We didn’t see the best of Doug Moe in Philadelphia. Hell, we barely saw him at all. He lasted 56 games as the Sixers’ coach in 1992-93, the team’s first after Charles Barkley left town. Thirty-seven of them were losses, two by 56 points – including the last one, on March 6, 1993 in Seattle.
Too bad, because Moe, who died Tuesday at age 87, was funny and fiery and free-wheeling. Also a helluva coach, given the right circumstances, which he most certainly was not given that season.
It could even be said
that he was something of a pioneer, since his previous teams, in San Antonio and Denver, favored a wide-open, high-scoring style that anticipated today’s game. He would laugh at that designation, though, because he laughed at a lot of things.
Writing on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter on Tuesday, longtime NBA chronicler Peter Vecsey described Moe, a Brooklyn native, as “the kind of guy who never stopped hanging out in front of the neighborhood candy store” – always cracking wise, always playing things fast and loose.
When he was coaching the Spurs, Jeff Cohen of the San Antonio Light once wrote, Moe would allow dogs at shootarounds, his thinking being that when the canines did their business on the floor, he could immediately excuse himself to go play golf.
Also – Moe called his wife “Big Jane” and just about everybody else “stiffs.”
“There are good stiffs and bad stiffs,” he told me and the rest of the media corps during his lone training camp with the Sixers. “You always wonder.”
While he predicted that that edition of the team would win 50 games, he soon discovered that he had way too many bad stiffs. Hersey Hawkins was still around, and still a viable player. And Jeff Hornacek, over from Phoenix in the Barkley trade, could ball. But assorted injuries had curtailed Johnny Dawkins’ effectiveness, and the rest of the roster was the Land of the Misfit Toys.
A funnyman before tipoff, Moe turned into a wildman on game night, raging at officials and his team. (Woe to the young fan sitting within earshot of the Sixers’ bench.) But his histrionics had no impact on a team that was ill-equipped to execute his coveted motion offense – the idea was for players to think on their feet, to read the defense and each other – much less run up and down.
There was some levity, though. Bob Ford, then the Inquirer’s beat writer, noted on Facebook Tuesday that before a game one night in Denver, backup center Eddie Lee Wilkins approached him and said, “I wanna pop off.”
Ford discouraged that, as he had already filed his pregame notes and didn’t think it was particularly newsworthy to chronicle the complaints of a guy who was buried behind Andrew Lang, Manute Bol and Charles Shackleford on the depth chart.
Wilkins was shocked by Ford’s stance.
“Man,” he told the scribe, by Ford’s recollection, “when I played for the Knicks if you wanted to pop off there would be 10 dudes standing around you writing it down.”
(In other versions of the story, Wilkins uttered a four-syllable word beginning with “mother” rather than “dudes.”)
Anyway, Ford finally allowed Wilkins to pop off a few days later, and he complained that the team didn’t have any plays, and their practices were a joke. Moe didn’t disagree with any of that but told Ford (again by the writer’s recollection) that he wasn’t going to “beat up these guys trying to get them to play a way they can’t really play.”
Moe’s point being that if given a competitive roster, he could get the most out of it. His track record in Denver, where he went 432-357 over a decade, would suggest as much. Law Murray of The Athletic noted that five of the 31 teams in NBA history to average over 120 points a game were indeed Nuggets clubs coached by Moe.
That was topped by the 1981-82 club, which checked in at 126.5 a night and featured Dan Issel, David Thompson and Kiki Vandeweghe. Also Alex English, who scored more points than any other NBA player in the ‘80s. (And think about some of the others who played in that decade.)
So yeah, the man could coach, despite how it might have looked here. Moe’s 628-529 record over 15 seasons is further testament to that. (Only 18 coaches have ever won more games.) So too are his people skills.
“God bless you BIG STIFF,” former Nugget Bill Hanzlik typed on Twitter Tuesday.
Seems like as fitting an epitaph as any for Doug Moe, who never took himself too seriously, and never stopped hanging out in front of that candy store.
