NBA.com Tribute to DJ; Hall of Fame Induction coming Aug 13th

Here's to Dennis Johnson, one of the all-time greats.  He'll be honored during the "Celebration of Basketball" and Enshrinement Week in Springfield, Mass:

DJ: Touched Lives in D-League, Seattle, Phx, Boston and Beyond

Ken Rodriguez of Spurs.com wrote a wonderful tribute on Dennis Johnson, who will soon be inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame in ceremonies to be held in Springfield, Mass on August 13th.  Check out his story:

Dennis Johnson, you may have heard, was a late bloomer. He stood 5-feet-9 in high school and sat on the bench. He grew to 6-foot-3 and became a five-time NBA All-Star.

That’s some leap and he still hasn’t landed. Almost 40 years after leaving Dominguez High in Los Angeles to drive a forklift, DJ is about to touch down, posthumously, in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

The Class of 2010 ceremony, set for Aug. 13 in Springfield, Mass., is sure to include warm memories, a sprinkling of laughter and probably tears. DJ’s life produced many thrills, his passing broke many hearts. He left too soon -- three years ago at age 52 -- and those closest to him still feel the loss.

"I still haven’t gotten over it," says Jamar Smith, a 6-9 forward who played for the DJ-coached Austin Toros from 2005-07. "I was real close to him. It’s still difficult."

At the enshrinement, they’ll talk about the ferocious D he played on Magic Johnson. About the Finals MVP award he won with Seattle. About the two championships he won with the Celtics. About Larry Bird calling him the greatest teammate he ever had.

But that will only be part of the story. The icing with lit candles atop a three-tiered cake. The lesser known story – perhaps the most inspiring story – is the hard work DJ poured into players in the NBA’s Development League.

Take Jamar Smith, a raw talent from Maryland with NBA potential. Smith spent one training camp with the Spurs in 2006 and wound up back in Austin. DJ improved Smith’s game and confidence, and built something else. Friendship.

Once, while Smith was waiting to move into an apartment, DJ opened his own place to Smith. When Smith left for his new spread, he found the washer and dryer weren’t working. With DJ’s permission, Smith returned, threw in a load of laundry and left. When Smith came back to finish, he found his shorts, t-shirts, socks and underwear folded neatly on a bed.

"I was in shock," Smith says. "And it happened a few more times."

That’s one picture of DJ’s heart. Here’s another: Every time Smith turned around, DJ was talking to a fan, signing an autograph, shaking the hand of someone who recognized him from his NBA days. "He never turned anyone down," Smith says. "And he probably did more community outreaches to kids than any of the players."

More than anything, DJ knew how to connect with people, especially players. The Toros lost their first 12 games of the 2006-07 season, and desperation set in. Dale Osbourne, then an assistant Toros coach, recalls asking DJ to shake things up, to cut some players.

"I was panicking," Osbourne says, "and DJ was saying, ‘We’ll stay the course.’"

The next day, DJ convened a team huddle. He announced that no one would be released but that Osbourne wanted to cut half the players. DJ stepped back as guys shot dirty looks at Osbourne. Just when Osbourne thought something ugly might happen, DJ stepped in. “Just joking," he said.

Later, DJ approached Osbourne and hugged him. "Coach,’ DJ said, "I’m always going to have fun."

Whatever else DJ did, it worked. The Toros won their next nine games. Optimism soared. Then, after a pickup game with Jamar Smith at the Austin Convention Center, DJ walked outside and collapsed.

Osbourne rushed to the hospital, where he found one of DJ’s relatives sobbing on the floor.

"Then I hit the floor," he says, "and started crying."

News of DJ’s death spread quickly with numbing disbelief. What? How? When? No one could comprehend the loss.

A three-time NBA champion left behind a wife, three children and so many siblings. DJ was the eighth of 16 children born to a social worker and bricklayer in Southern California. Tributes poured in from around the country. A clutch playmaker, they said. One of the great defensive guards in history. The Toros remembered him a bit differently.

They still do.

“The greatest guy in the world,” Osbourne says.

Jamar Smith would say “Amen.” When the Toros were losing, DJ steadied the team. When player confidence faltered, DJ offered encouragement. When Osbourne suggested cuts, DJ insisted on patience. Yes, DJ wanted to coach in the NBA. But how could he do his job in the D-League and develop a player he cut?

