Coaching Clarity: Two or Three Things I Know about the Hollins’ Situation

• LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
• Dave Joerger [right] may be next in line as Lionel Hollins’ tenure as Grizzlies’ head coach ends.

If coach Lionel Hollins and general manager Chris Wallace weren’t part of the Grizzlies’ future, an uninformed onlooker wouldn’t have known it from the team’s draft workout Monday morning, where Hollins and Wallace sat at the back of the gym talking and new chief decision-maker Jason Levien was nowhere to be seen. But clarity finally came to the Grizzlies’ increasingly messy coaching situation later that day, with the team announcing, via an official release, that it had severed ties with Hollins, whose contract was set to expire at the end of the month.

A few things I know as the Grizzlies officially embark on a new era:

This shouldn’t be that surprising: Lionel Hollins’ fate as Grizzlies coach was always dependent on the resolution of conflicting normalcies: “Don’t mess with success” vs. “New owners hire new people.” When Hollins bristled publicly about the Grizzlies’ new front office on multiple occasions mid-season, the odds tipped in the favor of change but that didn’t seal his fate. Instead, closing interviews — not just with Hollins but with others around the organization — seemed to convince team CEO Jason Levien to make the change he probably always desired.

There are many factors at play in this unpopular decision, but it’s ultimately about an apparently unbridgeable cultural divide: Hollins is of the “you provide the players, I’ll coach them” mold. Levien and controlling owner Robert Pera want to forge a more collaborative organizational culture, one where everyone is working on the same track and the coaching staff doesn’t just receive players from the team’s front office, but also actionable information. Even as Hollins publicly dismissed talk about “philosophical differences,” those very differences were on display.

Film references are instructive (at least for me): Via Japanese master Akira Kurosawa there’s the Rashomon effect, in which truth is difficult to uncover because people tend to give contradictory interpretations of the same event. Hollins, by his account, thought his exit meeting with Levien and Pera went really well. Levien and Pera apparently thought otherwise. Via French titan Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is the wisdom of “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.” It’s equally easy to see — at least to me — why Hollins would assume he’d earned a new deal and also why Levien would be reluctant to commit a long-term contract to a coach with whom he didn’t think he could have a productive working relationship. Blame feels irrelevant.

“Risk” and “mistake” are different things: “Don’t mess with success” is pretty persuasive if you ask me, but to call this a mistake is to assume a future, and I don’t put that much stock in the importance of Hollins or any individual coach. But it’s certainly a risk. There are obviously coaches out there who can work better with his bosses. There are also a smaller number who can be as or more successful on the floor. There’s a smaller group still who can do both. And there’s no guarantee this or any front office can successfully choose that person no matter how good a hire seems at the time. Past Grizzlies history is instructive here.

But, to his credit, Levien showed a confidence and willingness to make unpopular decisions with the Rudy Gay trade, though the team was on firmer ground there, even if a lot of traditionalists didn’t know it (and still don’t). The risk is greater this time.