The Hard-Luck Coach.

Rick Carlisle's dismissal as the head coach of the Pacers only continues a string of years of coaching in the Association that can only be described as immensely frustrating, just from the arc of it. I can't imagine the difficulty of it personally.

Carlisle's firing as head coach of the Pistons must have been tough enough -- it wasn't that the team wasn't on the rise under his leadership, but Larry Brown was available, and he took the team to the promised land of a title, and he had to deal with that. You can say that without Joe Dumars dealing for Rasheed Wallace in that championship year, the Pistons don't win. I agree with that, but that's still a team that Carlisle had kind of brought back, but didn't get to finish the job with.

He heads to the Pacers, gets the top record in the Eastern Conference, but loses in the conference finals to those champion Pistons, rubbing salt in the wound -- and next season, you get Artest's explosion in the Palace at Auburn Hills, which effectively derailed the team and started a series of trades which robbed the Pacers of any talent that could be coached into a good team outside of Jermaine O'Neal. Since Larry Bird and Donnie Walsh can't fire the players, Carlisle has to go.

Other coaching moves: the Sonics can coach Bob Hill and re-assign GM Rick Sund for the last year of his contract. Not unusual, given that new ownership often likes to bring in their own guys after a bad year, but who will take a job for a team that's likely in its current location for one more season? Lenny Wilkens is running b-ball operations over there, and while it's unlikely that he would go back full-time to coaching, I wouldn't be surprised if it shakes out that way.

The Green Begins To Fade.

It is always a relevant and necessary question in this era of balanced budgets, state deficits, and attempts to shore up the financial future of more important concerns to the general public whether or not sports stadia and arenas ought to have ANY public investment when owned by private companies or individuals (I make an exception for the Green Bay Packers, the sole model of public ownership.)

Washington's state government has added its name to the list of those refusing to ask its taxpayers to shoulder that burden, and it means the Sonics and Storm will be gone after 2007-08, some form of miracle notwithstanding. I have never been a fan of public involvement in paying for homes for sports teams, because much of the complaining about newer facilities rings hollow when teams leave buildings that aren't really that old, and do it for one-sport-only stadia and arenas.

TrueHoop provides a good compendium and summary, with links to folks espousing the need to keep the team and its 40 years of history in the Emerald City. But it's hard for me to agree with Seattle Times columnist Steve Kelley on this. $300 million for a state is not exactly just a drop in the bucket to be able to cough up for a multi-purpose arena:

The proposal made by new Sonics owner Clay Bennett is a work in progress. The proposal needs to be more specific. He has to settle on a site. And, I believe, his ownership group has to pony up more money for the building. After all, this is a franchise that spent more than $60 million on a couple of centers — Jim McIlvaine and Calvin Booth — who were about as mobile as an all-purpose arena. This is a franchise that didn't mind wasting more than $70 million on big-league bust Vin Baker. Bennett and his group can afford to be more of a partner in this place. But let's not be the one state that says, "No."

Someone has to at some point. L.A. is still saying no to the NFL, and it hasn't bothered anyone there one bit outside of the city politicians who mouth platitudes about getting a team to play in the Coliseum or the Rose Bowl. Eventually, cities and states are going to have to start saying "no" a lot more often to franchise owners; there's a lot of power in that. And there's no particular reason why cities have to be three or four-sport cities.

Ultimately, Washington's state government has every right to ask Bennett, if his plan is that flawed, to come forward with an acceptable one before they grant the use of public funds, because when you have paid for two stadiums for baseball and football in the last decade, any plan that involves public money is going to come under more scrutiny. The onus is not on the local government, and shouldn't be. That $300 million could go somewhere where it is more desperately needed -- education, transportation, etc.