Westhead Making a Mad Dash on a Tightrope

DENVER —  A man with a vision has no time to picture defeat.

“Is it possible this system won’t work in the NBA?”

Paul Westhead paused, repeating the question as though this were the first time he had ever considered it.

“Maybe. I’m not going to say categorically ‘No.’ But that is something that will be proven to me,” he added, “only after I’m satisfied that the system is in place.”

On the back wall of the Denver Nuggets office that Westhead inherited from Doug Moe nearly two months ago, there are 13 picture hooks, but no pictures. Since walking away from his job at Loyola Marymount and back into the NBA, he has made no time for anything but the system. Pro basketball, Westhead is convinced, will be made ready for the next century now or not at all.

“What’s going on here is best described as walking a tightrope stretched between two tall buildings,” he said. “You have to have wits, courage, balance and you must think you are not going to fall. If you think you’ll fall, you will.”

Like most high-wire acts, this is something that has to be seen to be believed--if not believed in.

Employing a fast-break offense every trip up the floor and a full-court, gambling, trapping defense every trip down it, this is Westhead’s version of Dr. Naismith’s game played with a finger glued to the fast-forward button. When his college teams played this way, he often referred to the 45-second clock as the “four-to-five-second clock.” With the time frame pared to 24 seconds in the NBA, Westhead is fretting now about fractions of seconds.

One writer has likened the system to football’s two-minute drill played for 60 minutes, or a hockey power play that begins at faceoff and never ends. Boston Celtics great Bob Cousy saw it two weeks ago and called it “schoolyard basketball.”

In six of the eight exhibition games the Nuggets played with the system’s incendiary devices, they were burned beyond recognition. In the first one, the Phoenix Suns threw down 32 dunks en route to a 186-123 victory; in the third, the Atlanta Hawks scored 116 points in the second half of a 194-166 victory; in the fourth, the Boston Celtics shot 70% from the field in a 173-155 runaway.

Being kind, a primer of the Nuggets’ preseason might read something like this: See Denver run. Denver can run. See their opponents laugh. Their opponents--taller, stronger, more experienced--can run, too.

Being less kind, the newspapers are having a field day. Westhead is lampooned as Dr. Strangehoop, Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Flubber--every out-of-his-mind medical man, it seems, but Dr. Hyde.

At 51, Westhead has walked out on the tightrope twice before with NBA teams (the Lakers and the Bulls) and taken the fall by himself. He seems fully prepared to do so again.

After nine straight years of making the playoffs, Westhead knew coming in that this team was not likely to go anywhere in a hurry. Fat Lever and Alex English, who led the Nuggets in almost every statistical category over the past few years, departed for Dallas before he arrived.

The team he has inherited in Denver has no size to speak of, less experience and finds itself lodged in what is perhaps the NBA’s toughest division. But that has only made him more determined.

He knew he could play it conventional and get beat by 10 points every night, or play it his way, risk getting hammered by 20 or 30 many nights, and perhaps see it through once and for all and really learn if this is a vision or a hallucination.

“My sense is that you have to stay on course and not deviate because of the criticism, or because you’re losing and somebody says, ‘Obviously you need to slow it down,’ ” Westhead said, “because I’m going to say that we need to speed it up.”