From the outside, it certainly didn’t look very good.
David Fizdale, known as players’ coach and a rising star in the league, was fired less than two years into his first head coaching job after feuding with All-Star Marc Gasol. It didn’t matter that Gasol, a 32-year-old star on the decline, is one of the hardest types of players to coach. It was Fizdale’s job to learn how to coach and motivate an aging player with a max contract, and he failed.
Yet, Fizdale was able to parlay this failure, parlay his lowest professional moment, into a big win and land one of the most coveted jobs in sports.