Doc Rivers is the kind of guy who likes to say he saw things coming. On Tuesday night, after the injury-ravaged Milwaukee Bucks defeated the Indiana Pacers 115-92 in Game 5 of the first round of the NBA playoffs to stave off elimination, a reporter asked Rivers what he’d learned about his team from the performance. “It’s a good question,” the Bucks coach replied. “I believed in them anyway. I said that after the game last game.”
It was only a few months ago, at the end of January, that Rivers was unexpectedly hired to take over the Bucks, and if there’s anything he didn’t foresee, it was that he’d wind up in the playoffs without the team’s two leading scorers, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, on the floor. But “this team,” Rivers said on Tuesday, “they’re giving it to me. They’re doing everything, they really are. They’re playing together. They know we’re down men. They know they have to do it together. No one’s trying to be a hero.”
He wasn’t just caping. The Bucks’ Game 5 performance was inspired and inspiring, lighting up the Fiserv Forum with the hope that Milwaukee might make it back home this weekend for a deciding seventh game. And it all marked, for a few more days at least, the continuation of another strange and star-crossed year in the life of Doc Rivers.
Ever since his rookie season with the Atlanta Hawks 40 years ago, Rivers has been a fixture and a fire starter in the modern NBA. To glance through Rivers’s résumé is to romp through decades of hoops history, with him as a sort of Forrest Gump character, always in the mix. “He’s the head of the snake,” says one former teammate, Kevin Willis. “Doc spent time with the 15th man as much as he did with the superstar,” says another, Charles Smith. “He’s done a remarkable job,” says Patrick Ewing, who has known Rivers since high school, “of, you know, one door closes, another one opens.” Current 76ers player Tobias Harris agrees: “He will always keep on pushing on until he, in my opinion, gets the full respect that he deserves.”
Rivers has been around for it all: The marquee Dominique-Bird shootouts in the ’80s. The bruising Knicks squads in the ’90s. The pair of divergent Celtics’ trips to the NBA Finals in 2008 and 2010. The Clippers’ and Sixers’ inability to even make it that far ever since. He has played under the likes of Mike Fratello and Pat Riley. He has played alongside Moses Malone, Dennis Rodman, and Ewing—and he’s coached Ewing, too. He has also coached Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, his son Austin, and his son-in-law Seth Curry—both of whom he also traded—and Giannis Antetokounmpo, until the two-time MVP was injured on the eve of the playoffs.
He nearly replaced Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. One time—as a coach, not a player—he got traded for a first-round pick. He is about to be portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in Clipped, a Hulu miniseries about disgraced former Clippers owner Donald Sterling. He shares grandchildren with Dell Curry. He sends President Obama to voicemail. He hangs out with Larry David. (“One night at dinner I told Doc I could come up with some great in-bound plays,” David told me recently in an email. “I drew up a few of them on a napkin and he wasn’t as dismissive as I expected him to be, but of course he never used them.”)
Rivers was just the 10th NBA head coach to reach the 1,000-win mark, and he’s won more playoff games than all but three of those guys. In 25 seasons as an NBA head coach—he’s never been an assistant—Rivers has missed the postseason just five times, and only once since 2007. And yet his teams have blown 3-1 leads in three playoff series, squandered four additional 3-2 advantages, and lost 10 Game 7s. The last time a Rivers-run team made it past the second round of the playoffs was in 2012. This winter, when he unexpectedly took the helm of the primo Milwaukee Bucks, the team was 30-13; under Rivers, they closed out the season with a 17-19 record, found themselves down 3-1 against the Pacers—and then came through with their biggest win of the season on Tuesday night.
So, what’s up with Doc? We chatted with a teensy portion of the many, many, many folks around the league who have crossed paths with Rivers at each of his stops over the years to try to find out. Rivers can be both funny and frustrating, smiley and dissembling, blustering and blunt. He can dish it and he can take it, and he’s at his most compelling when he’s in the midst of doing both. His body of work is good, but it’s also bad, and it’s always so, so very Doc.
Doc the Player
Atlanta Hawks
1983-1991
Best season: 57-25 in 1986-87
Worst season: 34-48 in 1984-85
The Good: In a three-year span in the mid-’80s, the Atlanta Hawks added three players who would become the nucleus of the team: Dominique Wilkins in 1982, Doc Rivers in 1983, and Kevin Willis in 1984.
Stan Kasten, the current Los Angeles Dodgers executive who at the time was the young general manager of the Hawks, recalls that Rivers’s agent wasn’t thrilled that he fell to the second round of the draft: “He might not have come out early” from Marquette had he known he wouldn’t go in the first, Kasten says, and there was “a day or two of noise from his agent about not reporting, or something.” But Rivers called coach Mike Fratello right away to say, “Don’t believe anything else you hear about me,” Kasten says. “I’m coming in, I’m going to win a job.”
