They definitely weren’t a championship team when he was the coach, so maybe that had more to do with him than the players.
The Red Mamba Brian Scalabrine tells a story about how he was fired as an assistant coach during the season just for trying to tell Jackson the Warriors indeed were a very good team that Jackson was ruining.
The Spurs were my scout,” he said. “We talked about this one thing we needed to do, and I thought that (Andrew) Bogut did a good job of getting to where he needed to go. But in the coaches’ meeting – which just happens a lot, it’s just the way sports is – there’s a lot of bashing Bogut on this particular play. It’s really insignificant when you think about it. It’s a cumulative effect of all this.
“Me and one of the other assistant coaches, all I wanted to do was not jump to a conclusion. I wanted to watch the clip that we were talking about, which means watch the tape, right? And they wouldn’t put it on. So I was like, ‘Let’s just watch the tape, and let’s figure it out. I don’t want to argue. Let’s watch the tape.’
“Afterwards, it’s a big thing. Like we’re having a meeting afterwards, and we’re going to clear the air here (with Mark Jackson). He’s the leader, so we had this meeting of clearing the air, and the meeting was, it was like a bombardment of he’s trying to like get everyone to say that I’m a bad guy, and I’m a bad coach, and I should be off the staff.
You don’t just along the way just like dismiss one of your assistant coaches and think that nothing is going to happen. Like, there’s still going to be some fallout from this. Then we started getting into the talk of team and how I thought that they were really good, and he thought that they were not good as they really are.
“I thought that we would win it, and I thought that team was unbelievable, and I knew about a month-and-a-half in that we just didn’t have what it takes,” Scalabrine said. “We weren’t disciplined enough. We didn’t push and grind the way we have to grind to win. Now, we had what it takes to win, but there is an element of uncomfortable-ness and being comfortable with uncomfortable-ness that we just never really went into from a coaches-to-players standpoint.”
Hard to disagree with Scalabrine’s assessment because as soon as Jackson left and the Warriors got a coach they could trust, you saw what happened and what is currently happening.