Coming just two weeks after the demotion of first-year assistant coach Brian Scalabrine, the departure of another assistant coach, Darren Erman, was viewed as a sign that Mark Jackson had lost control of the Warriors. That wasn’t really the case it appears. After the team said Erman was released for violating team policy, Chris Broussard of ESPN reports that Erman had been found secretly recording players and coaches without their consent.
Per ESPN:
Sources said Erman, who was coach Mark Jackson’s second assistant, would record coaches’ meetings, meetings between the coaches and players, and informal discussions among coaches that took place in the team’s coaches room — all without the participants’ knowledge.
“He was taping everything,” one source said. “Taping pregame speeches wouldn’t have been that bad, but he was taping guys just sitting around talking in the coaches’ office.”
Sometimes Erman would be present during the tapings. Other times, he would leave the room and leave his phone behind to record conversations the other coaches were having.
While it can’t be nailed down who Erman was doing the recording for, or if he was just doing it for himself, Broussard’s sources intimate the recordings were handed to the front office or the team’s owners:
“Was he taping it for himself or was he taping it for management? That’s not known,” a source said. “But he had a lot of communication with members of the front office.”
Broussard goes on to write that the Dubs coaches noticed a change in Erman in March and a few weeks later they discovered he was recording them. After he was caught, he told the team he had been recording them for three weeks. They kept him around another week before Warriors management terminated him on April 5.
Erman’s departure came less than a month after popular assistant coach Brian Scalabrine was demoted to the team’s D-League affiliate in Santa Cruz. Broussard’s report also indicated Scalabrine was frequently disrespectful to Mark Jackson and the other members of teh coaching staff. Scals didn’t sit with them on the team plane, and at one point, Scalabrine didn’t speak with Jackson over a five-week stretch.
The Warriors are in a bizarre place. They won 51 games this year and made the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time in 22 years. But Jackson is said to be on the hot seat if the Warriors fail to advance further than their Western Conference semifinal loss to the Spurs last year. They’re currently tied 2-2 with an embattled Clippers team in their first-round series, but no one can figure out if Jackson will really get canned should they be eliminated.
One of Broussard’s sources says that Jackson’s relationship with owner Joe Lacob and GM Bob Myers is fine, which makes the uncertainty around his job status even more peculiar.
(ESPN)
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