[Feigen] Former Coach Silas will coach Team US for 2 games

Are you actually being serious? How many championships has Silas won as a head coach? What's his win loss record? And you think you get to compare him to Popovich? Put down the crack pipe you absolute lunatic.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5948423/2024/11/27/stephen-silas-usa-basketball-qualifying/

The team Stephen Silas coaches now won by 42 points on Friday, by 23 on Monday and won’t play another game until February.

When Team Silas retakes the court, there is no guarantee any of the players under his direction the past few days will be in uniform. And yet, toward the end of practice between the two blowouts, Silas stopped play for a short but terse lecture.

“YOU are not playing up to our standard,” Silas said sternly. “And it’s only you who set what our standard is.”

The team Silas coaches, the USA Basketball men’s national qualifying team, gathered more than a week ago in Washington for training camp, followed by games against Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. That day when he stopped practice, held on Georgetown’s campus, he didn’t like the attention to detail he saw during a team scrimmage and was acting on a lesson he learned the last time he was a head coach, for the Houston Rockets.

“I would say I stop practice a lot more (now) — if I see something, I stop it,” Silas said. “Quickly interject, let them know that it’s serious and then back out. I think early on (in Houston) I would kind of like let it go, and then afterward through film or whatever, address it. But I’m much more direct when it comes to, you know, ‘This is how we need to do it, and we need to do it right.’”

…

“Yeah, I’d love to be a head coach again — but I don’t know if it’s very much connected to my decision to coach this team,” Silas said. “This opportunity came, and to be the head coach of the U.S. team is a pretty cool thing to do, regardless of what the circumstances are.”

Silas was at his family’s home in Dallas, where he coached as an assistant for two years before coaching the Rockets, decompressing after a tumultuous four years, when Ford called him in September.

The last two people Silas interviewed before he was hired in Houston were Harden and Westbrook. He earned their approval and was hired in late October 2020; before the team played its first game the day after Christmas, Westbrook had already forced a trade to Washington. Harden forced his trade to Brooklyn in January. The Rockets, predictably, lost 177 games in those three seasons after the trades as the franchise sunk quickly into a rebuild. Coaches almost never survive those, and the Rockets declined to pick up the option on Silas’ contract for the 2023-24 season.

Silas makes no excuses and holds few (if any) regrets from his Houston stint. Most of the circumstances — not just Harden and Westbrook leaving, and the rebuild that followed, but also all of it happening while the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging — were mainly out of his control. His father, NBA legend Paul Silas, died just before Christmas during Stephen’s final season with the Rockets. And then, when Williams scooped Stephen up and brought him to Detroit, the Pistons lost 28 consecutive games during a miserable season. When Silas was let go as part of the housecleaning in Detroit, he was looking forward to stepping back from basketball.

“I’ve been enjoying the family time, and it’s important because, like, obviously my dad passed a couple years ago, and now I have a daughter who is a senior in high school, and I can actually go to the parent-teacher conferences and be there when she comes home and be there for homecoming and stuff like that,” Silas said. “It is really cool at a time that I probably needed to have after three years in Houston, one year in Detroit which wasn’t very successful. Kind of like take a step back, enjoy the fam, do the USA thing. It’s really cathartic for me.”

…

When Kaminsky and Silas first worked together, Silas filled in for head coach Steve Clifford in Charlotte when Clifford missed time for health reasons. When the two were reunited in Houston, Kaminsky remembered a fiery Silas after the Rockets were lit up in a game by Damian Lillard, which prompted a rare postgame tirade from Silas.

As far as Silas is concerned, that particular incident might be an example of him waiting too long to address issues as they arise. Kaminsky remembers it as an example of Silas being forceful when he has to.

“When he tells us something and shows us something (for USAB), we need to follow, and there’s no questions,” Kaminsky said. “I saw him in Houston try to communicate to a lot of young players who didn’t really understand the NBA as a whole. And I feel like I kind of helped him with that. But there is a side to him where he is very soft spoken, but he’s not afraid to tell people how it is. And I think a lot of times, especially with the youth movement in the NBA, sometimes these guys come in, don’t really understand the work ethic (and) things that it takes to be successful. You need to have someone like that.

“He’s going to get another chance to be a head coach in the NBA. He’s too good.”

Silas has a certain way he stands on the sideline during games, with his hands on his hips, wrists cocked, head slightly bowed, like he’s looking through the top of his eyes. He stood that way as an assistant in Cleveland for his father, as an assistant to Clifford in Charlotte, as the boss in Houston and now for Team USA.

Thinking about how his career path has gotten him to this point, Silas, moments after stopping practice to make sure his players knew they had a standard to uphold, said to The Athletic: “When I got let go from Detroit, all my Pistons stuff went away. I got let go from Houston, all my Houston stuff went away.

“But this USA stuff, this USA shirt, it stays forever.”

 

lol

 

They’re not getting after it!!!

how does he keep getting head coach jobs ?