Michael Curry As Head Coach Of The Pistons Continues To Concern Me

I’ve always admired Michael Curry because he came up the hard way to turn himself into a solid NBA player for a number of years with a few different teams. I think Curry is a good man, and one way or another he was going to be a head coach in the league (whether it was sooner or later). As it turns out, thanks to Pistons’ president Joe Dumars, it was sooner rather than later as Curry is now the head coach of the Pistons. But, I fear that it has been too much too soon for Curry who may be in just a little over his head right now as head coach of the Pistons. This Pistons are still a veteran team and needs an experienced guy on the bench leading the team and making the tough decisions that have to be made (like the one Curry was confronted with when he had to decide who to bring off the bench between Allen Iverson and Richard “Rip” Hamilton). I’m not sure Curry is maximizing this team the way we saw kicked-to-the-curb coaches like Larry Brown do for years. I think it would have been wiser to bring Curry along a little faster and wait until he had a little more seasoning and the team was truly committed to developing young guys likeRodney Stuckey, Arron Afflalo, Amir Johnson, Jason Maxiell and others. That would have perahps been the right time to bring in Stuckey. Time will tell if Curry is a good or great coach, but right now it has been an early struggle for him. I hope he does well, but there are obviously going to be some growing pains while he makes the adjustment to coaching professional basketball at the NBA level with a team that was expected to worry teams at the top of the Eastern Conference and over in the Western Conference. Let us hope Curry’s on-the-job training progresses.