I’m often asked about the best things I’ve seen watching the NBA, and there’s one moment that sticks with me.
It was just before Game 3 of the 2003 opening-round playoff series between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Dallas Mavericks. A cute little girl, an eighth-grader wearing a strapless, black-and-white-checked dress, hesitantly walks toward center court to sing the national anthem, having won a competition.
Four lines in she forgets the words, giggles nervously and would like to dig a hole, perhaps the inspiration for those “Want to get away?” airline commercials.
From off camera Portland coach Maurice Cheeks appears. He puts his arm around her as she buries her head in his chest, and he encourages her: “C’mon, c’mon.”
Cheeks doesn’t seem too sure of the words himself, but he starts singing and urges others to join in. There’s Don Nelson singing at the Dallas bench, and Portland players singing. Soon the entire arena is belting out the national anthem.
Natalie Gilbert is the girl, and as Cheeks accompanies her off the floor, he smiles and tells her: “Don’t worry, kid. Everyone has a bad game once in a while.”
You couldn’t stop smiling and cheering after that.
Cheeks’ greatest assist? Perhaps, despite a career in which he is ninth all time. But also symbolic of Cheeks’ ascendancy with the Philadelphia 76ers. Once again he’s bringing everyone together while helping to keep the young kids from failing.
“Everyone knows Mo is a wonderful person,” says Ed Stefanski, the Sixers’ new general manager. “That’s good, but I wanted to know if they would respect him.”
The Sixers, here Friday night to play the Bulls, have given Stefanski the answer with an impressive late-season roll: 13 victories in their last 17 games after winning Wednesday night in Detroit. It has helped earn Cheeks a surprising one-year extension. After Stefanski replaced Billy King in December, it was assumed Cheeks would be let go, perhaps for Larry Brown, who remains on the Sixers’ payroll as a consultant.
“When I got the job, I said I was going to review everyone, and I guess no one believed me,” Stefanski says. “Mo adapted to more a fast-break style in the middle of the season, which is not easy. He and his staff have done a great job.
“We traded one of his security blankets and made him push the envelope with kids — Thaddeus Young, Lou Williams, Rodney Carney. Doing it with kids is not as easy as with veterans. And even when they struggled, they never quit.”
The 76ers, on no one’s preseason playoff radar, are seventh in the East at 31-34, one game behind Washington. This despite losing two of their top veterans from last season, Joe Smith and Kyle Korver. And though they turned over the team last season by trading Allen Iverson, they still went 18-11 after the All Star break.
“I have an idea of how I want my team to play,” says Cheeks, a graduate of Chicago’s Du Sable High School and a quiet star on the champion 76ers of the 1980s. “But you’ve got to have players on your team who play that way.
“I don’t have players who played the way I played the game. So to put your plan into place, you have to adapt to the players. You can’t expect them to adapt to you.”
Cheeks was encouraged by the Sixers’ strong finish last season.
“I thought we would start out gangbusters the way we played last year,” he says. “But Joe Smith and Korver were a big part of that. Now we’re playing a younger group. They’re going to make mistakes. You probably lose some games because of those mistakes.
“But the young players are getting minutes. There’s no better way to learn than being on the floor playing against [Steve] Nash and Shaq.”
The young Sixers are regarded — where have we heard this before? — as a hard-working, overachieving group that defends and plays relentlessly. They are among the best in the NBA in offensive rebounding and steals, and they’re supported by heady veteran point guard Andre Miller, who’s listed as day-to-day after hurting his back Wednesday.
Yet even that was indicative of progress as the 21-year-old Williams stepped in for Miller and finished the win over Detroit. And when Williams struggled, Carney was there with smothering help defense to harass Chauncey Billups into a bad miss on a potential game-winning shot.
In many ways that progress is a tribute to Cheeks, who has generally been lightly regarded as a pro coach despite winning 49 and 50 games his first two seasons with Portland’s “Jail Blazers.” He was fired in his fourth season with a 22-33 record and seemed to be joining the 76ers as a feel-good story: likable, popular former star returns.
It’s rare to find a more humble man in pro sports. In the early 1980s, when the 76ers had Julius Erving and Moses Malone, Cheeks would always point to them and say, “That’s who you want to talk to.”
“But Mo,” I’d protest, “you’re from Chicago.”
“They’re the stars,” he’d say.
Cheeks is more comfortable dispensing star treatment than receiving it.
“You’ve got to be a little more delicate with players these days,” he says. “You temper your conversations for different guys. They did for Dr. J and Moses, and rightly so. Me? No one tempered for me.”
Cheeks, typically, is grateful for the extension, even if it’s only for one year.
“Most times when a new GM comes in, he makes wholesale changes,” he says. “I’m fortunate to get more time. We’ve got some young players, and I want to finish what I’m doing with them. I’d hate to put these guys on the floor and not be there when they are prospering. Players know what’s going on. They know I’ll be here. They’re good guys and good players, team guys, and they don’t give up.”
If they felt like it, they would know Mo Cheeks is there.
They could ask Natalie Gilbert.
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sasmith@tribune.com
