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As Marc Stein reported on Sunday, Texas Legends head coach Nancy Lieberman will be moving from the bench to the front office.

Lieberman was the first women's coach of a men's professional basketball team associated with the NBA when she signed on to coach the Legends, the Mavericks' D-League affiliate, last summer. Lieberman's hire was historic, but in many respects not all that radical. Lieberman is a basketball lifer, a Hall of Famer who had coached professionally in the WNBA.

At the same time, there were very few, if any, male professional basketball players who had played under women at any level. When I asked about that last summer, Lieberman responded, "As far as I know, guys have been told what to do by women their whole lives."

While Lieberman was telling her players what to do, the Legends went 24-26 in their inaugural season and qualified for the playoffs.

We caught up with Lieberman on Monday and asked her to reflect upon her season.

Big picture: How do you think you fared this season?
It was pretty amazing. Sometimes when you're in the thick of it, you don't really take the chance to look back and go, "Wow. We had a hodgepodge of guys. We all came from different places. We were a first-time team -- and look what we did." Look at how positive we were for the D-League as a whole. We made the little things matter. We made the details matter. My goal was to give these guys a reason to come to practice every day with their best -- not just show up, but come because you had something you had to give us.

When we spoke a year ago, one of the things you said was that the biggest source of expectations would be you, that the pressure on you would be more self-inflicted than from people watching on the outside looking in. Did that hold true?
I don't know if it was pressure as much as standards or opportunity. But I have always felt as if I had to operate on a different level because of the perception, that I couldn't take anything for granted. So the answer is, yes. I knew that I had to watch more film than most coaches. I knew that, even if I was tired and it was three in the morning, I had to be back on Synergy if one of my players was struggling, that I could give him -- as I like to say -- the answers to the quiz. If Antonio Daniels was having problems with his weakside defense, or if Justin Dentmon was turning the ball over, it was my responsibility to come to them the next day with solutions.

It's not like you have a chance to be back in the huddle every 30 seconds and call a new play. We don't have a chance to stop, think and redo. Everything is on the fly. You're trying to disseminate information instantaneously. So your connection with your point guard is at a premium -- because he's an extension of you, from the bench to the floor. You have to get the pieces in the right places. Or then you call a timeout and things aren't going well and you've got 20 seconds to tell people what you want to tell them in the emotion and heat of the game. I have to be ready for those moments. All that work that I did and all those people I reached out to for a year paid off.

Was there one specific piece of advice that was most useful?
Joe Girardi said to make sure they want to come back every day to see you at practice.

To that point, Pat Riley says that the most important factor for a coach -- above X's & O's or tactical preparation -- is "contact" between player and coach. It doesn't even necessarily have to be basketball-related. But that's his term for the emotional or interpersonal state between coach and player.
He's right. One thing I did was make sure I knew a little something about every player on our team. We were in Idaho for Thanksgiving playing the Stampede -- it was our second and third games of the season after losing opening night. The last thing I want to do is come home 0-3 and have to answer questions like, "Do you know what you're doing?"

So we're sitting around Thanksgiving dinner with 10 guys and my coach and every player had to tell us something non-basketball-related that we didn't know about them. So I found out that some of my players had children. Some of them had siblings who were in prison. What kind of route in life they took to get here. It was amazing. It was really quiet at the table when someone was talking. It brought us together.

There was one day during the course of the season when Antonio Daniels called me and said, "Hey, you know, my mom just got diagnosed with cancer." We cried together. When Sean Williams was sick in the middle of the night, he called me. This is a funny story because we have apartments our players share in Frisco. Sean calls me and says he's going to go to the hospital. I told him I'd meet him there, so I asked him, "Which hospital?" He goes, "Coach, I'm in Arlington at my mom's house." So I said, "Where's your mom?" Sean said, "She's in the next room sleeping." I'm like, "Dude, you woke me up when your mom is in the next room?!"

