San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A PASS FROM FATHER TO SON
In 1978, a 5-year-old Stephen Silas stood on the sidelines of the basketball court inside Seattle’s old Kingdome and watched his father sweat and push and bang bodies with some of the best athletes in the world. As Paul Silas and the SuperSonics practiced, his son impatiently waited for the grown men to clear the floor. Once they did, the boy ran out onto the gleaming hardwood, a diminutive version of his father hoisting shots at the basket, enraptured by a world that would bond them forever.
This is Stephen Silas’ earliest memory, and he recalls it now in 2021 after recently completing his first season with the Houston Rockets as an NBA head coach, a role his father occupied for 16 years.
Some children spend decades trying to avoid repeating the mistakes their parents made or attempting to shed familial expectations by taking a distinctly different path. Silas has done neither.
“Being Paul Silas’ son has always been great for me, and it obviously comes with challenges for me, but I never shied away from that,” he says. “I haven’t really done anything to separate myself or try to make people think I’m my own man and all that stuff. I have too much respect for him and what he’s done, what he’s done for me. If I do what I’m supposed to do and do it to the best of my abilities and all that, it’ll work out the way I want it to.”
Paul Silas, who played 16 years in the NBA and coached another 32 years in seven different cities, imparted his love of basketball and life onto his two children. The oldest, Paula Silas Guy, did not hoop but became a sportscaster. Stephen played college ball at Brown before embarking on an NBA coaching career both consciously and subconsciously modeled after his father’s.
Although the backdrop of Silas’ childhood changed as his dad’s playing and coaching stops crisscrossed the country, he always felt grounded because their lives centered on basketball.
When Paul’s team played at home, he brought Stephen to practices and spent hours teaching him to shoot in the backyard or at the park. Stephen was a silent observer as Paul sat on the family couch and methodically rewound and sped up VHS tapes of game film. When the team was on the road, Stephen and his mom, Carolyn, listened to games on the radio or watched on TV.
Paula, seven years older than her brother, can still summon the vision of a 2-year-old Stephen in his playpen alongside a basketball, his inquisitive eyes glued to a Celtics game on the TV. His first words were “Jo Jo White,” his father’s Boston teammate and his favorite player, a guard whose jump shot Silas would later try to emulate. In the years to come, Silas rarely went anywhere without his arms cradling an orange ball, resembling “a basketball with legs,” his sister says. He was an NBA ballboy and constant presence around their dad’s teams.
“We were always about basketball and that was our love language,” Silas says.
So it was perhaps inevitable that Silas would become a coach, too, and that he credits his dad with leaving an indelible mark on his career and how he approaches adversity.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor, head coach, emotionendeavored al support, teacher, all of those things wrapped up into my dad,” Silas says. “As you’re going through trying to be a second assistant, then a lead assistant, trying to be a head coach and make it to where those are the biggest things you’re striving for, looking back the biggest thing of my career up until this point has been working for my dad and spending every single day with him and helping and just enjoying being around him.”
During his long NBA career, Paul Silas’ public persona was largely informed by his basketball style: a loud, strong, 6-foot-7 disciplinarian who scrapped for every rebound and loose ball he could get.
Off the court, however, he played a different role for his family. Whereas the Silas children nicknamed their mother “the pit bull” because of her toughness and protectiveness, Paula likened their father to a gentle stallion.
“When you needed someone to mother you, you didn’t go to my mom, you went to my dad,” she says. “He’s the more maternal one and the one who looks out for you in quiet, subtle layers and tries to make sure everything is going to be OK with you.”
Paul Silas’ relationship with his own parents was fraught. His father struggled with alcoholism and his mother never once saw him play basketball, according to Paula. So Paul was intentional about being there for his kids. He
to attend as many of Stephen’s games as possible, driving three hours round trip from Nets practice to see his son play in high school, and made frequent trips to Providence, R.I., when Stephen played for Brown in college.
During a game against Princeton in Silas’ junior season, with his dad and sister in the stands, the typically soft-spoken guard got ejected for fighting. Paul, an assistant with the Knicks at the time, went to the locker room. He embraced his emotional son and told him he was proud of him for standing up for himself.
“My toughness definitely comes from my dad,” Silas says. “My will to just fight through adversity and all those things come from my dad, but I would say my mom has given me the ability to connect with people.”
Paul is a basketball traditionalist. He eschews points per possession for more conventional stats and 3-point barrages for paint points from set plays. As a coach, he mandated that his players wear suits to games and on travel days. He was incredulous when a teenage Stephen came home with an earring dangling from one ear and a basketball court shaved into the back of his head; as Paula remembers it, the design featured a winged basketball in the center of the court with a Knicks logo on the side.
Stephen responded by going to the attic and fetching an old photo of Paul wearing a dashiki and sporting a huge Afro, sideburns and a gold medallion. He pointed to the photo and asked his father, “You’re talking about outfits to me?”
The younger Silas is adaptive. He’s evolved as the game has over his 20-year career. He coaches his Rockets team to emphasize 3pointers and layups over midrange shots and old-school postups. He rules the sidelines with a gentle yet firm touch.
While the differences are certainly present, Silas admires his father as a master of connection and can’t help but mirror him in specific ways. When he talks to players, he sometimes catches himself repeating lines he’s heard his father say in similar situations over the years.
“It’s interesting because people always say I have the bubbly kind of personality that my dad has and Stephen is a bit more serious, but I see so much of my father in my brother,” Paula says. “I think it transcended basketball.”
The inherent contrasts in their personalities and coaching styles made them an effective team when Stephen first joined Paul’s staff in Charlotte as an assistant in 2000. They worked together in New Orleans and Cleveland before Stephen left to work for the Washington Wizards as an advance scout and the Golden State Warriors as an assistant. He eventually rejoined his father in Charlotte (after much cajoling, he says), then spent two years in Dallas before being hired by the Rockets prior to the 2020-21 season.
“He’s a hard-nosed, tell-it-likeit-is, loud, big personality, and I tend to finesse things a little bit more,” Silas says. “It works well when we’re together because they really do go well together as far as him being the voice and me being the detail-oriented, explainer type guy.”
Of all his time working with his father, the season that makes Silas proudest of his dad is the one that makes Charlotte Bobcats fans most ashamed. In 2011-12, the Bobcats won just seven games in a lockout-shortened season and set the record for worst winning percentage (.106) in NBA history. The team fired Paul Silas after the season, but his son remembers the bravery that preceded that moment.
“To watch him get through that season and stay as positive as he possibly could, leading with his head held high, the strength he had to show during that season was so admirable,” Stephen says. “It was probably the worst moments of our career together but the most proud of him that I was because of his ability to just find a way to get through it. … There are very, very few people who would’ve made it through without cracking or giving up. He was 67, 68 at the end of his career, and he didn’t have to but he just did it because he loved the players, loved coaching over me and everything about it.”
Paul Silas is approaching his 78th birthday in July, and according to his son remains an eternal optimist. They communicate after every Rockets game Stephen coaches, usually texting after wins and talking through losses on the phone. Paul often evokes his mantra, “Good things happen when you least expect,” a phrase that despite its repetition holds some comfort for Stephen after a rough first season in Houston marred by injuries and high-profile departures.
The lines between father and son and teacher and student blurred over the years. Stephen is married now with two daughters of his own. His time coaching under Don Nelson and Rick Carlisle gave him new perspectives to integrate with philosophies he learned from his father. He is 48 and leading an NBA franchise, preparing for a pivotal draft that will help dictate the future of the Rockets organization.
He is still Paul Silas’ son, only now it is the father who proudly watches as the son goes to work on the court, inhabiting the world they created hand in hand.