Congratulations to Georgetown for giving Patrick Ewing what the NBA never did.
No, not a championship. A chance to be a head coach.
That’s the one dark cloud in the sunny skies over the return of Georgetown’s greatest player to take over his alma mater in its time of need. This should not be Ewing’s first head-coaching job.
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At some point during the past 15 years — the entirety of his post-playing basketball career — when he spent nearly all of it as an NBA assistant, some franchise should have given him his shot.
It didn’t have to be a college job, much less the school he took to the pinnacle of the sport, to break him in. The case could be made then and now against someone who hadn’t been immersed in the college game, or the interconnected parts of it. It wasn’t their fault.
This is on the 30 NBA teams, and all their openings over the years, that kept passing him over. After all the interviews, all the years on the bench, all the hands-on-tutoring, all the osmosis of working next to four head coaches on five franchises, all the times running the show in summer league, the mountain of off-season and in-season work.
All the dues he paid. All the dues some coaches are constantly told have to be paid, right before someone with less experience, or no experience, or only college experience, bogarts the line ahead of you.
BENDER: Why it's so great to have Ewing, 1980s hero, return to school
Even in the official announcement, Georgetown president John J. Gioia lauded Ewing's NBA years "with some of the best basketball minds in the country." They weren't enough to sway any NBA team.
Yes, there is irony in seeing Ewing get a gig for which he had no experience, after waiting on a job for which he damn near had too much. Irony, or karma. Works either way.
It will be quite a sight seeing Ewing stride the sidelines at Georgetown games next season — literally a sight. The all-time list of seven-foot coaches at any level is (no pun intended) pretty short.
That has always been an perplexing element of Ewing’s long shutout: it mirrors an inexplicable reluctance to hire big men as head coach. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that of all NBA head coaches in its history who had played in the league, 44 percent were guards, and just six percent were centers.
Why big men are left out, no one knows for sure. One pervasive theory is that big men can only coach their own kind. The times that Ewing has been his most vocal — a dramatic change for him, as those who have followed him since his arrival as a Georgetown player knows — are when he’s de-bunking that.
"That's one of the things for me, when I became an assistant coach, I never wanted to be called a big man's coach," Ewing told Sporting News last year. "I can coach anybody. Basketball is not brain surgery."
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The greatest exception to that theory is, of course, his college head coach, one John Thompson Jr., all 6-10 of him. Yet another reason why this hire was destiny.
It shouldn’t have taken that, though.
The NBA was trending away from candidates like Ewing. More coaches without head-coaching experience. More without even assistant experience. More without even NBA playing experience. A Hall of Fame center with 14 years on the bench as an assistant? There was no place for him.
His place, as it turns out, is back where he began. Patrick Ewing is a novice head coach who’s as ready for the job as anyone could be.
Not this college job. The one in the NBA that he never got.