NBA Finals a rare instance of Black coaches going head-to-head for the championship

George Johnson laughed when I asked him if he could remember the 1975 NBA playoffs when his Golden State Warriors upset the heavily favored Washington Bullets in the NBA Finals.

We both laughed at how difficult it was, after seven decades on earth, to recall certain events. But certain events you never forget. Johnson said he would never forget the Warriors’ championship season and the NBA Finals when Golden State swept the Bullets.

The significance of that the series is that it marked the first time two African American coaches faced each other in the NBA Finals. K.C. Jones was the Bullets coach. Al Attles coached the Warriors. In the 2017 NBA Finals, two Black coaches went head-to-head for a game. Warriors assistant coach Mike Brown coached Game 1 against Cleveland Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue due to Warriors coach Steve Kerr dealing with complications from a previous back surgery. The matchup between two Black coaches wouldn’t happen again in full until the 2024 NBA Finals when the Boston Celtics, coached by Joe Mazzulla, face the Dallas Mavericks coached by Jason Kidd in Game 1 Thursday in Boston (8:30 p.m. ET, ABC).

My sense is that being a Black head NBA coach in 1975 was probably different from being a Black NBA coach in 2024. The league is Blacker in terms of players, and there are more Black coaches now — 14 before the season began — than there were then.

I reached out to Johnson because he was a center on the Golden State team which he joined before the 1972-73 season. We met in 1975 when I was an associate editor with Ebony magazine in Chicago. I’d written an article about Attles and Jones meeting in the Finals.

At the time, there were five Black coaches in the NBA: Attles, Jones, Ray Scott with the Detroit Pistons, Lenny Wilkens with the Portland Trail Blazers, Bill Russell with the Seattle SuperSonics. They were a close group and embraced the idea that one coach’s triumph was a triumph for all. Scott was voted NBA Coach of the Year in 1974.

The Attles-Jones first was professionally significant for me because, just as those Black NBA coaches were fighting for respect and opportunity, Black sportswriters were fighting to break into sports journalism at mainstream publications, which often kept closed shops.

Legendary sportswriter Larry Whiteside of the Boston Globe compiled a list of Black sportswriters that came to be called the Black list. The list consisted of sportswriters working in mainstream newsrooms.

There was a correlation between the Black coaches fighting for jobs in the NBA and Black writers fighting for opportunity. The 1975 NBA Finals were a significant milestone, though Johnson said when we spoke that, for a couple reasons, he was more focused on the fact that Golden State had reached the Finals than the Black dynamic at play.

“You know what? I probably didn’t realize it at the time,” Johnson said. “I’m sure we probably talked about it, but I was so excited, I’m sure the whole team was to be in the Finals like we were.”

Johnson was born in Tylertown, Mississippi, in 1948 and got a glimpse of the sort of suffocating racism that was part of the culture. He attended college in New Orleans but when his family moved to the Bay Area in California he filtered the significance of race — like two Black coaches facing each other — through a more relaxed prism.

“Having lived in Mississippi and migrated to California, I found that Blacks were more accepted, obviously, out there than they were in Mississippi,” Johnson said. “So, for me, it was like a cultural awakening. Stuff that you used to be a little leery of, especially going down South, although there weren’t written rules, you knew your place, so to speak, without getting into trouble.

“But in California, it was a lot more free, and of course, playing basketball and doing what we did, that didn’t faze me at all.”

I also reached out to Bernie Bickerstaff, 80, who was K.C. Jones’ assistant on the 1975 team. He joined the Bullets in 1973 after spending four seasons as coach at the University of San Diego.

Bickerstaff said the significance of the 1975 Finals was not lost on Black coaches, though there weren’t any parades being thrown. “We didn’t talk a lot about it, because the bottom line is that you belonged. You didn’t need to beat your chest, you were there,” he said.

On the other hand, Bickerstaff and other Black coaches knew there was the challenge and the opportunity to show one’s competence and acumen as a coach.

The five Black coaches were a tight band of brothers.

