| | SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- John MacLeod may be going back to the
Phoenix Suns, the same team he coached for 14 years. This time, he
would be there as an assistant.
MacLeod said he's weighing an offer from new Suns coach Scott
Skiles to join his staff. MacLeod, 62, left coaching last spring
after he was forced to resign as Notre Dame's head coach.
Skiles was promoted from an assistant to head coach earlier this
week after Danny Ainge resigned to spend more time with his family.
"It's a consideration," MacLeod told the South Bend Tribune
from the new Phoenix-area home into which he and his wife, Carol,
moved in October. "(The Suns) are already good, but they have a
chance to be better. Scott will be a very good head coach."
MacLeod, who spent eight years as the head coach at Notre Dame before resigning in early March, interviewed with Washington and
Cleveland during the offseason. Both teams decided to go different
directions, hiring Gar Heard, who played for MacLeod in college and
in the NBA, and Randy Wittman.
"I wasn't disappointed that I wasn't hired," said MacLeod, who
won 707 career games as a head coach with Phoenix, Dallas and the
New York Knicks. "I understood that they wanted to go with younger
coaches. That made sense (but) things work out."
Skiles, 35, who led Plymouth to the Indiana high school
championship in 1982, is the youngest coach in the NBA. MacLeod
said he was hesitant to jump at Skiles' offer because several other
coaches around the league are said to be on the hot seat and he's
still interested in being a head coach.
Should something unfold, MacLeod would hope to land with one of those teams as an interim head coach for the rest of the 1999-00
season.
"It would be nice if all of us had the magic lamp to look
into," MacLeod said. "But you just don't know. Coaches change
every year. There's always movement."
MacLeod said he's still got the "juice" to coach after 32
years on the sidelines.
"You can only play golf so long," he said. "I need more than
that. I miss coaching. When you're a coach all your life, you miss
the action of it."
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