Lakernoise

When I was a kid, I never quite understood what the saying “what goes around comes around” meant exactly. Things happen in circles, I decided, still not sure what that meant. When I got a little older, my perspective changed. I upgraded my opinion to “Things happen in cycles.” Later – as I matured a little more – the saying came to have religious overtones. It was the proverbial equivalent of “an eye for an eye.” In other words, do something bad and something bad will happen to you. Or, as the Buddhists put it, karma!

I remembered this saying after recent events in Minnesota. After all, take a look at this. In the 1984 NBA Finals that pitted finals perennials the Celtics and the Lakers, in Game 4 Celtic power forward Kevin McHale clothes-lined Kurt Rambis as he was going in for an easy bucket. Rambis landed hard on his back and neck. As ugly a play as you’ll see, but those were pre-flagrant days. The benches emptied, but there were no fights – or suspensions. Rambis went after McHale but tumbled into the courtside cameramen. Celtic star Larry Bird helped Rambis up. The Lakers, who were favored to win, were so shaken that their nemesis took another final from them. (You can see it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7r6vXeOfyQ.)

So 25 years later – this coming around business can take time, you see – McHale, now the coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves after being demoted from a front office job, is unceremoniously pushed out the door. And weeks later is replaced by Rambis, who gets a nice 4-year deal. It’s not like Rambis had been waiting for 25 years; the Lakers beat those same Celtics in two other Finals match-ups a few years later. But there does seem to be something, well, karmic about this.

I wasn’t the only one to notice that, of course. But that turning continued today when Bill Laimbeer was named one of the assistants to Rambis. Yes, Bill Laimbeer, the former center of the Detroit Pistons. One of the Bad Boys. Perhaps the ugliest, meanest, least-liked of the Bad Boys. The same Bad Boys who pushed the Lakers to 7 games in 1987 before losing (on some questionable referee calls, it should be noted, for the conspiracy theorists). A year later, they dethroned the Lakers, who were without Magic Johnson and Byron Scott. Laimbeer pushed around Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Jabbar’s last games as a pro. (Rambo’s last year as a Laker, too, it should be noted.)

Laimbeer, you may recall, retired as coach of the defending WNBA champion Detroit Shock just a game or two into the WNBA season this summer. Coincidentally, his old team, the NBA Detroit Pistons, were looking for a new coach. Fans in Detroit wrote to the papers and called in to radio sports talk shows urging that Laimbeer be given a shot as the coach of the Pistons. The Pistons’ front office head honcho, Joe Dumars, a teammate of Laimbeer’s from those Bad Boy days, quietly went his way, finally opting for the relatively unknown (outside NBA coaching circles anyway), John Kuester, an assistant with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

A colleague in Detroit calls that the right move, noting that when Laimbeer was a commentator for the Pistons, he rarely talked to players before or after games, and the few times he did venture into the locker room, he was largely ignored. Not a guy with people skills, you might say. My colleague goes so far as to say Laimbeer was actively disliked and would have been a terrible choice as Pistons head coach.

Bill Laimbeer as an assistant to Kurt Rambis? This coming around karma thing has me worried. What next? Robert Parish as an assistant? Isiah Thomas as a consultant? Tommy Heinsohn as the Wolves TV Commentator?