Still a man’s world

Bill Laimbeer will peer down the sideline tonight at MCI Center and see Richie Adubato as his adversary.

The baddest of the Detroit Pistons’ championship-winning Bad Boys is just beginning his coaching career, and Adubato is on the flip side of a career that includes three stints as a coach in the NBA.

It will be a man versus man matchup in an all-women’s league — and that hardly is a rarity.

Eight of the WNBA’s 13 head coaches are men, and former Boston Celtics star and ex-NBA coach Dave Cowens has been hired to coach the expansion team in Chicago that begins play next season.

The WNBA has become a haven for men looking for a second chance or for a first opportunity to coach in pro ranks.

Laimbeer, for instance, is coach of the Detroit Shock — his first job as either the top man or assistant. Washington Mystics coach Adubato has found a home in the WNBA after unsuccessful stops as an NBA top man. Los Angeles Sparks coach Henry Bibby was fired as the men’s coach at Southern Cal and is trying to resurrect his career in the WNBA.

“I looked around for a job in the NBA and didn’t find one that made any sense,” said Indiana Fever coach Brian Winters, who coached in the NBA in Vancouver and as an interim coach at Golden State. “I was offered this job to remain a head coach. This came up, so I said, ’Why not try it?’ ”

Many have used the women’s league as a steppingstone to the men’s game. Former NBA star and ex-Sparks coach Michael Cooper left midway through last season to become an NBA assistant in Denver. Michael Adams left Washington shortly before the season to become a men’s assistant at Maryland. Laimbeer is regarded as the front-runner to become the New York Knicks’ coach.

It wasn’t always so in the WNBA. When the league was founded in 1997, seven of the eight coaches were women. Today a league whose slogan is “This is Our Game” has five more teams but only five females on the sidelines.

“We are always fighting for more pieces of the pie,” said Seattle Storm coach Anne Donovan, who last season became the first woman to win a WNBA championship. “There are a lot of great women’s coaches who haven’t gotten a chance. There are college coaches and former WNBA coaches yet to resurface.”

Donovan says she wants the WNBA to have the best coaches, regardless of gender. But the three-time Olympian sees a clear bias in the league for male coaches.

“I have come to understand the hiring process even if I don’t like it,” said Donovan, who is coaching her third WNBA team. “The WNBA clubs, except for Connecticut, are run by their big brothers in the NBA. Most of the hiring is done by NBA executives who are more comfortable and familiar and do better background checks on people they know. And that is usually men.”

The WNBA says money prevents it from hiring top women’s college coaches. The league simply can’t afford coaches like Tennessee’s Pat Summit or Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer. Summitt earns more than $800,000 annually, and the WNBA pays only a small percentage of that to coaches.

Still, successful women coaches at lower than top tier programs have not been hired either. In a 2004 study, 67.5 percent of Division I women’s teams (221 of 328) were coached by women. And there appear to be women in the WNBA pipelines: Each team has at least one female assistant.

“I like to not get bogged down on whether it should be a female or a male,” WNBA president Donna Orender said. “I think you want to promote the best possible basketball, and I think that whoever is able to take their team and push them forward, that is what we want.”

The issue hardly seems to rankle advocates of women’s sports. Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation — a watchdog group fierce in defending women’s rights through Title IX — was unaware of the WNBA disparity.

Lopiano says all sports’ coaches — including those in the NBA — should have equal representation and seemed only mildly concerned with the WNBA’s male dominance.

“I think everybody would be happy at 50-50,” she said. “I think everybody would love to see women role models coaching professional sports. … When it comes to coaches, when it comes to officials, women should be equally represented. That doesn’t mean all the coaches should be women. But it does mean that at least half should be.”

Lopiano wants more diverse search committees when there is an opening and the WNBA to have a gender policy similar to the NFL’s minority rule, which requires teams to interview at least one member before making a hire.

However, for now, men continue to establish themselves in the women’s league. Laimbeer won a title with the Shock in 2003. Adams got his first head coaching job in Washington after two years as an NBA assistant and being out of coaching for two years.

“It was an opportunity to get back into coaching,” said Adams, who spent 11 seasons as a player in the NBA. “I would have loved to have gone back and been an NBA assistant, but there weren’t many opportunities at the time. So I had to go after the next best thing and get as much experience as I could. I saw a lot of guys doing it.”

Adubato won three Eastern Conference titles with the Liberty before getting fired midway through his sixth season last year in New York. Adubato, who last coached in the NBA in 1996-97 with the Orlando Magic, was persuaded to try women’s basketball by Ernie Grunfeld, the Washington Wizards’ president of basketball operations, who was the Knicks general manager at the time.

Adubato said the number of former NBA players and coaches working in the WNBA helped persuade him to take the job.

“When Ernie and I talked, Frank Layden was coaching Utah and Orlando Woolridge was at L.A.,” Adubato said. “K.C. Jones was in the [now-defunct American Basketball League]. And Sonny Allen, a good friend of mine, was coaching Sacramento.

“I called every one of them and they said, ’Richie, if you love to coach, which you do, you will love coaching with the women,’ ” said Adubato, who got the Mystics job after another Grunfeld recommendation. “They want to learn. They work hard. They have a tremendous desire to get better. They give you the work ethic every day. So I decided to take it and was very happy that I did.”

Adubato chose to cross over rather than seek an NBA assistant’s job. He said it was refreshing to step into the women’s game, where the focus is more on teaching and less on off-court issues that can sidetrack NBA coaches.

And the word has spread as men have taken the reins of women’s professional teams. Meanwhile, women have become minorities in coaching their own game.