Expert: Alessandro - 5/4/2008

Question
Who was Tom Heinsons ass. coach and what was his background

Answer
From the Celtics' official website:

http://www.nba.com/celtics/history/Stats_ManagementCaptains.html

John Killilea (who graduated from Boston University in 1952) served as both assistant coach and head scout under Mr. Heinsohn during the 1970s.

In an obituary for the Boston Globe (Killilea died of a heart attack in Denver in 1996), Bob Ryan described him in the following terms:

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Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Jan 31, 1996

BOB RYAN

His boss said, "Come on home, John; take the weekend off."

"Nah," said John Killilea. "Let me take one more look at the big kid at Valparaiso."

He was changing planes in Denver last Saturday when it happened. He had just seen Boise State at Montana and now he was en route to Kansas City to see Valparaiso at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was reaching up to take his bag out of the overhead when his heart exploded. They had the CPR going within a minute and they airlifted him to the University of Denver Hospital, but by the time they got there, he was gone, a basketball lifer who had died with his scouting boots on. He was 67-going-on-15, a man passionately in love with a game. For John Killilea, there was no baseball, no football, no hockey, only basketball.

They'll bury John Killilea in Brookfield, Wis., today, which, if his family doesn't mind my saying, seems entirely inappropriate. For though Killilea left Boston 19 years ago to work for teams in Milwaukee, New Jersey, Wichita and Houston, he would always be a Bostonian every time he opened his mouth. He was Quincy and Boston University and the Boston Celtics and, most of all, he was Boston Garden and the Tech Tourney.

The NBA knows him well, but the truth is that the NBA was Lifetime II for John Killilea. Long before Larry Costello hired him as a part-time East Coast scout for the Bucks, and long before he became the Celtics' first full-time assistant coach in 1971, Killilea was churning out a 314-91 record at five Maine and Massachusetts high schools over an 18-year period, claiming residence in both states' Coaches Halls of Fame.

"He was one of the best, if not the best high school coaches I ever knew," says Holy Cross athletic director Ron Perry Sr., a longtime friend who first encountered Killilea as a college playing opponent in the early '50s. Each man became something of a Massachusetts coaching legend in the '60s, Perry at Catholic Memorial and Killilea at both Silver Lake and Melrose. "He never had a superstar. But fundamentally, his teams were as good as any I ever saw -- at any level."

It was a glorious era in Massachusetts high school basketball, and Killilea was at its core. "What an amazing time," Perry reflects. "There was John and myself and Rollie Massimino and Jim Calhoun and Skip Karam and Jackie Lehane. The things John did were something. He put Silver Lake on the map, and they haven't been heard from since."

"Oh, he was tough," recalls renowned University of Maine player and head coach Skip Chappelle, who played for a Killilea-coached Old Town, Maine, team that electrified onlookers in the 1957 New England Tourney. "A disciplinarian, a no-nonsense guy. Could he teach defense . . ."

Years later, Killilea the Pro explained the M.O. of Killilea the High School Coach.

"The most important rule," he told me, "was this: Never live in the town you work in. Shop elsewhere. Get your hair cut elsewhere. You don't need suggestions about who to play and how to play."

Fair enough. But when Killilea's Melrose team followed up a Class B Tech Tourney victory with the state championship by defeating Holy Name of Worcester, his unfamiliarity with the town led to a problem. It seems that the mayor had arranged for a police and fire truck escort, only the team never kept their appointment.

"I forgot where I was supposed to meet them," Killilea confessed. "I don't know the city that well, and I got lost leading the team bus from the Garden to Melrose."

He said goodbye to Lifetime I following the 1970-71 season, having won four Tech Tourney titles. "It's a young man's job," he declared.

Thus began Lifetime II, some of which was spent on the bench watching over the world's greatest basketball players, and a great deal of which was spent traveling -- no exaggeration -- millions of miles scouting basketball players for the Celtics, Nets, Bucks and, since 1988, the reigning world champion Houston Rockets, for whom he was director of player personnel. By the time he was finished, he had as many NBA championship rings as he had Tech Tourney titles.

As a bench assistant, his specialty was defense. He constructed the defense that continually baffled the Bucks as the Celtics won championship No. 12 in 1974, and he was at Tom Heinsohn's side two years later when they won No. 13 against Phoenix.

But his NBA legacy will be as a scout. "I put John in the same class as a guy like Jack McMahon," says Houston basketball operations chief Bob Weinhauer, referring to the sainted scouting legend. "He was the epitome of the NBA quality scout. When I first came into the league {from the University of Pennsylvania}, I followed him around like a puppy dog. If you drove or ate a meal with him, you got the stories, and with them you got an entire background of the NBA."

However much the disciplinarian he may have been as a coach, inside Killilea was a class clown always ready to leap out. The Killilea I knew saw the humor in every game, every player and every situation. He had, for example, his own little shorthand when scouting players. Consider the final notation "KP" on a player's report. "KP," in Killilea-ese, stood for "Kahn't Play."

But nothing topped "LGIU."

"LGIU," of course, stood for "Looks Good In Uniform," and it meant the same thing as "KP."

He was totally lacking in the all-important art of self-promotion, which helps explain why he never became an NBA head coach. That he knew his stuff was a given. I will never forget the end-of-the-line Don Nelson telling me that he would like to get his feet wet in the coaching ranks by "sitting next to a John Killilea and learning from him." Ironic, no? But Killilea never had a pushy bone in his NBA body. Here he was, the player personnel director of a defending champion, watching games during the 1995 Finals while standing in the runway. "I didn't want to deprive someone else of a ticket," he shrugged.

He had battled diabetes for years, and friends and family were concerned about his health. Weinhauer had been telling him to stay home more and do the follow-up work on TV, but that wasn't Killilea's style. "You have to be there in person to judge a player's quickness and strength," he said a long time ago. "That's why all the traveling and hours are necessary, even if it means the reward of just one player."

He did it because he loved it and he died on his way to see a kid one more time, just to make sure. The kid could have been an LGIU, but there are always 100 of them for every player, anyway. Looking for that one kept John Killilea young.

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Alessandro
http://parquetwishesandleprechaundreams.blogspot.com/