Did he ever. “When he first came, we hit it off—day one,” Wilkins told me over the phone in early April. “Because I think as the great scorer and the point guard, you have to have some sort of connection, and Doc Rivers’s and my connection came quicker than anybody I’ve played with. … Once he was put in that starting lineup, man, it was sky’s-the-limit.” Kasten agrees: “’Nique led the league in shots year in and year out. There was somebody getting him the ball, right? No one dunked like Dominique. And Doc was just fine with that.”
And when Willis was drafted a year later, “I’ll never forget, I got a phone call from Doc Rivers,” Willis says, “and he was calling me to say ‘Hey, congratulations, welcome to Atlanta, welcome to the team.’”
There weren’t a lot of people who could tell Wilkins what to do, but Rivers was one of them. “The respect we had, he could tell me: ‘You know, I think that was a bad freakin’ shot, man,’” Wilkins says. “And I could in turn say to him: ‘You know, Doc, man, you got to keep him in front of you, so we can help you! You know, we can’t just double, we can’t just switch all the damn time or trap!’” Players today, Wilkins says, “take every little thing personally,” but he remembers a different environment in the ’80s. “This is going to sound crazy to you, but we wasn’t afraid to give a guy a good eff you,” he says. “It was healthy! You know what happened right after something like that? We went to lunch or dinner together. Shit was forgotten.”
So who delivered more eff yous: Doc to him, or him to Doc? “Believe it or not, he and I never went there,” Wilkins says. “I had to make sure I stayed close to Doc, or he wouldn’t give me the ball.”
Starting in 1985, the Hawks put up four straight 50-plus-win seasons and developed bitter rivalries with frequent opponents like Isiah Thomas’s Detroit Pistons and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics. Rivers and Wilkins were both named to a stacked 1988 All-Star squad. (Ainge! Barkley! Bird! Ewing! Jordan! McHale! And that was just the Eastern team.) “It was just young guys trying to express themselves, trying to learn from each other and win basketball games,” Willis says. “And it took years to really get that, because we had some days, some years, where it was like, wow, man, we could have won more.”
The Bad: Rivers has said one of those missed opportunities for more came in the 1988 conference semis against Bird’s Celtics. Atlanta lost the first two games, then won the next three. “We should have won in six,” sighs Wilkins. “We could have ended it in Atlanta,” Willis agrees. Instead, the Celtics won Game 6 by two points and pushed the series to a seventh game that would go down in history, with Wilkins and Bird trading points in a frenzied fourth quarter.
“He had a hell of a game,” Wilkins says of Rivers, who put up 16 points and 18 assists in the contest. “I was cooking that game, and he was trying to find my number every time he got an opportunity.” Still, despite Wilkins’s 47 points, the Celtics won the game and the series, again by only a bucket.
A few months after the heartbreaking playoff exit, the Hawks took an offseason trip to the Soviet Union. “It was a drag and a pain in the ass for a lot of our players,” Kasten says. “Not Doc. Doc and his then-wife, Kristen, they couldn’t wait to go. They were curious and interested. Because that’s who Doc is: curious and interested, as well as being interesting.”
The Doc: Hawks players were occasionally asked to attend charity functions and season ticket holder banquets and the like. The players mostly saw this as a chore that took away from their free time, but as Willis recalls, Rivers saw things differently.
“We had a meeting, in the locker room or somewhere, and Doc mentioned to all the guys: ‘Listen, guys, hey, you know, when we go do these events, either corporate sponsors or season ticket holders, whatever it is, you might want to consider that you stay longer, shake some more hands, introduce yourself, things of that nature. … And you might want to take a business card, and you may not use that business card right now, but you never know when you’re going to need that relationship. So you gotta start forging and building relationships now, while we’re on this platform. All doors are open, opportunities all over the place.’”
As Willis recalls it, “When he said that, some guys were like, yeah man, get outta here, Doc, whatever, man, whatever. And I—I took it to heart. That’s all I kept thinking about … I took it to heart and I never forgot it.” These days, he says, “Some of those cards that I collected back in the ’80s? I still have those same cards today.”
Los Angeles Clippers
1991-92
Best and worst season: 45-37
The Good: “It’s so doom and gloom, thinking back,” laughs Charles Smith, who was teammates with Rivers on three different franchises in the ’90s, starting in L.A. “At that time, the Clippers were just the worst team, and the worst-managed team, in all of sports, probably.” The Clippers hadn’t made the playoffs since 1976, back when the team was still the Buffalo Braves. But—this category is called “The Good,” after all—that was about to change.
Rivers’s one year playing for the Clippers wound up coinciding with the franchise’s best season in—and for—more than a decade. Not since 1976 had the team had a better winning percentage (.549), and not until 2006 would they eclipse it again. “He was kind of one of the missing pieces,” Smith says. “He brought leadership. And he brought a participatory style of dealing and communicating with all the guys, no matter who they were, you know?”