“I only worked with him four months,” Osbourne says, “but he’s one of the finest individuals I’ve ever known.”

The values DJ preached Osbourne followed as interim coach. No one felt like playing after DJ’s death and losses began mounting. But no one got cut. “We stayed together as a family,” Osbourne says. “That’s what DJ would have wanted. After a while we came together and missed the playoffs by two or three games.”

In Boston, a YMCA branch Learning Center was dedicated in DJ’s name. In South Texas, the Toros host a high school boys and girl’s All-Star classic that bears his name. In the D-League, there’s the Dennis Johnson Coach of the Year Award.

He touched some lives, all right, and not just in Boston, Seattle and Phoenix, where he played in the bright lights of celebrity. In the long shadows of obscurity, Dennis Johnson found a home, a place to develop men and build dreams. That's worth celebrating, and when Hall of Fame ceremonies commence, D-Leaguers will do just that.

Ken Rodriguez is a San Antonio native who covered his first Spurs game in 1981 for The Daily Texan, the University of Texas student newspaper. He spent 26 years in the newspaper business -- 21 of them covering sports -- before joining the marketing department at Our Lady of the Lake University in 2009. His Spurs.com column will appear every Wednesday. 

Bob Ryan on Larry Bird on DJ ...

An interesting column by Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe on Dennis Johnson, one of the future inductees of the Basketball Hall of Fame.  Read on:

INDIANAPOLIS — It’s about time they listened to Larry.

Didn’t Larry Bird explain Dennis Johnson to the world a quarter-century ago? Didn’t he surprise people by saying, without qualification, that “Dennis Johnson is the best player I’ve ever played with.’’? That’s what he said, time and time again, and he never felt an apology was necessary to either Kevin McHale or Robert Parish, future Hall of Famers themselves.
Long, long after it should have been done, and, sadly, three years after his death at the age of 52, voters at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame affirmed Larry’s praise by making Johnson a member of the Class of 2010, as announced yesterday at the Final Four.

“I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster since we received the news,’’ said his widow, Donna. “I’ve been happy and sad. Happy, of course, because he’s in, but sad because he won’t be there.’’
Bird was present at the announcement in his role as representative for the 1992 Olympic team, the One and Only “Dream Team,’’ which will be joined in the team category by the legendary 1960 Olympic team that was coached by the great Pete Newell, and whose key players included Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Jerry Lucas, and Walt Bellamy, who was the team representative.

But Larry was equally happy for DJ. His opinion of his old teammate has not changed over the years.
“I played with a lot of great players,’’ Bird said, “but if I had to play with only one of them it would have been DJ. I just had a connection with him. The backdoor cuts and many other things. We never needed any conversation on the court. No need for talking. He just always knew what we needed.’’

DJ’s résumé includes two championships with the Celtics and one with the Sonics. It includes nine selections to the All-Defensive team. It includes five All-Star Game appearances. It includes the MVP award in the 1979 Finals, when, among other things, he blocked 14 shots in five games from the guard position. There have been many great defensive guards, but Dennis Johnson was the only one I’d ever call destructive. 

But as is the case with any legitimately great player, his essence cannot be gleaned from a résumé. As much as any great player I can think of, it can truly be said that there was no one like him.

It wasn’t one thing; it was everything. Ninth of 16 children. A nobody coming out of high school. Drove a forklift before going to junior college. Second-round Seattle pick out of Pepperdine who caught the eye of coach Bill Russell. Zero-for-14 in Game 7 of the 1978 Finals as the Sonics lost to Washington and the aforementioned MVP a year later. Successful three-year tenure in Phoenix, but saddled with label of being a handful. Traded to Boston for Rick Robey (there were other minor matters).
The red hair. The freckles. The classic two-guard body. The conversion to nominal floor leader, although you’d never really confuse him with a point guard. The cheeks puffing out, a la Dizzy Gillespie, as he brought the ball upcourt. Those deadly poke-check steals. The power drives. The line-drive jumpers. The dribbling of the basketball to signify how many years he’d been in the league before every foul shot. The off-the-dribble, halfcourt bullets to a cutting Bird along the baseline. The overdue switch to guard Magic Johnson after Game 3 of the 1984 Finals, after which he neutralized him while scoring 22, 22, 20, 22 points in Games 4, 5, 6, and 7, respectively. And, yes, the nights he’d occasionally take off, always doing it for a home game against a team the Celtics were going to defeat and always having the courtesy to announce his intentions internally beforehand. That’s part of the Dennis Johnson package, too.

