Post-playing Career
In 2000, Blackman was tapped to be the defensive coordinator for the Mavericks under coach Don Nelson. The next year he served as an assistant coach for the German National team and helped lead them to a bronze medal at the 2002 World Basketball Championships in Indianapolis. During the 2004-05 NBA season, Blackman was hired as one of the Mavericks' television analysts, along with Matt Pinto and Bob Ortegel. For the 2005-06 NBA season, Blackman returned to the Mavericks' bench, serving his first season as a full-fledged assistant coach. In July 2006 he was promoted to the position of Director of Player Development.
In August 2010, Blackman was hired on as an assistant coach by Turkey head coach Bogdan Tanjevic in advance of the 2010 FIBA World Championship tournament. Blackman stated that he took the job specifically to work again with Tanjevic, who had been his coach in Milan.
During the 2006 NBA Finals, Blackman's former coach with the New York Knicks, Pat Riley, admitted, publicly for the first time, that sitting Rolando Blackman in favor of John Starks during Games 6 and 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals was the biggest coaching mistake in his career and that he has never forgiven himself for it.
Read more about this topic: Rolando Blackman
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)