“There was a real bond there in terms of guys really looking out for each other. It was strong,” Bickerstaff said. He pointed out that most of the five Black head coaches hired Black assistants. “Even at that time, you had to have the intestinal fortitude to hire another brother when there’s only one to be hired. That wasn’t really the popular thing to do at that time.”

Bickerstaff is also old enough to have seen a dramatic evolution from Black players being shut out and marginalized to numerically dominating pro and major college basketball.

“I grew up in Harlan County, Benham, Kentucky, and there were a lot of us good enough to play at the University of Kentucky at that time,” he said. “But now you’ve got five Black starters. Mississippi might have five Black starters. And I think the perspective is people want to win. So, when you want to win, you put your best people on the floor.”

Bickerstaff became coach of the SuperSonics in 1985. He told the story about an interaction with a white reporter that reflects a period of time and how far the league has evolved. “The one thing I will never forget: There’s a newspaper guy who sat down with me and he asked me, ‘How do you think people are going to respond now if you start five Blacks?’ And he was going to do a story on it,” Bickerstaff said. “So, I said, ‘Now, if Pat Riley was sitting here, would you ask him the same question?’ And that ended everything right there.”

In the intervening years, Black players have become so dominant in the NBA that a trivia question might be who is the last American-born white male player to star in the NBA. Will the evolution of talent have extended to coaching and eventually to the executive suite?

A measure of progress is that Bickerstaff’s son, J.B., has had two stints as a coach, one with the Memphis Grizzlies and a four-year run as the Cleveland Cavaliers coach.

“Now there’s probably more of an opportunity of seeing two Blacks in the Finals because the NBA has done a really good job of hiring Black coaches,” Bickerstaff said.

Johnson played at historically Black Dillard University in New Orleans. Attles, the Warriors coach, played at North Carolina A&T, also an HBCU. That may have been why having a Black coach was no big deal and having two of them meet in the Finals was no big deal either.

Three seasons earlier, Attles saved Johnson’s career. After being waived by the Chicago Bulls, Johnson moved back to the Bay Area and began working for a bank while playing semipro ball in the area. When the Warriors had a tryout, Johnson tried out and played well enough over four days to catch Attles’ eye.

“After the sessions were over, Al sent for me, and he was sitting in the middle of the bleachers on one side of the court. So, I got up and I sit next to him. He says, ‘Well, we like what we see in you, and we would like to bring you to camp. Would you be interested?’ I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? Yes, of course, of course.’ ”

Johnson went to camp and began his NBA career. Two seasons later, he was an NBA champion and played for 13 seasons.

In 1975, the Bullets were an overwhelming favorite to win the NBA title.  For starters, a scheduling snafu forced Washington to play the first two games on the road. Another conflict forced those two games to be played at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

“Of course, we won the first one and then we won the second one,” Johnson said. “It’s like, ‘OK, we got to go back to Washington.’ I don’t think any of us on that plane heading back to Washington thought that we were going to do what we ended up doing, which was win the next two games and sweep them. So, that was just an incredible year.”

Nearly 50 years later, the NBA landscape has changed dramatically, though for all the changes, there’s still room for the rarity of two Black coaches facing each other in the Finals.

“Well. I think it’s certainly different now,” Johnson said. “Everything is different. I mean, salaries and stuff. I don’t remember what we all made, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a whole lot of money back in those days. I also think the type of respect that Al and K.C. actually were a part of creating around Black coaches is definitely the reason that we have two Black coaches now, coaching against each other.”

We no longer keep our Black list of African American sportswriters, though the push to get more into the business has not abated. Black NBA coaches are more numerous now, though the push for more has not abated, either.

In 1975, Bickerstaff paid attention to the phenomenon of two Black coaches facing each other in the NBA Finals because it was the first time the two had reached the mountaintop.

“It was different,” he said, “but it wasn’t a thing where you went around beating your chest. Al Attles and K.C. were two really good coaches who happened to be Black, and they earned that opportunity to get there.”

In his view, the same dynamic holds true 49 years later with Mazzulla and Kidd.

“This is not a gift. They belong here,” Bickerstaff said. “They’ve earned the opportunity because they won.”