Under head coach Larry Brown, who joined the team midseason (and was baked a cake by Elgin Baylor?!), the Clippers even made the playoffs, falling 3-2 in the first round to the Utah Jazz (in a series that was delayed and moved because of widespread riots in Los Angeles over the Rodney King verdict). Rivers averaged 15 points and four assists that postseason.
The Bad: Rivers began his Clippers stint on an awkward note, holding out for 19 days over a contract negotiation before ultimately returning without a done deal. (“Some of those things, I probably should not have said,” Rivers reflected at the time about a few heated discussions on the topic. “But I won’t go back on that. I’ve always spoke my mind.”) In 2021, when he was asked during a presser what he remembered from that time, Rivers said: “What I remember most is, it’s a terrible story, but I’ll tell it: I decided to show up to the first practice and, like, five players were late. [Coach] introduced me to the team and I went off on the guys about being on time. I hadn’t even been with the team, but I was like ‘This is so unprofessional.’” There’s that participatory leadership, baby!
The Doc: “I wouldn’t say he was a chameleon,” says Smith, “but Doc was good at punching his club card in with anybody on the team. If it were going to a club, he might stay for five minutes. But he went, you know? If it were going to a party at somebody’s home, he’d come for a while, he’d make sure he showed up and then leave. So he was able to build a relationship of some sort with everybody on the team. And I think he did it intentionally.”
New York Knicks
1992-1994
Best season: 60-22 in 1992-93
Worst season: 57-25 in 1993-94
The Good: Basketball-wise, Rivers’s injury-marred, two-season-and-a-tiny-bit stint with the New York Knicks was mostly unexceptional. But when it came to the direction of Rivers’s career, his stop in New York wound up being hugely influential. So let’s focus on that second part first.
According to Rivers, it was his time with the Knicks, under the imperial and persnickety Pat Riley, that ultimately set him on a trajectory toward coaching. (You can see the seeds of it in this 1993 Sports Illustrated article, in the extremely managerial way that Rivers praises John Starks.) “Riley, clearly, had the biggest impact,” Rivers told reporters in 2022. “It’s not even close. I mean, I had no thoughts of coaching until I played for Pat Riley and the way he did it, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool.’” It helped, Rivers said, that after he retired and started working in TV, Riley routinely “would call me or challenge me … he would belittle me, literally,” into jumping into the arena as coach one day.
But back to the early-to-mid ’90s Knicks: The seasons that Rivers spent in New York were probably about as close as the Knicks got to winning a title in the past half-century. In his first season after being acquired in a three-way trade that shipped out popular Knicks guard Mark Jackson, Rivers shared point guard duties with Greg Anthony—that is, until a brawl broke out in March 1993 between the Suns and the Knicks that led to a lengthy Anthony suspension for leaving the bench.
Rivers, who helped start the whole melee, because of course he did, was suspended too, but only for a couple of games: “Even though Doc Rivers was clearly the aggressor,” an NBA official later said in a statement, “we have no choice but to throw Kevin Johnson out as well.” Ewing, who has known Rivers since they were teenagers playing in the Boston Shootout tournament, begs to differ: “It’s the other way around,” he says when I mention the chaos. “KJ’s the one that started that fight, and I guess we just finished it.”
A few rough bounces and an all-time Bulls team kept the Knicks out of the Finals in 1993. But the following season, with Michael Jordan off playing baseball, the coast finally seemed clear for Riley, Rivers, and the rest of ’em to pop off.
The Bad: Unfortunately, the thing that actually wound up popping, a couple of months into the ’93-94 season, was Rivers’s ACL, necessitating surgery and sidelining him indefinitely. Rivers told me during an interview in 2017 that Ewing tried to make him feel better in the aftermath: “He just gave me a car,” Rivers says, “because he felt bad for me. A Mercedes. A two-seater. … I was like, ‘Get out of here with that,’ because I wasn’t taking a car. Then I called him and said, ‘I’ll buy it from you,’ and the price he sold it for was a joke. That’s Patrick.” (When I ask Ewing about this, he acknowledges that Rivers “did get a great deal” on a vehicle.)
Rivers hoped that he might be able to return to the roster in time for a late playoff series. But Riley wasn’t willing to gamble by putting him on the postseason roster. So when the Finals rolled around, all Rivers could do was sit in street clothes and watch as Starks threw up bricks and the Knicks squandered Games 6 and 7 against the Houston Rockets—same as all the rest of us.
The Doc: “In New York, Doc showed me so many different things that I didn’t even think about,” says Smith, who was traded from the Clippers to the Knicks alongside Rivers. “Like, for example, Riley had this thing where he wanted to be the final person that the media or press spoke with at the end of every practice. And when we were traveling, what Riley would do is say: everybody shoot 100 free throws and let’s get on the bus and go. While everybody’s scrambling to get on the bus, while everybody is shooting free throws, he’s doing all the interviews. So it was a way of him controlling the press.
