Dwane Casey’s real legacy isn’t success. It’s goodwill

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The first thing Dwane Casey did upon arriving back at his old workplace on Wednesday was get lost.

The Detroit Pistons got off their team bus in an unfamiliar spot at the Scotiabank Arena. During his seven years as the Toronto Raptors coach, Casey had been used to driving his own car to work or taking the subway.

Down in the bowels, all pro sports arenas look the same – drab, featureless, vaguely steampunk. If you don’t know where you’re headed, it can take a while.

The Detroit players trooped in behind their new coach. Casey started one way down the hall. Wrong way. He turned. His players turned with him. Then he went the other. Not sure about that either. He dawdled. The players dawdled with him.

“I realized I didn’t know where I was going. Then they realized I didn’t know where I was going,” Casey said. “But we all figured it out together eventually.”

Casey told the story several times to several people. The tale grew a little bit in each telling. Casey lit up more with each new detail. In a week, it may involve crawling through the ducting.

Maybe it was all the wins that so endeared Casey to Toronto basketball fans, or the postseason appearances, or the way he used to shoo Drake out of the way when he was windmilling up and down the sideline, but I suspect it was the sincere, golly gee-ness of Casey that people loved.

Even when it was bad – and it got bad right at the end – Casey looked like he was having fun. The feeling was contagious.

About a million people showed up to see him on Wednesday morning. So many media were on hand that the media room could not contain them. They had to do the interview on the main court while the Pistons were in the midst of a shootaround.

A Detroit staffer wonderingly watched the herd go past for 10 minutes and said, “Is it the playoffs already?”

Casey greeted most people by name, calling them out like a man just arrived at his own surprise birthday party.

He’d clearly prepared some remarks. His firing in May was presented as a mutual decision, but it had taken Casey by surprise. As a result, his final news conference was an odd, downbeat affair.

Now he had the chance to say the nice things he’d wanted to say.

“It was beautiful. The people here are beautiful. My family and I embraced the Canadian way, which is beautiful.”

I don’t think I can ever recall him using the word “beautiful” before – a little too arty for a Kentucky-bred country mouse like Casey – but he was leaning hard on the adjectives of emotion on Wednesday.

He said he didn’t know how the crowd would greet him. Then he said he wouldn’t cry. Then he admitted that he might cry, but that he didn’t want Blake Griffin to see him (Blake Griffin was forced to move from L.A. to Detroit – believe me, he’s cried).

Hard feelings? Sure, a few. You didn’t have to read between the lines. You just had to read the lines.

“I know revisionist history, everyone has to take credit for the wins …”; or “They’ve had additions [of Kawhi Leonard] more than changes because those are the same plays that we ran for the last four, five years …”; or “I have no ill will for anybody. I understand what happened, how it happened. I don’t know why it happened.”

But there was an airiness to the way Casey said it – less bitter, more bemused. You get the feeling he’s thought a lot about this and decided in the end to think less about it.

Upon being introduced before the game, the crowd gave Casey a spontaneous standing ovation. He didn’t cry. Instead, he fiddled embarrassedly with his clipboard.

When Raptors coach Nick Nurse’s name was called a few minutes later, there was enough of a stillness that a few heads on press row swivelled. Then Toronto’s Kyle Lowry made a great show of running over to the visitor’s bench to embrace Casey.

During the game’s first timeout, a short video of Casey’s accomplishments was played on the big screen, prompting a much longer ovation. Lowry left a team huddle to join it at mid-court. Jonas Valanciunas and Pascal Siakam followed him over.

However poorly Casey’s firing was handled or whether it was a good idea, the tribute was a generous and fitting gesture. Casey didn’t summit Everest with Toronto, but he is the only Raptors boss to spend considerable time with the team at base camp.

And so, that’s that. Casey is just another former coach, however admired. The next time he shows up, depending on how the fans are feeling that night, he may well be booed. People are strange that way.

Casey’s real legacy isn’t success. It’s goodwill. Night after night, he showed well for the club that employed him, drawing in newbie fans and giving the old ones something they’d never known before – confidence. If you were lucky enough to spend time in his vicinity, you felt his warmth. He made people feel good because he made them feel seen.

His secret was never forgetting the unlikeliness of his journey – a kid from the Jim Crow South who never played professionally – to the NBA. He talked about it often.

He was, in the dictionary sense of the word, a gentleman: chivalrous and honourable.

Earlier in the day, someone tried to elicit an expansive answer from the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet on the topic of coaches and their importance. VanVleet is a clever fellow who, though young, has already mastered the NBA art of talking without saying anything.

But since he knew where this one was going, the attempt amused him enough to prompt an answer.

“Coaches are vital to the game,” VanVleet said, smirking, his tone rising archly. “I love my coach. I love him so much.”

As he left the podium, VanVleet added: “Again, I love my coach.”

That’s certainly not true in every instance, but sometimes it is.