Adubato finds his niche

It was an idea that had never occurred to Richie Adubato.

He was an NBA lifer, a scout, an assistant coach for five teams and the head coach of three. After 19 seasons in the NBA, why would he take a job in a start-up women’s league?

“I really didn’t know much about women’s basketball. I hadn’t even thought about it,” Adubato says.

That was eight seasons ago. Adubato now is one of the top coaches in the WNBA. His teams have competed in the WNBA finals three times. Tonight, he takes his second team, the Washington Mystics, into a first-round playoff series against the Connecticut Sun at Verizon Center.

At 68, Adubato enjoys coaching and teaching — he spent 18 seasons as a high school and college coach in New Jersey before getting his first NBA job — and he likes the lifestyle of the WNBA. The league’s short season allows him to spend most of the year at home in Orlando, Fla.

“I could have gone back [to the NBA as an assistant], but I wanted to watch my 15-year-old son play in high school,” says Adubato, who got his first NBA coaching job as an assistant to Dick Vitale with the Detroit Pistons. “This gives me all the time in the world to do it. I still enjoy coaching. This is fun. It is a great challenge. It is four months. It is not 11 months. Thirty-four games plus the playoffs — that’s a piece of cake.”

It’s a piece of cake that Adubato never thought he would want.

Adubato served as the interim coach for the Orlando Magic during the 1996-97 season. He took his team to the playoffs, where it lost a best-of-five series in five games to a Miami Heat team that had the league’s best record and superstars in Alonzo Mourning and Tim Hardaway.

Adubato fully expected to be rewarded with the position on a permanent basis.

“I thought I had the job,” Adubato says. “Basically, they wanted to bring in Chuck Daly. It was bad luck for me. I had the people. I had the fans. I had the team behind me. When they fired me, I figured I would stay out and see if somebody recognized the job I did.”

They didn’t. Adubato was out of a job and out of the league. And that’s when a former player and a new league entered.

Ernie Grunfeld played for the New York Knicks for four seasons when Adubato was an assistant with that team in the mid-1980s. Grunfeld was the Knicks’ general manager in 1999 when the Knicks’ WNBA sister team, the Liberty, was looking for a coach and Adubato was looking for a job.

“I went in and spoke with Ernie Grunfeld one day. He said, ‘Why don’t you take our Liberty job?’” says Adubato, who has a 127-240 record as an NBA coach and is 134-112 in the WNBA.

Adubato declined, thinking he would eventually land another job in the NBA. They spoke again two months later, and Grunfeld tried to sell Adubato on coming home, coaching in Madison Square Garden and teaching the game.

“Richie is a basketball lifer. That is his passion and his love,” Grunfeld says. “Just knowing his personality and the way he communicates with people I thought he would be a great fit.”

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