By John DentonNov. 8, 2015
INDIANAPOLIS – Scott Skiles is one of the most famous and accomplished players in the glorious history of Indiana basketball, so much so that he once scored 56 points in a high school game and later became a modern-day version of Jimmy Chitwood of Hoosiers fame with a most improbable prep state title that is still talked about today.
But playing basketball – something that Skiles did very well and did so at every level – was never the master plan. Even as he was defying the odds – first in high school in tiny Plymouth, Ind., then at Michigan State and finally at the NBA level – and getting absolutely the most out of an underwhelming 6-foot-1, 180-pound frame, Skiles always saw himself as more of the coaching type and a leader of men.
As a fiery player with a mean streak as extensive as those long jumpers he would drill over taller, more athletic big men, Skiles was as competitive and crafty as they come. But while playing the game was what he did early on in life, coaching it was the aspect that he secretly always dreamed of and prepared himself for since, well, his early childhood days while growing up in tiny Plymouth, Ind.
“Ummm, when I was about seven,” Skiles, 51, said of the first time he thought about being a basketball coach. “At some point, I always thought I’d coach. I wanted to play as long as I could and I had goals of wanting to play professionally, but then I always thought I’d end up coaching after that.”
With that career path always the end-game goal for Skiles, it should come as no surprise that he has been quite successful everywhere he’s coached. Whether it’s been in Greece, Phoenix, Chicago, Milwaukee or even now in Orlando, Skiles has shown a knack for elevating teams with his off-the-charts basketball smarts and his unwavering beliefs in how the game should be played.
Already, in just 5 1/2 months on the job in Orlando, Skiles has done the unthinkable in turning the previously defenseless Magic into one of the NBA’s top teams at stopping foes. The formerly fragile Magic have already sent scares into several playoff powers and they enter Monday’s game in Skiles’ native Indiana at 3-4 and riding a two-game winning streak.
Skiles isn’t a big fan of the phrase “culture change” because it tends to discount the work of those in the coaching seat before him. But because he has been so staunch in his unwillingness to except anything other than success, the Magic have taken to his no excuses mantra and have done an about-face when it comes to expecting excellence from themselves.
“We’re trending in the right direction, but that doesn’t change our record or where we are,” said Skiles, still steamed that his Magic let teams such as Washington, Oklahoma City and Houston off the hook in the season’s first two weeks. “Pressure is not the word, but we need to let the guys know that there’s an expectation and we need to keep that on them. It’s not that, `hey, everything’s OK, everything’s OK.’ It’s not OK and they know it. So far, they have responded pretty well to that. They’ve taken some tough hits already in these games. If we can work through this, in theory, it will make us stronger.”
For anyone who has watched the Magic in recent years, it’s already easy to see that the team is stronger and infinitely better prepared. This is the effect that a no-nonsense, unwavering coach such as Skiles can have on a team: Practically the same Magic team that ranked in the bottom five in the NBA in every major defensive category last season heads into Monday’s game against the Pacers ranked second in the NBA in field goal percentage allowed and third in 3-point percentage allowed – statistics that have the most been accurate forecasters of teams headed to the playoffs over the past two decades. That growth has a Magic team that won just 20, 23 and 25 games the previous three seasons dreaming big and willing to run through a wall for Skiles.
“I feel like now we have an identity and we’re a defensive team and we share the ball well,” said Magic guard Evan Fournier, who has blossomed in Skiles’ system and he’s posting career-best numbers in almost every major statistical category. “We’re definitely playing better basketball and we feel like we’re just going to keep getting better with Scott.”
PLAYER ONE DAY, COACH THE NEXT
Life sometimes has a way of altering the best laid plans and speeding up the clock when things unexpectedly happen.
Sure, Skiles always thought coaching would be his long-term future in basketball, but that doesn’t mean he was totally ready when the opportunity presented itself in the strangest of scenarios in Greece back in 1997.
Wait, Greece? How, you might wonder, did that out-of-the-way locale factor into Skiles’ path toward becoming a head coach. In actuality that’s where Skiles’ Xs and Os journey actually got its start – and that birth came under the strangest of situations.
Out of the NBA after bouncing between the Magic, Bullets (now the Wizards) and 76ers over a three-year period, Skiles headed to Greece in 1996 in hopes of prolonging his playing career. He signed with PAOK of the Greek League with much fanfare, but his time there was marred by a shoulder injury and his battles with then head coach Michel Gomez.
Fed up that he could no longer play because of the bum shoulder and not one to dawdle around, Skiles negotiated his way out of his contract and planned to head back to Indiana. However, a late-night call from the PAOK owner in what was supposed to be his final hours in Greece changed his plans and jump-started his coaching dreams.