“He would tell us, you know, you don’t want to talk to the press. They’re the pariah. You know, they’re not on our side. It was very manipulative. But Doc tore right through that. And Doc would take the time and build relationships with the press. And when I saw him do it, I was like, that’s a great idea. And then I did it. … He’d have, you know, breakfast, lunch with them and build a relationship. Riley didn’t like him for doing that, but Doc did it anyway, and it helped Doc. It helped him become a coach, because he had so many relationships with the press and people throughout the league. Doc extended himself.”
San Antonio Spurs
1994-1996
Best season: 62-20 in 1994-95 (49-11 with Doc)
Worst season: 59-23 in 1995-96
The Good: In December 1994, the Knicks, facing a glut at the point guard position and worried about Rivers’s ability to come back fully from his injury, waived Rivers. By the end of the month, he’d signed with San Antonio. “Doc was one of the more respected guys in the league,” says former Spur Sean Elliott. “So for me, I was thrilled to get him on the team.” Doc and his family moved in a few doors down from Elliott, who recalls the Rivers children coming over to jump in his pool—and who also recalls that those kids’ father, charming as he could be, was also never one to mince words.
“I remember one time when we were talking, you know, talking about how our season was going,” Elliott says. “And, how I thought, you know what? We could do it. Then Doc looked at me and he goes, ‘No, because you guys don’t practice hard.’ And I was like, what? Now, he’s coming from the Knicks under Riley. But I thought our practices were tough! Like, we were going at it! And he was like, ‘No.’ He’s like, ‘You guys don’t practice as hard as we did in New York.’” All these years later, Elliott still sounds totally taken aback by the revelation. “I was—that was a shocker to me. And that’s what I appreciated about him because, we were friends, we became friends, but he wouldn’t be afraid to, you know, judge me on the court.”
The Bad: Rivers had a lot of time for judgment in San Antonio, because he was, more often than not, on the bench, backing up Avery Johnson and winding down his career. The good news is that this gave him a front-row seat to some top-notch drama. It’s hard to fully summarize the story he told on The Bill Simmons Podcast last year about team discord during the 1995 Western Conference finals. But just know that it involves Dennis Rodman and Popovich snarling at one another and, more shockingly, a young Johnson savaging … a veteran Moses Malone?!
The Doc: After retiring from basketball, Rivers took on some TV work, including broadcasting Spurs games—a role that enabled him to connect with even more people around the league. He was still in that job during the lockout-shortened 1999 season when two things almost-but-didn’t happen that would have shaken the very bedrock of the National Basketball Association.
In early March of that year, rumblings went around the Spurs locker room. “We were going to play Houston,” remembers Elliott, “and the rumor was that if we lost that game, Pop was going to be out.” That’s right: Gregg Popovich, who had taken over Spurs duties two and a half years earlier, was on the hot seat. And the likely candidate to replace him? What’s up, Doc?!
It’s truly an overwhelming counterfactual to contemplate: A Spurs team with Pop out the door and a young, green Doc at the helm. Instead, “We ended up winning that game, actually pretty handily,” says Elliott. “And then we went on to go on a tear.” The Spurs won 18 of their next 20 games, and the season concluded with an NBA championship, the first of five they’d win under Popovich.
But that’s not even the only what-if about an NBA finalist from that spring. According to ESPN’s Ian O’Connor, after the New York Knicks fired GM Ernie Grunfeld in April 1999, Rivers talked to then-MSG president Dave Checketts about being the replacement. It never came to fruition, and the Scott Layden era—a sort of inverse-Pop stretch of anti-success—was born instead. Only Doc could be on the other side of both of those sliding-door moments.
Doc the Coach
Orlando Magic
1999-2004
Best season: 44-38 in 2001-02
Worst season: 1-10 in 2003-04
The Good: When the 37-year-old Rivers replaced the 68-year-old Chuck Daly as the Magic’s head coach in 1999, the team went from having one of the oldest coaches in the NBA to having the second-youngest. (Jeff Van Gundy, also 37 at the time, was the baby of the league with the post-Riley Knicks.) While Rivers hadn’t apprenticed as an assistant anywhere, the combination of all his years playing the point guard position on the court and all the people he met and film he watched as a local/national TV analyst gave him plenty of experience to draw on.
“I remember, first meeting, he walked in, he had all of his old playbooks, from all the coaches he played for, with all the organizations, ” says now-USC head coach Eric Musselman, who at the time was an Orlando assistant. “So it seemed to me that while he was playing, that he knew he was going to coach.”
