Wizards look to new coach Saunders to show them the way

Third time's a charm. Three-pointers. Three musketeers. Little pigs, blind mice, tenors and stooges.

Three strikes and you're out. Three-second violation. Three's a crowd. Celebrities die in threes.

For every good thing about the number three, there seems to be a bad thing. Considering this is October, though, and the Washington Wizards have lost neither a game that counts nor an All-Star combo guard to knee surgery yet, we're going to focus on the Goldilocks aspects of Flip Saunders' new job as the team's head coach.

For Saunders, this one really might be just right.

When he took over in Minnesota so long ago, 20 games into the 1995-96 season, the Timberwolves were hungry after four consecutive seasons of at least 60 losses. But they lacked talent, at least beyond a kid months removed from high school named Kevin Garnett. When Saunders was hired in Detroit a decade later, he found a Pistons team that had plenty of talent and knew how to win, and thus didn't particularly need Saunders. He steered them to a 176-70 regular-season record in three seasons but didn't get them back to a championship or even to the Finals.

With Washington now, Saunders has a roster of skilled and accomplished players. But due partly to injuries to Gilbert Arenas, Brendan Haywood and DeShawn Stevenson, all that talent got the Wizards just 19 victories last season. Rarely has a team of such great potential been so thoroughly humbled, and therefore been so receptive to the new voice on its bench.

"When you have a coach whose resume speaks for itself -- 50 wins, conference finals -- you definitely buy into what he's talking about,'' forward Antawn Jamison said after a recent preseason game against Detroit in Grand Rapids, Mich. "Since I've been here, there's never been talk about being a championship contender. But now, from Day 1, Flip has stressed that this team has the talent to be a championship-caliber team. He's stressing it day in and day out. When you have the captain of the ship saying that, it definitely sinks into the rest of the guys and you start to believe it.''

Said Saunders of his new club's relative hunger: "In Detroit, there were things they wanted to keep doing because they had had success. That was something you could build on. This situation, you're changing the whole culture.''

Oh, the Wizards still are an Arenas-centric team. Never mind Agent Zero's October experiments with passing rather than shooting, working from inside the 3-point line or zipping his lip around reporters; soon enough, if his bum left knee stays healthy, he again should be the high-scoring, high-volume All-Star talent that can dominate games or just steal them late. Jamison is back to lifting weights with the shoulder he injured last week in Cleveland and Caron Butler, no longer able to claim "underrated'' status, has shown signs of adding lockdown-defensive prowess to his versatile skills.

Healthier role players, development from within and some key additions -- Mike Miller, Randy Foye, Fabricio Oberto -- give the Wizards depth. And in Saunders, they have a seasoned veteran coach who has this job not because of who he knows or whom he isn't, but because of what he can do.

In Minnesota, Saunders was known initially as the former University of Minnesota guard who happened to be a college roommate of Kevin McHale, who brought him to the Wolves and stuck by him through seven first-round playoff exits. In Detroit, Saunders' primary qualification was that he was not Larry Brown, the mercurial lifer who preceded him. In Washington, Saunders arrived on his own merits, more confident and ready than ever before.

Consider, for instance, the season he spent out of the league in 2008-09, his first year not coaching since he was hired out of college by Golden Valley (Minn.) Lutheran College. It was a well-paid exile, on the Pistons' dime, that Saunders turned into a positive.

"The unique thing was,'' Saunders said, "when you watched games, you really didn't care who won. It was kind of what it's like to be a sportswriter. You could really critique coaches, you could critique everything. Watching the game and [knowing] how I did things, I became maybe more entrenched in my philosophy. I thought the way I did things was the right way to do it.''

Hard to quibble with the results, beyond the absence of a chunky gold and jewel-encrusted ring. At 587-396 through 13 NBA seasons, Saunders' .597 winning percentage ranks seventh among active coaches and trails only Phil Jackson (.746), Pat Riley (.722), Don Nelson (.611) and Jerry Sloan (.600) among all-time coaches at similar points in their careers.

His reputation is as someone who runs a fluid offense based on lots of ball movement, open jump shots and few turnovers. He's known for a legendarily thick and guarded playbook and a go-along, get-along demeanor that drew criticism toward the end of his runs with the Wolves and the Pistons. If Latrell Sprewell and Sam Cassell helped get Saunders fired in February 2005, if Rasheed Wallace and Rip Hamilton didn't always heed his words in Detroit, why should Arenas, Stevenson or any other Washington player?

Maybe because they're out of chances?

"The front office, Ernie [Grunfeld, Wizards president] and those people, have kind of informed them `This is the guy, this is how it's going to be,' '' Saunders told me. "And the players have been unbelievable. Listen, in all my years, I went every day [this] training camp setting my schedule at 11 o'clock and we'd start practice on average 30 minutes earlier. These guys already had been there for an hour.''

Said Foye, who missed Saunders by a season and a half in Minnesota: "All the stories that Kevin Garnett told me about Flip Saunders, I'm finding out are true. Just since the start of training camp, I've been learning from him, talking to him, and I just see everyone else is on top of it.''

Saunders has a tough act to follow. The Wizards' last full-time head coach, Eddie Jordan, still has admirers and friends in the locker room (Ed Tapscott's role never went beyond interim after Jordan was fired last November). But the new guy is secure in his ways, with 30 years of experiences to draw on and fellow coaches' tactics to "borrow.'' At one workout, he apparently lifted a page from Detroit strength coach Arnie Kander's playbook and had the Wizards throwing around a football. Remember, in a lot of ways, this is a teardown and rebuild project, for the players and the coach.

"The most challenging thing is, when I took over in Minnesota ... I had worked with some of those players. That helped a little bit because I had a good sense of where they were,'' he said. "Then of course, when I went to Detroit, I had a guy in Chauncey [Billups] who basically knew my system; when he was on the floor, he could tell everybody because he had run the whole thing [with the Wolves].''

Washington is all new, them to him, him to them. Except for the hunger, which makes Saunders' porridge neither too hot nor too cold.

"Everybody has a chip on their shoulder,'' Jamison said. "Everybody wants to be a part of something successful. We all get along. Guys came in in perfect shape for training camp. Guys are working hard. We look at last year as, 'It happened.' We don't forget about it. It makes us hungrier.''

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA for 25 years. You can e-mail him here.

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