“He was a big-game player,’’ Bird maintained. “He always shot better in the playoffs and he always took it hard to the hole in big games. People forget he won before he came to Boston, and once he came, we got to the Finals four years in a row.’’
So what kept him from this honor for so long? I guess we’ll have to ask all those voters who, year after year, just didn’t seem to get it. Was it because his career average was “only’’ 14.1 points a game? Maybe he should have shot more, even if it wasn’t necessary. He certainly couldn’t have done much more at the defensive end.

And it did matter to him. “He’d ask me if I thought he’d get in, and I told him, sure,’’ Bird said. “This is a big day for his family.’’
“We do wish he were here,’’ acknowledged Donna Johnson. “But I’m so blessed I’ll be able to stand in for him.’’
“I played with some great players,’’ Bird reiterated. “But DJ was the easiest to play with.’’
That endorsement should have had DJ in the Hall long ago, don’t you think?

Tribute to DJ...one of the greatest ever

On Sunday, Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski wrote his best piece to date. It was a terrific tribute to Dennis Johnson, one of the very best players in NBA history and a major part of the Celtics' 15th ('84) and 16th ('86) NBA championship. It is well worth the time if you haven't had a chance to read it.

***


D.J.’s greatness extended to his final team
By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports

BOSTON – The last man Dennis Johnson ever guarded still wants to make sure it’s understood that he hadn’t worn out his coach. Practice had been over for the Austin Toros, and Jamar Smith, released out of the San Antonio Spurs’ training camp, worked alone on his shot. D.J. wandered over to him, balancing a barrage of inspiration and insults like he always did with his players.

“That isn’t your spot,” Johnson teased Smith. Soon, the coach stretched out his arm, contesting his jumpers. Smith had come to believe so much in himself, because D.J. believed so much in him. It hadn’t been the greatness of Johnson’s pro career, his reputation as a Hall of Fame talent. For this young kid, it had been his coach’s gentleness, his patience, his insistence on imparting the wisdom of an extraordinary basketball life.

“He was not running around that day,” Smith said. “When he got the ball, he was just standing there, just shooting it … ”

He was 52 years old Feb. 22, 2007, in the Austin Convention Center, coaching his second season for the Toros in the NBA Development League. Two years ago, Smith had been an undrafted NBA prospect out of the University of Maryland, arriving in town weeks ahead of his teammates. Without an apartment until the first of the next month, with nowhere to stay, Johnson invited Smith to stay with the coach’s wife and four children.

After Smith moved out, he still had to wait for his washing machine to get hooked up. He stopped over to the Johnsons to throw a load into theirs. When Smith returned, he discovered that Johnson – cast to the bush leagues as a five-team NBA All-Star, a three-time world champion, an NBA Finals MVP, the most underappreciated player in the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers Finals of the 1980s – had thrown his clothes into the dryer, folded them neatly and stacked them in a basket.

“Here was a great player, a Hall of Fame player, who would do that for … me,” Smith said. “It just showed the kind of humble man he was.”

And so, after that practice, D.J. had thrown up his hands in the face of Smith, until the player swished three, four, maybe five straight. Johnson laughed, and with a dismissive wave, said, “I ain’t messing with you no more.” He walked outside to his car with the team’s publicist, Perri Travillion, and teased her that the police had spared him the parking ticket they had tagged on her windshield.

Together, they laughed. And then, he gulped, “Catch me!” and collapsed onto the sidewalk. Dennis Johnson died of cardiac arrest.

When Magic Johnson thinks of the Celtics-Lakers battles in the 1980s, it isn’t just Bird that comes to his mind. “My rivalry was really with D.J.,” Magic said. He called him, “one of the best individual defensive players probably to ever play in the league,” and has never gotten over the way Johnson systemically took him out of the ‘84 Finals. Larry Bird called Johnson the best teammate he ever had.