The Magic were at the start of their post-Shaq and Penny Hardaway era, and the 1999-2000 team was a motley crew, led by Darrell Armstrong. “Nobody gave us the chance to win,” Armstrong, who is now an assistant coach with the Dallas Mavericks, told me during a recent pregame shootaround. At one point midseason, the team went through a 1-13 slump. But “somehow, someway, we found a way to win games,” Armstrong says. “We weren’t a big, talented offensive team. We played together, and we used each other, and, you know, on defense, we would hound ya.” The team, which came to be known as the “Heart and Hustle” squad, finished the season 41-41, won hearts, and juuust missed out on the playoffs.
The Bad: An ambitious free agent frenzy in the summer of ’00 was a mixed bag. The team’s quest to lure the trio of Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill, and Tim Duncan seemed, for a time, so crazy that it just might work. (Elliott recalls that in San Antonio, “the whole city was on pins and needles” that Duncan might decamp. “You get in front of Doc and he’s, you know, very convincing,” he says.) In the end, while McGrady and Hill signed on, Duncan—possibly turned off by Rivers’s stringent team travel rules, which didn’t allow friends or family on the charter plane—remained a Spur.
A year later, a well-meaning attempt to incorporate Rivers’s ol’ car dealer Ewing into the Magic for the 2001-02 season ended in discord. “I was excited to go there,” Ewing says. “Unfortunately, it didn’t end up being the way that I thought it would be. ... It was hard for him to coach somebody that he’d played with and known for a lot of years. It was just—it was just hard.” Ewing says with a chuckle that there was “a lotta cursing out, a lotta fighting. He had his philosophy and I had what I believe. But we still remained friends over the years. So when I was coaching at Georgetown and he was with his team, he came up to our team. I would speak to his guys.”
And in the spring of 2003, Orlando did something that would prove to be a bit of foreshadowing for the rest of Rivers’s coaching career: first, the Magic took an exciting 3-1 lead in the first round of the playoffs (over a stacked Pistons team, to boot). But then, the Magic lost the series in seven. “I told them to remember how tough this was, with a minute and a half left,” Rivers told reporters that night. “I told them to look around, to look at this crowd, to look at the other bench, to look at them celebrating. We have a future, for the first time since I’ve been here as a coach.” Six months later, Rivers was fired, 11 games into the season.
The Doc: “Our conditioning was the hardest—to this day, it was the hardest training camp conditioning that I had ever seen in my life,” Musselman says, sounding astounded. “I mean, a lot of that was brought from Coach Riley. I just remember, like, during the sprints, I was like, man. It was the hardest that I had seen a group of pros ever pushed in a training camp environment.”
(Oh, and also, in 1999, after the Magic lost one regular-season contest to the Portland Trail Blazers by two points, Rivers described the game as “the Dream Team against Uruguay,” with his side being Uruguay.)
Boston Celtics
2004-2013
Championship season: 66-16 in 2007-08
Worst season: 24-58 in 2006-07
The Good: Flags fly forever. When Rivers got hit with that rare (and, supposedly, first for an NBA coach) indoor Gatorade douse in June 2008, on the occasion of the Boston Celtics winning their first (and, still, most recent) title since 1986, it created a sort of cloak of imperviousness that Rivers has proudly donned ever since. And why wouldn’t he? The 2007-08 Celtics had it all: a Big Three of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen; large fellas Big Baby Davis and Kendrick Perkins; a weird little guy (that’s a compliment) in Rajon Rondo; and all the essential role players who help make a team what it is. “From my perspective on that team, I’m like, the 12th man on the team, but [Rivers] treated me with a tremendous amount of respect,” says Brian Scalabrine in a phone call last month.
In Rivers, this team had a coach that felt he could finally realize some of his visions with his roster: whether those visions involved the execution of his beloved after-timeout schemes, or a preseason scouting trip to check out the duck boats that the team would ride in a championship parade, or the elevation of the collective-above-self concept ubuntu as a team rallying cry. It wasn’t always pretty—don’t ask me, ask this fan!—and it took two nailbiting early-round seven-game series to get there. But this time–and, thus, for all time—it worked. After all, as Garnett put it: Anything is possible.
This was a far cry from the team Rivers first took over when he arrived in Boston in 2004, recruited by his old ’88 All-Star Game pal Danny Ainge. Besides Pierce—who took some time, and a few tantrums, to buy into the Rivers regime—that squad’s leading scorers were Ricky Davis and late-career Antoine Walker. Not the most fearsome top three. Scalabrine, who came to Boston in 2005 from a Nets team that had recently gone to the NBA Finals, was struck by something when he arrived: Rivers was treating the Celtics as if they were the league’s elite. “Doc was coaching what I consider, like, young players that weren’t ready to win,” he says, “like winning players.”
Scalabrine wasn’t sure whether this approach would work on such a young team, particularly when, going into a 2007 draft that included prospects like Kevin Durant and Greg Oden, it looked as though the Celtics might get even younger. Instead, Boston used its no. 5 pick to make a trade for Allen, an intrigued Garnett followed via the Megadeal, and “from that point on, everything I’d heard, all the messages all made sense,” Scalabrine says. “I started to really see, like, ah man, Doc Rivers is a high-level coach who can get through to high-level players.”
