[Sacbee] No hard feelings - Rick Adelman moves ahead

http://www.sacbee.com/100/story/273772.html

No hard feelings
As former Kings coach Rick Adelman moves ahead, he's mostly OK with how his previous tenure concluded
By Scott Howard-Cooper - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, July 15, 2007


LAS VEGAS -- The Houston Rockets, and Rick Adelman, are here for summer league.

"No," the new coach said, "we're not staying at the Palms."

That would be too weird.

"Yeah, that would be a little weird," Adelman said, a wry smile punctuating the potential of the rich irony. "I don't think they would give me the basketball suite."

They being the Maloofs, the family that owns the casino resort just off the Strip and the Kings. And they already gave him something.

The boot.

That was 14 months ago, when Adelman's eight-season run ended in the afterburn of one trip to the Western Conference finals, two Pacific Division titles, a .633 winning percentage and the greatest success of the Sacramento era. He got fired, the Kings got Eric Musselman, and it turned out everyone took the season off from competitive basketball.

Adelman's hiatus was the planned absence. He and the family moved back to their longtime base in Portland, Ore., one son played on a high school team, another coached a boys high school team and a daughter coached a girls high school team. At least three games a week, no waiting.

Then the Rockets called. The Pacers and Magic also called. But he was far along with Houston when Orlando reached out, and Indiana didn't present nearly the chance to win now, so Adelman took the path lined with Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady.

That brought him here for the first official showing as Rockets coach, in Vegas, of all places.

"I have not run into him," Gavin Maloof, with brother Joe a visitor to several of the games played at the adjoining facilities at UNLV, said Wednesday. "But I have no problems with Rick. My only thing is, they (the Rockets) were scheduled to be at the Palms. At the last minute, they pulled out. What's that about? I was very disappointed."

Summer league isn't good for actual reunions, anyway. The rosters are scrambled with the inexperienced and the unknown, and the assistant coaches run the games. Adelman, like all his peers, watches from the stands and was not expected to be on the bench Saturday night as the Rockets faced the Kings at Thomas & Mack Center.

It never had a chance to percolate into an emotional setting in the way the first trip back to Arco Arena may develop in the actual season. Adelman mentions the fans in positive terms. He remains friendly with and speaks warmly of the bosses in basketball operations -- Geoff Petrie, Wayne Cooper, Jerry Reynolds, Scotty Stirling -- and many among the support staff and the several players who remain from his era.

Adelman never had a problem with being fired, after all. He didn't agree with the decision, feeling the success the second half of 2005-06 after the Ron Artest-Peja Stojakovic trade had earned the coaching staff the chance to return for a full season with the new roster. But he also accepted his fate as part of the business. If the Maloofs and basketball president Petrie wanted it that way, Adelman would live with it.

The disappointment that remains one season and one team later is only in the sendoff from the Maloofs: Following eight seasons of considerable accomplishment and helping to turn their product into a billboard for NBA entertainment, the owners never called to put their voice behind the decision or wish Adelman well.

"But there's no hard feelings with me right now," he said. "They did a lot for me. They gave me extensions. They didn't have to do it. They gave me eight years there. Whatever happens, even though you have certain feelings at the end, there's also a lot of good things that happened. I'd shake their hands and wish them luck. I don't harbor any ill feelings about what happened. Things happen for a reason. Sometimes it's the right things to happen."

Said R.J. Adelman, a Rockets assistant coach, when asked if his dad now feels the need to prove something to the Maloofs: "No. Maybe some people around him might feel that way for him because we support him, but he's just not built like that. He goes about his job day to day and does the best he can and he goes home. The praise he deflects and the criticism he's taken on. He knows that's part of the job. But there's not a vindictive bone in his body."

The Kings are not far from Rick anyway. His staff is former Kings assistant Elston Turner, former Kings assistant T.R. Dunn and former Kings scout R.J. Adelman, with Jack Sikma, the former All-Star center who spent the last four seasons as a Seattle assistant. One of the players, Bonzi Wells, is scheduled to be back after a 2006-07 season of constant misadventure.

The Rockets of the moment are rookies Aaron Brooks, Carl Landry and Brad Newley and a lot of guys who will consider it a successful summer to be asked back for camp in October. That's when familiarity will kick in -- Yao, McGrady, Shane Battier, apparently Wells -- but Adelman also gets the difficult situation of a team that so far has been unable to get out of the playoffs' first round and has questions at point guard and power forward.

It will be a transition time all around, for the Rockets' veterans who spent four seasons with Jeff Van Gundy on the sideline and for the successor who coached 10 seasons in Oakland and Sacramento and 12 seasons in Oregon in community college and the NBA. Now it's Houston, where Adelman's team, unlike in Portland and Sacramento, isn't close to the biggest thing in the city, and it's Texas, where he's got the third-best club in the league's power state.

Welcome to the perfect in-between, the place where he can brush up against his past while moving on to the future. Without being too weird about it.