Down comes the house

The Pelicans fire Willie Green but before that, could not summon the courage to name him.

In a house that’s haunted the recommendation for, if not pacification, then polite coexistence, is to speak out loud and frankly to the ghost haunting it.

You can declare you mean it no harm and would like for the two of you to go about your business, two ships in the night. You can ask it to leave the same way you would a guest who’s overstayed a welcome. If its vibrations feel particularly hostile you can notch your ask up to a demand — firm, but civil — but always establish a line, a barrier between you and it.

The key, it seems, has nothing to do with the ghost. The key is to not lose yourself in desperation or fear. We’ve all slipped into the emotional recesses of ourselves, lurked in dark psychic corners and thumped down stills from the walls of our memory for the sake of a reaction. We can break those spells with a blink. When it’s the real thing, the goal is to not see ourselves in the ghost.

---

Years ago, Steve Kerr praised Willie Green, said he was going to be a star. Green had been a few seasons gone from Kerr’s staff with the Warriors then, and was leaving Phoenix where he’d been an assistant under Monty Williams to take a head coaching job with the New Orleans Pelicans.

Kerr said he loved the combination Green had of “confidence that comes with having played in the league for 12, 13 years” and the “humility that comes with being a role player.” Green knew how the league worked because he’d bounced around in it. Kerr also noted that former players who get into coaching can realize quickly that side of the game is a lot less fun than being on the floor. Green, he said, was the opposite. He loved the preparation, the fine-tuning, the drills, the repetitive work, loved the camaraderie. Kerr called him “a natural.”

In a 2018 Warriors blowout to the Pacers, Kerr got up on the postgame dais and called out his players, saying they didn’t care. Green and Kerr had coffee the next morning and Green told his head coach, plainly, that he was going to have to backtrack on the statement, that he had to know it wasn’t true. At that point those Warriors had three consecutive Finals appearances and two title wins from them. They’d go on to win their third, in a 4-0 sweep, almost exactly two months after that coffee.

Green wasn’t afraid to tell Kerr he was wrong. He had an intuitive knack for walking the line between being a coach (outward facing, exterior work) and empathetic to the locker room (internal, hopelessly). He was calm. Kerr said he never got too high, too low, that he wasn’t ever going to be the most demonstrative on the bench. This wouldn’t be Stan Van Gundy pacing the sideline raging at the refs, the promise of a blown play withering under the big lights. And a good thing, too, because Van Gundy got run out of New Orleans just before Green got there.

We’re at the Goldilocks confluence in New Orleans. This coach was too hard, too loud, too much (never mind that Zion Williamson came up under Coach K at Duke), but this guy — too quiet, too reserved, too soft on the players who need the push. This is how the coaching carousel works, besides the factors of timing, optics, buzzy names in the mix, and connections. “Works” doesn’t mean function well, or with consistent results, only that it’s how the mechanism revs itself around and around.

---

How many haunted buildings are there in New Orleans, as reigning most haunted city in America? Better yet, how many haunted tours?

This voyeurism for what’s finished but won’t leave.

---

The Pelicans have never gone over the salary cap. This is a team that, in its retconned history, has been cheap down to its bones. But contrary to the organization, let’s be generous with the term. “Cheap” here extends to behaviour, an established modus operandi of abusing power or cheaper still, flexing it for nothing but a base, mean pleasure.

The Pelicans were marred by the man who owned them first, back when they were still the Charlotte Hornets. George Shinn considered himself a devout Christian, outwardly anyway. He reportedly had prayers read over the Charlotte Coliseum’s P.A. system before games and referred to himself as “god’s little idiot” to account for his professional success. He was also accused of kidnapping and rape.

The 1997 allegation of Leslie Price outlined how Shinn offered to drive her to his lawyer for advice in her child custody case, but instead brought Price to his home and sexually assaulted her. The prosecutor who saw the case decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Shinn, but noted “something did in fact transpire between Mr. Shinn and this victim.”

Price then filed a civil suit, with additional allegations of sexual harassment by Shinn to two former staff of the Hornets. Shinn’s lawyer included a photo of Price in a bikini in the court file, and beyond blaming the victim admitted using the trope of “too dumb to be guilty” as the basis of his legal defence for Shinn.

Amidst the public trials (broadcast across the U.S. on Court TV) Shinn fell from grace with Charlotte fans and game attendance dropped, but rather than step away from the team Shinn started shopping it. First to Memphis, though the Grizzlies got there first, then to St. Louis, Norfolk and Louisville. At the same time Shinn demanded the city of Charlotte build a new arena at no cost to him, using the threat of moving the team as blackmail. At this point he’d also entered into a deal with a wealthy group of Louisville business owners and politicians for the Hornets to move into a new arena the team would share with the Louisville Cardinals college basketball team (then-coach Rick Patino nixed the deal, he didn’t want to share).

Shinn then turned back to Charlotte — the city reviled him (in a citizen’s forum he was taken to task by a man accusing Shinn of joyriding his helicopter around at all hours) but was building a mixed-use arena (the Spectrum Center) that looked pretty good to him, so Shinn dropped his threat of moving the team. The hitch was a public referendum that needed to pass for the arena to break ground, and right as it was set to close then-mayor Pat McCrory vetoed a living wage ordinance.

The city had enough money to build a brand new arena, but not enough to support living wages for the people who’d be working in and around it. Predictably, to anyone other than McCrory, the referendum torpedoed (when McCrory’s term ended in 2009, he’d be the last Republican mayor of the city) and the plan revised to build a new arena without requiring a vote — on the condition that Shinn sell the team. Instead, he moved it to New Orleans.

Shinn may be long gone but the rotten marrow remains, and the personal projections of the majority who’ve come after have only been another kind of haunting. Over the years the shades of smug at the top shifted between ego and complacent, self-satisfied and righteous, but the tap-dance looks the same. Whether it was football executive Mickey Loomis, recent president of basketball operations appointee Joe Dumars (who hasn’t been at the helm of a winning NBA franchise since 2004), or a venture capitalist like Gayle Benson animating those bones, they move with the same beholden-to-no-one hitch.