The Bad: For all these high-level players, Rivers’s nine years in Boston yielded only the one chip. The following season, Garnett missed all of the playoffs with an injury, and Boston fell to Orlando in the second round in seven games. And when the Celtics returned to the NBA Finals in 2010, for a title rematch with the Los Angeles Lakers, the outcome wasn’t remotely as satisfying as the last time. The Celtics took a 3-2 series lead into Los Angeles, where, in Game 6, Perkins got hurt. By Game 7, which was also in L.A., the Celtics couldn’t overcome being overwhelmed on the boards. It was a painful loss, made worse by the fact that Kobe Bryant didn’t even have a good game (23 points on 6-for-24 shooting, including 0-for-6 from 3).
Afterward, Scalabrine says, “We walked into the locker room and Rasheed [Wallace] just walked out with his uniform on, like, I can’t do this anymore. He just walked out. Like: Did Sheed just retire? And Doc was crying, and other people were crying. People were stunned. Everyone handles emotional losses differently.” (Sheed, for his part, remains a dedicated Rivers h8r.)
The loss had quite a shelf life. President Obama tried calling Rivers with his condolences, but the call went to voicemail. Kasten says that a short while afterwards, he ran into Obama (and their mutual friend, Eric Holder) at a Washington Nationals game featuring “our new kid, Stephen Strasburg.” The fellas got to talking, Kasten took his BlackBerry from its belt holster and handed it to Obama, and this time, Rivers answered the call. And years later, Rivers told Yahoo that he once had an hourlong dinner conversation with former assistant coach Tom Thibodeau during which they talked about the 2010 loss the entire time and the 2008 title not even once.
The Doc: This December conversation between Garnett, Pierce, and Rivers is worth watching for a multitude of reasons: the glorious oldhead energy; the “who’s got Bonner?” chaos; the story of Ainge showing up unannounced at Rivers’s door with the Celtics’ owners to ask him to coach the team. But the part that really sang of Docness was this monologue by the coach, which followed a conversation about Pierce coming to terms with taking fewer shot attempts under the Rivers regime.
“It ain’t easy, man. No, for real. Especially now, it’s even harder. ’Cause I don’t care who you are. When you go home, all your boys, all your friends—I always call them peripheral opponents, because they are. Everybody outside the locker room is the opponent, including families. Including families. ’Cause all they’re telling—they’re never going to tell you what you need to hear, they’re going to tell you what you want to hear. And what they’re going to tell you is you need to shoot more.”
Los Angeles Clippers
2013-2020
Best season: 57-25 in 2013-14
Worst season: 42-40 in 2017-18
The Good: It isn’t very often that a head coach arrives via trade, but that’s what happened in 2013, when Rivers decided he didn’t want to stick around Boston for what he felt would be a rebuild and instead got sent to the Clippers for a future first-round pick. Rivers’s first season in Lob City was both promising and tumultuous. Promising because the team finished with 57 wins, a slammin’ roster (Chris Paul! Peak Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan!), and a Sixth Man of the Year Award for Jamal Crawford. Tumultuous because, look, I hate to include the name “D*n*ld St*rl*ng” in the “Good” column, but because of that creep.
It was midway through the Clippers’ first-round playoff series against the Golden State Warriors when TMZ released audio of the Clippers owner making racist remarks. Rivers’s handling of the situation—denouncing Sterling, standing by his players, speaking forthrightly—was crucial in helping the franchise move ahead. Sterling was banned for life by the league and forced to sell the team to Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. The Hulu series about the scandal, Clipped, premieres June 4; already, the Fishburne-as-Doc memes have hit Twitter.
And in the midst of all that, somehow the Clippers beat the Warriors in the first round. They went on to lose to the Thunder in the second (thanks in part to a real boner by Chris Paul), but the showing paved the way for a 2014-15 season filled with positively giddy expectations. That year, LA won 56 games, had the top offensive rating in the NBA, defeated the reigning championship Spurs in seven games in the first round, took a hearty 3-1 lead over the Houston Rockets in the second round, and—and then. And then, and then, and then.
The Bad: Where to begin? Probably right there, in that series. First, the Clippers lost Game 5. Then, “slow-roasted agony” is how my former colleague Jason Concepcion described Game 6. One moment Los Angeles had a comfortable 19-point lead at home with three minutes to play in the third—and the next, the Rockets’ Corey Brewer and Josh Smith were raining 3s and combining for 29 fourth-quarter points while the Clippers’ entire team managed only 15.
