Rockets’ Silas remembers father

Stephen Silas is in his third season as coach of the Rockets. It’s the first non-interim NBA head coaching job for the 20-year assistant and son of Paul Silas, who helped the Celtics win two championships in the 1970s and who died Dec. 11 at age 79.

Paul Silas was a head coach with the Clippers, Bobcats, Cavaliers, and Hornets for a combined 12 seasons. He once told the Globe at a Celtics reunion that he grew tired of the lack of respect for the game showed by younger players. Silas was famous for his stern coaching style, brutally honest assessments of players, and his lively postgame news conferences.

Stephen Silas was asked what he takes from his father’s coaching style. He smiled.

“You can’t just grab a player anymore like my dad used to do,” he said. “It’s different in that I would say you can’t be as tough as my dad was, but there’s certain times he was so direct and he would have hurt a lot of players’ feelings from this era. That’s not good for your job security at this time. But he always did it in such a way that all the players knew that he cared about them at the same time.”

Paul Silas was LeBron James’s first head coach, and during Silas’s time in Cleveland he had infamous clashes with Eric Snow and Ira Newble. But Silas didn’t inherit enviable coaching situations. He was the coach during Charlotte’s 7-59 season in 2011-12, when the team’s leading scorer was Gerald Henderson at 15.1 points per game.

Silas’s teams did reach the playoffs four times, including the Hornets making the Eastern Conference semifinals in 2001 and 2002.

“To have that balance to really, really go at players but also when he passed, all those same players were calling and texting and making sure that I knew how much he meant to them,” Stephen Silas said. “He just had a way about him that he was tough and gritty and mean on the court, but off the court the exact opposite, a teddy bear, quick to smile, quick to laugh, quick to joke, and there aren’t many people who have that ability to do those two things.”

Stephen Silas said his father had an old-school coaching style, one that likely would not have translated to this generation.

“[His news conferences] would have gone viral today,” Stephen Silas said. “Some of the postgame rants and some of the things that he did and some of the little comments that he may or may not have gotten fined for, he always did it. He was a basketball lifer, an NBA lifer, not just basketball. He played for 16 years. He coached for 25 years. Forty years in the NBA, so what he did was always based on a genuine love for the NBA and a genuine love for the players because he was one once.

“I wasn’t blessed to be an NBA player, but I was blessed to be my father’s son, so I could empathize and see how he handled NBA players and do my best and do my Paul Silas impression at times, but he was just a good, good man. We’re staggered as a family as far as the reception that we’ve gotten and the tributes that have happened, all the moments of silence. We always thought he was great, and for everybody to see it the same way we see it is really just a great thing. I’m so proud to be his son.”