Hammon is done wrong by Blazers
Comments undo her interview for coaching job
Becky Hammon didn’t get the Portland head coaching job, and she probably won’t be getting any shots at an NBA top job soon, not after the Trail Blazers slapped a figurative “Kick me” sign on her back on her way out the door.
It would have been cool had the Blazers hired the first woman to become a head coach or manager in any of the top five American pro sports leagues. That pioneering potential seemed to intrigue the Blazers. And maybe by interviewing Hammon, the Blazers were playing to their fans in Portland, a progressive city where social progress is embraced, not feared.
Regardless of their motives, give the Trail Blazers credit for
at least beginning to mainstream the idea of a woman coaching an NBA team.
But then the Blazers blew it. Apparently someone in the organization thought it made sense to leak to the media that Hammon didn’t get the job because the team is anticipating conflict with dissatisfied superstar Damian Lillard and they wanted someone who could “steer the ship through such delicate waters with Lillard.”
That’s the phraseology of Bleacher Report’s Jake Fischer, who reported the anonymous inside intel.
“Delicate waters” — what kind of gendercoded BS is that? What are we doing here, laundering cashmere sweaters?
As we all know, it takes a manly man to steer an NBA ship through delicate waters. Like Don Nelson did with Chris Webber. Like Gregg Popovich did with Kawhi Leonard. Like Larry Brown, the NBA’s alltime dramaqueen coach, did with half the players he ever coached.
The Blazers, with their vague leak, pretty much assured that Hammon won’t be getting any calls soon from teams needing a head coach. The deepdive stuff the Blazers dug up on Hammon, reportedly from people at her current team, the Spurs, and from other NBA teams, will probably stick to her, the way similar whispering campaigns hurt Kim Ng before her 20year wait to become an extremely wellqualified MLB general manager ended last winter when the Marlins hired her for the job.
Here’s what the Blazers should have done after they hired Chauncey Billups: publicly thanked Hammon for the interview and say how impressed they were. And then shut up.
The wimpyskipper label might make some teams think twice about considering any woman as head coach, because, hey, Hammon is the NBA’s homegrown No. 1 top female candidate, and if she’s not seaworthy, what woman would be?
Almost any team looking for a new head coach is, by definition, sailing into delicate waters. Can you imagine an anonymous source on any team leaking similar intel on a male candidate, that he was deemed a bad fit because they heard he might have trouble handling an unhappy player or two?
Maybe the Harlem Globetrotters are looking for a new coach. They’re the one basketball team in the world that doesn’t at least occasionally sail into delicatewaters problems.
The Blazers’ secret leaker might have been hoping to placate Blazers fans who were disappointed that Hammon didn’t get the job. But his leak did no favors to anyone.
Maybe the leaker thought he was doing the rest of the league a favor, hinting at Hammon’s shortcomings so other teams don’t get sucked into a bad hire. That would be a first, an NBA team waving that red flag to save other teams from going down the wrong path.
Speaking of delicate interpersonal relationships, it was a bad look for the NBA that one of its teams started a whisper campaign about a female job candidate just when two headcoaching jobs went to men with histories of sexual abuse.
Billups was accused of sexual assault in 1997 and settled the subsequent civil suit. The Mavericks, who have a supercringey recent history of sexism within the organization, hired Jason Kidd, who pleaded guilty to a spousal abuse charge in 2001.
Eventually a woman will get an NBA head coaching job. The Blazers also considered Dawn Staley, who coaches South Carolina and the U.S. Olympic women’s team. If I was an NBA team owner, I would try to find out what makes Cheryl Reeve so wildly successful. She has coached the Minnesota Lynx to four WNBA titles, has been Coach of the Year three times and Executive of the Year once. Reeve just might have encountered a spot of “delicate waters” in her journey.
When a woman eventually does get hired to coach an NBA team, it probably won’t be Hammon, who will now go back to doing what she’s been doing for the past seven seasons — at least to hear how the Blazers tell it — and fooling future Hall of Fame coach Popovich and the Spurs.