched, but the Nets do finally have an appealing setting, an owner with billions of rubles and international riches, and an upgraded roster, though one with flaws that have become increasingly and painfully apparent during a miserable December.

It is conceivable, if not likely, that Carlesimo, Johnson’s top assistant, gets the same opportunity Mike Woodson made the most of after replacing Mike D’Antoni last season with the Knicks. Could Deron Williams, the franchise player who publicly complained about Johnson’s offense and Wednesday night took a suspiciously timed seat on the bench in Milwaukee with an injured wrist, suddenly grow a healthier attitude now that Johnson and his personality, long known to grate on point guards, are gone?

A sobering disclaimer: Carlesimo’s undoing in Portland, Golden State and to a certain degree in Oklahoma City was almost universally attributed to a high-volume style that invariably worked better with college players on scholarship than professionals earning seven-figure salaries.

It is hard to imagine that Carlesimo, at 63 and after three N.B.A. dismissals, would be as headstrong as he once was. From 2002 through 2007, as an assistant coach in San Antonio, he was well positioned to marvel at one of the best player-coach relationships — Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich — in the history of the sport.

Having been blamed for Jerry Sloan’s coaching exit in Utah and sure to be implicated in Johnson’s descent from decorated (he was N.B.A. coach of the month in November) to departed, Williams is obviously no Duncan. He was also clearly not playing at 100 percent. But will he respond to Carlesimo the way Carmelo Anthony did to Woodson? Who knows?

At the Nets’ practice facility in East Rutherford, N.J., on Thursday, General Manager Billy King said he told Carlesimo, “You coach it like you’re going to be here for the next 10 years.” Be it 4 games or the 54 that remain on the Nets’ regular-season schedule, Carlesimo at least has come full circle in his career as a head coach.

The son of Peter Carlesimo, a longtime power broker with the then-prestigious National Invitation Tournament, Carlesimo played college ball at Fordham, made a coaching name for himself at Wagner on Staten Island and came within the cheapest of nudge fouls in 1989 of winning a national title at Seton Hall.

He spent 12 years at the South Orange, N.J., university and probably could have stayed for 25, given his success, and a gregarious and raspy-voiced style that seemed perfectly suited to his trademark Smith Brothers beard.

When bigger programs recruited Carlesimo, he invariably would say, “No thanks,” and then question himself a few days later for not listening harder. But when the Portland Trail Blazers called in 1994, offering more than $7 million of the computer giant Paul Allen’s money, Carlesimo took the leap into the N.B.A. life. His timing for the pros wasn’t good and never really was.

In Portland, he inherited a veteran team that had made the finals in 1990 and 1992, but was in decline. At Golden State, a bad team was made worse by the ever-obdurate Sprewell. Carlesimo’s short tenure with the Seattle/Oklahoma City franchise occurred when Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook were still playing on training wheels.

And then there was always the question of whether Carlesimo was best suited for the college game and should have stayed there.

That said, there has also been a Zelig-like quality to Carlesimo. People tended to like and respect him, especially other coaches. Mike Krzyzewski chose him as an assistant for the 1990 world championships. Ditto Chuck Daly for the Dream Team at the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992. Carlesimo was Popovich’s top lieutenant on three championship teams, and Johnson hired him with the Nets.

In making the change, King said it was Carlesimo’s experience that kept him from going outside the franchise, for now.

“If you bring in someone from the outside right now, it’s going to take them a while just to figure out the personnel,” he said. “And that takes time.”

How much time Carlesimo gets may depend on how quickly the Nets regain their footing, or maybe not. Either way, it is more time than many thought he would get when Sprewell made the figurative act of coach-killing seem worse than it already was.

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