Les Carpenter, The Guardian/Oakland


In the autumn of 2011, back when David Stern locked the doors on his NBA players in a fit of labour pique, University of Memphis basketball coach Josh Pastner offered a job to an old friend. He wanted Luke Walton to be his assistant.
It didn’t matter that Walton was still a small forward for the Los Angeles Lakers and that everybody knew the NBA’s labour dispute would end before Christmas, rendering the assistant coaching job a high-end internship. Pastner had a feeling about his former college teammate. Behind the placid gaze and the California ease there burned the soul of a coach. Pastner wanted Walton to find it.
“Everybody thought it was a stunt, but I don’t have time for stunts here,” Pastner told the Guardian.
At the time, Pastner was two years removed from replacing John Calipari at Memphis. The pressure to win big like the coach before him was immense. The last thing he needed was a gimmick. Somehow he knew Walton could make a difference with his players, even if it only turned out to be three and a half months of Walton. He turned out to be right.
Anyone who thinks Luke Walton is off to the greatest start of any head coach in NBA history simply by standing on the Golden State Warriors sideline is a fool. The idea that anyone could lead the Warriors to a 20-0 record in Steve Kerr’s absence is ridiculous. If anything, Walton has earned himself a real head coaching job somewhere in the NBA next season because he has been handed the league’s hardest job: taking over the previous spring’s champions and getting them to listen.
The biggest challenge of any NBA coach isn’t dissecting game tape or designing plays, it’s making multi-millionaires believe you aren’t wasting their time, that they have reason to believe that you can somehow make them better. In Walton’s case the demand is even greater. He’s had to get a team that won the title last spring to play as hard as they did last season. Even an established coach finds this hard to do in November when the players are still coming off the glow of the previous year’s championship. It’s nearly impossible for a fill-in who has never been a head coach before.
That’s what makes Luke Walton the name a lot of general managers are going to want running their teams when Steve Kerr recovers from his back surgery and returns to the bench. But it’s what Pastner saw in Walton even before Walton maybe saw it in himself.
“There are two things he does,” Pastner said. “He’s got a great knowledge of the game and that’s important because players know when you know what you are talking about or not. But he’s also got a great temperament He doesn’t get too high or two low. He’s got a competitive desire to him but he keeps it very calm and relaxed.”
What everyone is seeing now on the Warriors sideline is what Pastner saw in the basketball offices at Memphis. Walton was made for coaching. Though he was only there from late August to early December and was still an active player, he redesigned elements of Memphis’s offense. He changed some of the plays they ran off screens. He taught them pieces of Phil Jackson’s triangle offense and explained other NBA formations that eventually found their way into Pastner’s playbook.
He also recruited. Pastner assigned him the task of trying to lure forward Alex Poythress to Memphis. This wasn’t a simple job given that Poythress was a top 20 recruit and eventually wound up with Calipari at Kentucky. But Walton worked well with Poythress, not by selling but by talking, telling the player about life in the NBA and the things he needed to do to make himself better.
 “He gets people and he understands them,” Pastner said. “He’s basketball intelligent and he’s very smart. He doesn’t make rash decisions.”
Pastner paused.
“When you look at the people he’s been around, it’s amazing,” he said. “Whether you like him or not, I love listening to Bill Walton [Luke’s father] on television. He knows so much. And Bill Walton is in the Hall of Fame. Then he’s been around John Wooden, Hall of Fame. Larry Bird [Bill’s teammate in Boston], Hall of Fame. Kevin McHale [also Boston] Hall of Fame. Kobe Bryant, Hall of Fame. Phil Jackson, Hall of Fame. His college coach was Lute Olson who is also in the Hall of Fame. Think of all those guys he was around just as a little kid.
“From there it’s upon you to relate and be able to communicate. I probably sound like a broken record saying this but a lot of that is his temperament and his personality.”
And it is a big reason why the Warriors have won all their games at the start of this season when circumstances said they should have struggled. He has found a way to convince the players they are getting something from him.
Maybe his success in Kerr’s place is a surprise to many who never imagined Bill Walton’s son – the one with the Grateful Dead tattoo – as a head coach.