“I negotiated my way out the contract and I gave money back because I felt bad about getting hurt and wasn’t able to finish the season. I pretty much knew then that my (playing) career was over,” Skiles recalled. “My stuff was boxed up and the UPS man was coming the next morning and I had a flight the next morning.
“(PAOK) called me about midnight or 12:30 in the morning and said that they had fired the coach and the owner asked me to coach the team,” Skiles continued. “I said, `Give me a half-hour-or-so to think about it.’ I talked to my agent and the only thing to think about at that point really was that I was pretty certain that I could come back to the NBA at the end of that season to be an assistant coach. I had enough people bringing that up already, so it was whether I wanted to come back (to America) and relax a little bit or go right into it.
“I literally left practice one day (as a player) and the next day I was the head coach.”
So began the dream of being a coach, and despite the spontaneity of the moment, Skiles was very much ready to run a team from the sidelines. That became blatantly obvious when Skiles led PAOK – one that featured future NBA star Peja Stojakovic – to a winning record and a third-place finish in the Greek League.
“Over the years, the players who played for me have said that it was a smooth transition,” Skiles said. “I was comfortable with it. I was ready for it.”
COACH ON THE FLOOR
Skiles was ready to be a coach because he had actually been preparing himself to run practices, organize defenses and draw up late-game plays throughout his whole playing career.
In the Southern Indiana house where Skiles has spent summers much of the past 27 years and he’ll head on Sunday while the Magic are off from practice, sits a large box packed with notebooks and scratch pads. As it turns out, much of his playing career was merely reconnaissance for his future in coaching. Whether he was playing for Plymouth High’s Jack Edison, the legendary Jud Heathcoate at Michigan State, Matt Goukas in Orlando from 1991-94 or others along the way, Skiles often passed time on bus rides and long flights by filling notebooks full of play designs, practice plans and motivational lines. He hasn’t looked through those notebooks for years, but early in his coaching career they served as a roadmap of sorts for the things he wanted to try to convey to his players.
“I’ve always taken that (organizational) side of it seriously and I’ve paid attention to what coaches say – in other sports as well,” Skiles said of the notes taken along the way when he played. “For the longest time – it’s in my home in Indiana boxed up and I know exactly where it is – I had two, three or four notebooks filled with notes that I kept on the bus. There were things that I thought was good and things that I didn’t think were good, things that I might say and things I never wanted to say.”
Those who played with and against Skiles always thought he was destined to be a coach someday because of the heady, analytical way he dissected at the game. His ability to see plays before they happened and anticipate scenarios helped him survive in the NBA for 10 seasons as a crafty point guard.
In high school at Plymouth – a tiny town in Northern Indiana 115 miles north of Indianapolis and 75 miles east of Chicago – is where Skiles first rocketed to fame with his mastery of the game in basketball-crazed Indiana.
In 1982, Skiles was the best player on a tiny Plymouth team that made history by winning the all-classifications state title against Gary Roosevelt High School in double overtime. In that game, not only did Skiles hit the long jumper that tied the game and forced overtime, but he also had 39 points. That allowed Plymouth – and its student body of 900 students – to become the smallest school to win the Indiana State title since 1954 when Milan High School won it and ultimately inspired the movie Hoosiers.
“We played many times, local guys like him and us would get together and play,” said Washington Wizards coach Randy Wittman, an Indianapolis native who was well aware of Skiles’ legend in Indiana some 33 years ago now. “He was always a tough, hard-nosed guy and that’s what he demands of his teams to be now as a coach. That’s how he played and how he coaches now.”
Coincidentally, Skiles’ biggest professional success in his playing career came with the Magic when he was the starter at point guard on Orlando’s inaugural team. Magic co-founder Pat Williams, the team’s first GM, picked Skiles sixth in the 1989 expansion draft on the advice of Brian Hill, who was an assistant coach for the Magic at the time.
Skiles ultimately became a fan favorite in Orlando – even today he’s still considered the favorite player in franchise history by some fans – because of his gritty, gutty style of play. And his popularity soared to even greater heights on Dec. 30, 1990 when Skiles set the NBA record for assists in a game with 30 in a 155-116 Magic rout of the Paul Westhead Denver Nuggets. Incredibly, that record still stands today – even against Skiles wishes.
“I wish someone would break it so I’d stop getting asked about it,” Skiles huffed earlier this year when a Brazilian reporter asked him about his famed mark.
Hill, who led the Magic to the 1995 NBA Finals as head coach, always saw Skiles as a “coach on the floor” type of player. Still close with Skiles some 20 years later, Hill sees a lot of the gritty and heady attributes that Skiles had as a player in his coaching style.