Johnson had 15,000 points and 5,000 assists with the Sonics, Suns and Celtics, one of just 11 players ever to do so. With the Suns in ‘80, he was first-team All-NBA with Kareem, Dr. J and Bird. He was the Finals MVP in 1979 with the Sonics, and an immense part of two Celtics titles in ‘84 and ‘86.

Before arriving in Austin in 2005, he had run out of assistant coaching jobs and scouting jobs. He had a short run as an interim coach with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2003, but it never turned into something bigger. Bird, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge had been NBA coaches and GMs. Even M.L. Carr had a turn running the Celtics.

Nothing like that came for D.J., and no one ever heard him gripe about it. He belongs in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, but the politics of that process constantly rewards too many undeserving owners, executives and broadcasters. Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe and Peter Vescey of the New York Post made impassioned public cases, but D.J. never had the relentless orchestrated campaigns that these days are getting others elected.

Whatever happened, Johnson coached his last team in Austin without nostalgia over what had been, without bitterness of what never was. The Toros never heard him talking about Bird and Magic, about winning Game 5 of the Finals in ‘85 with a jumper, about catching that pass off Bird’s steal in ‘87 and beating the Pistons with a twisting layup in the conference finals.

It wouldn’t be long until his players understood the reason why: For him to help them chase a dream the way that he did, they needed to hear the stories of his own personal grind. He never talked much about the glamorous Big Eighties, but his own improbable passage in the Seventies.

Johnson told them about how he had never gotten off the bench in high school, how he had been working in a warehouse when a junior college coach discovered him in a Los Angeles playground game. He told them about getting picked in the second round of the 1976 NBA draft out of Pepperdine, and how he was the last player to make the Sonics roster that season.

“He always talked about the grind of making it,” Toros guard Cheyne Gadson said. “If you wanted to know a lot about the Celtics days, you’d have to look it up. But he wanted us to understand how hard it was to get from Pepperdine just into the NBA.”

On the long D-League bus rides, Johnson sat in the front row. Never sleeping, he considered his responsibility to make sure the driver stayed awake. Whatever the job, he did it. He had so little ego, so much pride. For over a decade, he had been an assistant with the Celtics and Clippers. He did advance scouting, a grueling, thankless job that most ex-NBA players – never mind past stars – leave to the video coordinators and ex-college student managers on the way up.

When the Toros hired him, he moved his wife, Donna, and his children to town. He immersed himself. He did every community event for the team. He spoke to every 4-H club, and rotary and biddy league basketball camp. “I don’t remember him ever turning one down,” Toros president Mike Berry said.

Before Johnson’s first training camp, the Toros had a typical minor-league tryout. Beyond a sprinkling of prospects, these were mostly weekend warriors and playground players willing to drop a modest entry fee for a brush with greatness.

“For every single guy who wanted to talk to him, D.J. took time that day,” Berry said. “He must have stayed an extra two or three hours, until he had a chance to talk to them all. Whoever you were, Dennis was going to give you his time. He had that much respect for people, for the game.”

They still revere him in Austin. He had been there simply a season and a half, but as San Antonio Spurs GM R.C. Buford said, “That community holds so much affection for him.”

Only now, the memory of rushing out of that gym and onto the sidewalk that fateful February day, watching D.J. die, never leaves Jamar Smith. “Coach Johnson was almost like a second father for Jamar,” Gadson said.

For months, Smith struggled to sleep. He’ll always hear his voice, remember his lessons, his gentle touch. Mostly, it will never leave Smith how much his teammates and him meant to Johnson and his coach’s family. As it turned out, it wasn’t the old Celtics and Suns and Sonics carrying Dennis Johnson’s casket up that cemetery’s hill in Gardena, Calif.

The players were the pallbearers, the Austin Toros. “An honor I’ll never forget,” Smith said.

The Austin Toros carried their coach past Bird and McHale and Ainge, and laid him to rest. These kids were living the hardscrabble basketball stories that had so much in common with Johnson’s own journey. Now, it’s the Celtics and Lakers all over again, and Johnson has come back to life in the old footage. Maybe he would’ve made his way back with them, maybe not.

“I know Dennis wanted to get back to the NBA, but I think he would’ve been fine if he never did,” Berry said. “He was at such peace with himself.”

He was Magic’s greatest defender, Bird’s greatest teammate, but so much of the big heart that finally gave out on Dennis Johnson belonged in the bushes, belonged to his last team.