“That Game 6 comeback had a lot of luck to it,” says Morey, who at the time was the Rockets general manager. “We had, I famously say, some of the worst 3-pointers in NBA history hit a bunch of 3s.” (He’s not being a jerk: other than Charles Barkley, no one has been worse from downtown in their careers than Brewer and Smith.) “I love my team,” Rivers said at the time—after his team went on to lose Game 7 and go down in infamy. “I love the fact that they wanted to win so bad that, in my opinion, we almost couldn’t win. We have to fix that part. It requires great trust in each other. Our guys were trying to do it on their own.”
Rivers coached the Clippers for five more seasons. (In 2017, he was demoted from his joint GM-coach role to just plain coach.) The team was ousted in the first round in three of those seasons, missed the playoffs in another, and in 2020—sporting a new-look roster with a core of Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Montrezl Harrell, and Lou Williams—took a 3-1 lead over the ascendant Denver Nuggets in the bubble before, all together now, losing in seven.
The Doc: What stands out most about Rivers’s Clippers tenure is the number of players who still seem to harbor a grudge from those days. Like Matt Barnes, Stephen Jackson, and Lou Williams, who chatted it up on a pod about some of Rivers’s psychological warfare. Or Marcin Gortat, who earlier this year remarked: “He’s a good dude and great to talk to, with incredible stories and a rich history in the NBA. However, I wouldn’t trust his coaching decisions.”
Both Paul George and Blake Griffin have criticized Rivers for not making better in-game adjustments. Chris Paul is one of several former Clippers who objected to Rivers’s installation of his son Austin on the team. (“Ya, I played for him,” Austin said in a 2022 interview in which he was asked about the perception that he earned his spot because of his pops. “So naturally, for simps who don’t know shit about basketball, that’s what they’re gonna think.”)
And JJ Redick seems to have made a very comfy home for Rivers in his head, free of charge. Recently, the ESPN analyst ranted at length over what he sees as a lack of self-accountability from Rivers—a speech that led Austin to disagree on ESPN, and also inspired Patrick Beverley to clap back on Twitter. “This Man Doc actually saved your career,” Beverley wrote. “Started you when no one else wanted 2. And u retire go on TV and say that.” In the end, incredibly, the best take on the subject may have come from Stephen A. Smith. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in February, “this is one of those situations where there are an abundance of people who can be right.”
Philadelphia 76ers
2020-2023
Best season: 49-23 in 2020-21 (72-game season)
Worst season: 51-31 in 2021-22
The Good: After Rivers parted ways with the Clippers in late September 2020, the Rockets got in touch. “He was the first call we made,” says Morey, who at the time was still GM in Houston. By November, the two of them were indeed working together—except for the 76ers, in Philly. During Rivers’s first year in Philadelphia, the Sixers finished the regular season no. 1 in the Eastern Conference. Nice! Over the next two seasons, oft-injured star center Joel Embiid was hale and hearty enough to lead the NBA in scoring twice, finishing second and first in league MVP voting. Sweet!
“Doc did a great job,” says Morey, speaking diplomatically by phone earlier this month. “We shared a vision that Joel was the guy to build around, and how to make that all work. Look, we didn’t get as far as we wanted, which was obviously the title. But you know, we had some great runs, through a lot of adversity.” That was about as good as it got.
The Bad: Morey is right: There was a lot of adversity jammed into Rivers’s three seasons as 76ers head coach. During Rivers’s first season, for example, the lauded but enigmatic point guard Ben Simmons had a disastrous performance in the playoffs. He became the NBA’s worst postseason free throw shooter in history, just for starters. In one series, he took zero fourth-quarter shots in five of the seven games. (Over the course of all 34 postseason contests that Simmons played as a Sixer, he took a grand total of two 3-point attempts, missing both.)
And in Game 7 of the team’s second-round matchup against the Atlanta Hawks that year, Simmons didn’t just pass up any old open look at the basket—although he had done plenty of that too throughout the series—he passed up a simple dunk, with the body language of a robot malfunctioning.
“The stuff with Ben,” says Morey, “was not straightforward to handle.” Throughout the playoffs, Rivers had been a Simmons defender, even getting cranky with the media when they asked whether Simmons’s minutes ought to be reduced. “You guys keep the Ben narrative going. We’re just going to keep playing,” Rivers said at one point that spring. But in the wake of that Game 7, his tone changed. When a reporter asked whether Simmons was capable of playing point guard for a championship team, Rivers replied: “I don’t know the answer to that question right now,” a response that now lives in infamy.
After that, a scorned Simmons began an almost year-long holdout that ended with him being traded to the Brooklyn Nets in February 2022. “I thought that was pretty unfair to Doc,” Morey says about the general brouhaha over Rivers’s remarks. “Like, I mean, I believe he had 999 positive things he said about Ben earlier. And I guess it’s the nature of how social media works that everyone jumped on that one comment.” (Rivers has said since that he wishes he could take it back.)