“Scott was always one of those guys who asked questions and was someone who you didn’t have to explain the `why’ of why we were going to do something. He already understood it,” said Hill, now a studio analyst for Fox Sports Florida. “Scott always had good comments and recommendations in timeouts and you knew in time that he was going to be a very good coach.”
Sometimes Skiles was such a student of the game that he would share that knowledge with everyone on the floor. Not only did he run the Magic as their point guard, he occasionally had suggestions for the other team as well – in his trademark wisecracking manner, of course.
“Scott would be on the floor telling guys on the other team, `Hey, you’re in the wrong spot. Your coach wants you over here,”’ remembered former Magic teammate Jeff Turner, who is an analyst for Fox Sports Florida. “He knew our plays and their plays, too. He knew everybody’s plays.”
`IT CAN GET A LITTLE MESSY SOMETIMES’
After his half-season trial run as coach in Greece, Skiles knew that he was ready to try his hand at coaching back in the NBA. Even while he was playing in Greece, NBA teams had already started putting out feelers about his interest in coaching because, well, they all knew that Skiles was destined to someday be a coach, and be a really good one. His first NBA job was as an assistant with the Phoenix Suns under Danny Ainge in the 1997-98 season. And when Ainge resigned in 1999, the Suns willingly turned things over to Skiles. And it didn’t take long for him to make an impact as a Phoenix team that ranked 14th in the NBA in defensive efficiency at the time ultimately rose to No. 2 in the league with Skiles calling the shots.
Skiles, the player, was most known for his 30-assist game and his craftiness with carving foes up in pick-and-roll plays. However, Skiles the coach, has evolved into something of a defensive guru – so much so that New Orleans coach Alvin Gentry called him “one of the best to ever coach in the NBA” last week. Maybe it was the old-school influences of Edison at Plymouth High or Heathcoate at Michigan State, but Skiles has always been a stickler about defense and rebounding since becoming a coach.
Regardless of where he’s coached in the NBA, Skiles has been the Bill Belichick of basketball with his unyielding demands that players take defense seriously.
“The Skiles Effect,” if you will, has been tangible and real everywhere he’s coached. Whether it was with the Suns, Bulls or Bucks, all those teams ultimately rose into the two in the NBA at some point on the defensive end of the floor. And in what might go down as his most remarkable feat so far, he took a Magic team that was 28th in the NBA in field goal percentage last season to first in the NBA thus far in that category through the first five games of the season.
Upon hiring Skiles in late May, Magic officials made it clear that he was the overwhelmingly obvious choice as head coach not because he starred for Orlando in the mid-1990s, but because he was just the coach needed. With a roster full of young players in need of structure, Skiles was tasked with instilling discipline and toughness to a team that struggled in those areas the previous three years.
Never one to get overly sentimental about the past – heck, he refused to take part in any ceremonial honors of the 30-assist game through the years – Skiles didn’t put much stock in returning as the Magic’s coach some 21 years after leaving Orlando as a player. The focused coach in him did care much for the fanfare of his return even though he’s been approached numerous times since his hiring by long-time Magic fans who expressed their happiness to him about his return as Orlando’s coach.
In typical Skiles sarcasm, he noted that the same fans cheering his return might be the ones on the radio call-in shows and message boards calling for his head as coach if he can’t turn around the Magic.
“I would imagine that because I played here and I played here for awhile that people might be interested in that with me back as coach,” Skiles said just before the start of the season. “But if we’re 0-5 of whatever, they’ll be all over me on the radio. I understand that; it’s a part of the business.
“There are a ton of kids who would never know that I played here unless someone told them,” he added. “I guess it’s the older people who are a little nostalgic about it, but I can’t be out there shaking the pompons that I’m back because I have a job to do.”
Skiles said something that he learned early on in basketball has helped him become a successful coach. Accountability, he said, isn’t about threatening players, but instead something that is absolutely necessary in order to cull the most out of an individual.
With defense, Skiles has been more than willing to hold players accountable, going as far as telling them that if they don’t defend that they won’t play for him. A lifetime of preparing to be a coach taught him that occasionally a mentor has to be willing to ruffle some feathers in the pursuit of excellence.
“Not to take anything away from any other coaches, but at this level with how talented the guys are, if you are going to be a really good defensive team it takes a major commitment from the players in time, effort and staying with your schemes,” Skiles said. “Occasionally you will run across players who don’t want to do it (defensively) and then you have to hold them accountable. And honestly, there are (coaches) who don’t want to hold players accountable because they don’t want to get into that mess. It can get a little messy sometimes.
“But that’s why I’m excited for this (Magic) team on that (defensive) end of the floor,” Skiles continued. “We have a bunch of willing guys who want to do the things we’re teaching them. They have athleticism and youth and I don’t see any reason why we can’t be pretty good on that end.”
