NUGGETS’ MALONE WON’T BACK DOWN
Nuggets’ Michael Malone doesn’t back down – as a player or a coach
He’s happy to yap about Michael Malone, but Mark Lezanic wants you to do him a solid first. See, when the Nuggets were in Philadelphia last week, he couldn’t make it over to the Wells Fargo Center, and the dang guilt won’t shake. Sometimes you own the schedule, and sometimes the bugger owns you.
“It was my fault not reaching out to him,” Lezanic says of the Nuggets’ coach. “When you see Mike, tell him next time he comes to Philly, I’m going to be reaching out to him. I’ve got kids playing, I’ve got a business. It’s tough. But I’m going to make an effort next time. (Heck) of a win for the Sixers, beating them. They didn’t expect that.”
Lezanic is a senior vice president and senior financial advisor with Merrill Lynch, where the day job can become the night job, too. Some three decades earlier, he was an assistant men’s basketball coach at
Loyola University Maryland when his boss, Tom Schneider, told him to go check out this kid from Seton Hall Prep in West Orange, N.J., the son of an old buddy of his.
“Very solid, cerebral, high-basketball-iq type guard,” Lezanic says of Malone The Teen Baller. “Had that Jersey toughness to him, New York-new Jersey toughness to him, that made him good. He would do anything to win. If we had eight more of him, we would’ve won a lot more games. Let’s put it that way.”
•••
Tough ain’t born. It’s built, one brick at a time. Before he coached in today’s NBA All-star Game; before he turned the Nuggets into the Western Conference’s mama badger; before the Kings stabbed him in the back; before he became pals with Lebron James and Chris Paul and Isaiah Thomas; before he found his feet in the pro ranks; before Pete Gillen made the phone call that changed his life; before he applied to be a Michigan state trooper; before he was washing windows and working at Foot Locker, he was … Moe.
Moe Malone, the Greyhounds point guard who’d give you a wedgie or run your undies up a flagpole if you crossed him.
OK, well, maybe not so much the last part.
“I don’t know where the nickname came from,” Joe Logan says.
“Little different height,” laughs Logan, the current women’s basketball coach at Loyola and a freshman student manager for the ’92-’93 men’s hoops team that featured Moe as a senior point guard. “Same sort of ability.”
Same chutzpah, same confidence, same engine, same sense of humor.
“More hair then,” Logan notes. “Maybe a little louder.”
“Same size,” Lezanic counters. “But without the goatee.
“If anybody gave him a hard time, he never backed down. He would never turn the other cheek. If a guy was 6-9, 220, he wouldn’t back down. He wouldn’t back down from anybody.”
The guy at the wheel for Team Lebron today in Charlotte played his last college game 25 years ago, on a March Friday in Albany. Young Moe was a facilitator, Monte Morris minus the Monte Morris hops. He finished his career at Loyola, now of the Patriot League and then of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, with 279 assists. As a senior, he ranked among the MAAC’S top 10 in assists (100) and dimes per game (3.7) on a squad that got wracked by roster attrition, didn’t win a league game at home, finished 2-25, and saw Schneider — who passed away in 2015 — resign after a 1-10 start. Athletic director Jim Boylan finished out the slate on an interim basis and steered what was left of the chassis back to the drawing board.
“He certainly deserves (the recognition); he’s worked his (expletive) off,” says Boylan, now an analyst with the Rutgers radio team. “It was a challenging time and I thought he handled it in a very mature manner and he always played hard. Played with passion. He wasn’t the most talented player but he got the most out of his ability.”
•••
Moe let you in, but only so far. He never let on that he was the son of coaching royalty, that his father Brendan was one of the guys pulling the strings for The Bad Boys in Detroit at a time when the Pistons ruled the NBA with an iron fist. Or that his pops worked for Jim Boeheim, Rick Pitino, Hubie Brown and Chuck Daly, that he had giants on speed dial. Or that his old man was the only guy on the planet other than Dean Smith who knew how to stop Michael Jordan.
“I don’t know,” Logan says. “Maybe one night we were up talking and Mike said, ‘One day, I’m going to coach the All-star game.’
“You learned real quick watch- ing him that he was a coach on the floor. When he came back and played intramurals, he played it with the same passion he had as a Division I player. He was always thinking the game, always talking the game. Back when we were younger, I wish I could’ve written some of this stuff down.”
Moe was a history major and a sociology minor, wise before his time, a student of people, a listener. A tough guy blessed with three traits that would sail him through the rough seas to come: certainty, curiosity and empathy.
“He has his dad’s toughness about him, but his mom’s social skills,” says Gillen, the CBS Sports college basketball analyst who ended Malone’s foray into law enforcement in 1995 by adding him to his Providence staff. “His mother had superb people skills. He has a mixture of toughness and relatability with people.”
As a teacher, Moe knew instinctively, from the jump, when to bring the fastball and when to change it up. One of his earliest projects came as a graduate assistant at Oakland University, his first job out of school, when he was charged with teaching gifted off-guard Kevin Kovach — 1993 Ohio Division I Associated Press Player of the Year as a prep — how to play the point.
“He had a way of being able to verbalize it without making me feel small, making it feel like it was my fault,” notes Kovach, who would later work with Ohio State and NBA center Kosta Koufos, paying Moe’s words forward. “That’s what Mike really instilled in me: Finishing moves, especially in my weak hand. We would drill day after day, month after month, just finishing moves. To have a coach who says, ‘Hey, we’re going to get up at 6 in the morning to work on your game,’ it’s probably understating rather than overstating that (he) got me to the point where I was later in my career.”
Kovach went into this winter still ranked among the Grizzlies’ all-time top 10 in career assists (507), a club that includes Kay Felder (788), currently with the Raptors’ G-league affiliate, and South Florida coach Brian Gregory (905).
“I’m hoping to see him in the NBA Finals one day,” Oakland coach Greg Kampe says of Malone. “I told his dad, ‘Your son’s got a chance to be really good.’ I haven’t been right about many things in life. But I was right about that one.”
•••
Moe stood his ground. In the paint. On the bus. Always. You can take the man out of Queens, but you’ll never sandblast the Queens off the man.
“We didn’t have cell phones, so you actually talked,” Logan recalls. “And you would talk trash. ‘The Pistons are better than the Knicks.’ ‘No, they’re not.’ Telling stories of who’s better than whom.”
Moe had the backbone to take it, but he was a master at dishing it out. Same as it ever was.
“You know how he felt about who he was playing. And I’m thinking that it happened in practice quite a bit. But there wasn’t any malice.
“He wasn’t giving me a wedgie or running my underwear up a flagpole. It was fun. And even when I talk to him today, it’s like he’s 23 and I’m 19 and we’re getting ready to go to history class.”
Less hair. Same Moe. Lezanic has caught the Nuggets a few times on television, and can spot the fingerprints of that Jersey toughness all over the dang place, even from afar.
“I love the way his team plays through big guys,” Lezanic says. “Defensively, they play like him: Very tough and physical. And yeah, his team’s a reflection of him, no question. There was a lot of stuff that went on (at Loyola) and Mike persevered through it all and came through the other side. He’s done great things for a lot of people. I’m very proud of him.”