Without Simmons, things were different in Philly, but they didn’t necessarily get better. James Harden came to the team in the Simmons trade but the Sixers lost again in the second round, this time 4-2 to the Miami Heat. And last season, it happened again: a game plan was not adjusted, a hard-fought 3-2 series lead against the Celtics petered away to nothing, and once again, Rivers was on the wrong side of a seventh game.
Rivers was fired by the Sixers in May, and therefore had plenty of time to do things like tell Bill Simmons that he wished he could have coached a younger version of Harden instead, or that Morey “talked too much” with other teams about possible trades and made Rivers’s life harder by damaging team morale. (“Really no way to prevent some of that stuff,” Morey says, thanks to the “changing nature of the league generally. That, plus social media, plus, you know, just the level of trades in general across the league are much higher than in the past.”) Rivers also had more time to go golfing.
The Doc: Recently, when the Milwaukee Bucks visited the Sixers in Philly, a fan yelled at Rivers that Larry David was waiting for him on the golf course. How might David himself feel about that?
“As a comedian,” David tells me over email, “I hate the thought of anyone being heckled (what a word, by the way!), but Doc is hard to rattle, even if my name is invoked. He has a great disposition on the golf course, where one’s true character emerges, and I’m afraid mine is always found wanting. I’m quite the baby, and that’s where Doc goes into ‘coach’ mode with me. He’ll say, ‘I’m taking you out. You’re going to sit for a while.’ Doc has great tolerance for most things in life, but not for babies on the course.”
Milwaukee Bucks
2024
This season: 49-33; 17-19 under Doc
The Good: I asked David who was more annoyed by Rivers taking the Milwaukee job so suddenly this winter: David, who abruptly lost a golf/dinner/vineyard compadre, or Rivers, who went on SiriusXM a few weeks into his new tenure to proclaim that he didn’t really get why the 30-13 Bucks had fired coach Adrian Griffin, either? “Personally, to be honest, I told [Bucks ownership] when they called, ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’” Rivers said on the show.
“If Doc was as annoyed as I was,” David writes, “he wouldn’t have taken the job.”
Earlier this season, following a subpar showing in the in-season tournament, the Bucks enlisted Rivers to serve as an advisor to Griffin. Instead, he became a usurper. A bewildering assignment it may have been, but it was nevertheless a tantalizing one: coaching a franchise just a few years removed from a title, with a roster led by All-Stars Giannis and Lillard and a front office willing to do things like acquire Rivers’s security blanket (a.k.a. Patrick Beverley) from Philly.
Before Rivers took the reins, Armstrong ran into him at an NBA game for which Rivers was, ever so briefly, part of the ESPN broadcast team. “I said, ‘Hey man, you need to take these headphones off and get back on that sideline,’” Armstrong says. “Well, I didn’t know it was going to happen in about a week or two!”
The Bad: It was awkward enough when Rivers joined the team and was immediately named the coach of the Eastern Conference All-Star team by virtue of his predecessor’s conference-leading record. (“That is ridiculously bad!” he exclaimed.) But you really never want to find yourself in a situation where you’re literally throwing the bus drivers under the bus, as Rivers did earlier this month following a dismal loss. “I’ve actually been sitting back and watching everything,” he said after the game. “Not just our players but our travel crew, everything.”
This was a fun new addition to Rivers’s various presser greatest hits, which include but are not limited to: (a) a story about Ainge encouraging him to get thrown out of a game so he could catch Tiger Woods at the Masters; (b) a careful delineation between playing with one’s food and playing with one’s meat; (c) the all-purpose response, “Would you ask Pop that question? No, you would not”; and (d) a whole bunch of excuses.
And once again, a Rivers-led team was bit by several injury bugs. First Giannis was injured on the eve of the playoffs. Then Lillard went down in a chaotic Game 3 in which the Bucks battled back to force overtime but then lost by three points. Both stars were still on the bench during Tuesday night’s Game 5 Bucks win—the first time an NBA team has won a playoff game without both of its regular-season leading scorers on the floor.
The Doc: In a twisted way, the Bucks’ array of recent injuries may actually have done Rivers a solid, for now: you can’t really blame a coach for not doing his best work when all his sharpest tools are stuck in the shed. Game 5 felt a lot like a throwback instead, tapping into that old overachieving “Heart and Hustle”–style magic from Rivers’s early coaching days back in Orlando. Patrick Beverley bowed, Malik Beasley went bang, Khris Middleton blew the door open, and Bobby Portis Jr. was back, baby. (Speaking of back: Rivers suggested after the game that his sidelined stars might be “very, very, very close” to a return.) There are now two possible outcomes for the Bucks: (a) lose a series that few thought they would win; or (b) come back from down 3-1 to win in seven games and rewrite a lot of narratives.
After the victory, Rivers praised his team’s attitude during a “lively” pregame film session and walkthrough from earlier that day. “I didn’t know we were going to win tonight,” Rivers said. “You never know as a coach. But I did walk off the floor and I said, we’re coming tonight.” When he’s right, he’s right.