But that tells you right there: I was their coach, their mentor, but also a trusted figure in their lives. When Justin Dentmon wasn't getting the playing time he wanted, we were at odds with each other. One day we sat down and talked, and he's like my son now. It took getting involved in their lives. And now four of my players are out at my basketball camps this summer participating.

As you talk, it dawns on me there's nothing at all gender-specific about these issues. Once you took the job, it was purely coach-player kind of stuff: Guys unhappy with playing time. Watching film at all hours to help a guy with his defense. Dealing with the messy real-life issues players deal with -- health, family, whatever. Coaching is coaching.
It's coach-player stuff, but it's life if you want to take it to the most simplistic level. It's loving these guys like they're your children, but there's going to be a lot of tough love. Antonio Daniels -- love this guy. One of us is going to be at the other's funeral. We were so close, but we butted heads because he's this 12-year NBA veteran running this team, but I needed him to do certain things I felt were best for the team. He's running it the way he knows best with his past experience. Finally, there comes a point in time when you come together. One day I turn around and said to him, "There are three weeks left in the season. You want to run this basketball team? You have the keys. But I drive a Bentley and I'll expect nothing but the best." And he just looked at me and he goes, "Finally." And in his last four games with us, he had 40 assists and zero turnovers.

Did you encounter moments when you felt like guys were testing you where they might not test a male head coach?
I would've said that years ago, but not today. Because if my guys aren't allowed to question and if I'm going to be super-sensitive and go, "Well, he asked me that question because I'm a girl," you fall into a trap and I can't allow that to happen. If a guy challenges me about a defensive rotation, maybe he's not challenging me. Maybe he just wants to get it right. Maybe he just wants to have a better understanding of what we're trying to do. These are really bright guys. I want to hear what they have to say. Maybe they're seeing something we're not seeing from the bench. That's a strength and a virtue. That's communication. The worst thing I could do is every time someone questioned me is say, "There they go. They're challenging me." And that's not me, anyway.

Play out the scenario with me: How does the first female NBA head coach arrive at the job? Is it a woman who builds her career coaching men -- maybe at the high school level, then college, then D-League? Does she come up through the college ranks winning multiple championships? Is it someone who just racks up title after title in the WNBA? In your eyes, how does it ultimately happen?
I don't think a woman is going to come out of college, or come out of the WNBA and be a head coach in the NBA. I don't think that's very realistic on any level. I think it'll be someone who is investing their time, energy and effort. They'll get a break because they've created some relationships. They'll come through the D-League or will help on an NBA team. Sometimes the greatest thing is that internship you invest in yourself. If you live in a city with an NBA team, maybe you pick up the phone and you call the front office and you say, "Look, I'd really like to gain some experience. Could I volunteer?" Once you get your foot in the door, you create these relationships and people have a chance to see not only your knowledge but your work ethic and how you handle yourself.

People were very generous with me and offered me great guidance. And I was always reaching out because I wanted those guys to share what they knew -- and I want to share what I know. I'm open every day to information. Toward the end of the season, I called Kevin Eastman, Doc Rivers' assistant. I said, "Kevin, our defense is in the toilet. Can you do me a favor? Even though I've interviewed him, can you put a call into Tom Thibodeau for me?" I'm in my hotel room in Maine and my phone rings. It's Tom and we must've talked for two hours. We're talking about rotations, overloads and preloads. I was like, "Are you sure I'm not taking too much of your time?" He said, "Nancy, I love doing this." He's thanking me for calling him?! I get home a few days later and he had overnighted me the Chicago Bulls' defensive playbook. Who does stuff like that?

Who are some female prospects in the coaching ranks around the country whom we should keep our eyes on?
I think Jenny Boucek. She's worked really hard on the men's side. I've been a mentor to Jenny. Ronnie Rothstein has been a mentor to Jenny when she was coaching in Miami in the WNBA. They stayed in touch. Coach Riley has been somewhat of a mentor to her. Rick Sund. Jenny is in the WNBA now. When she came to visit me, she was in Mavs practices and my practices. She's really good. I also hired a woman named Tara Gibson as my video coordinator. And you know what video coordinators do these days?

• More good stuff on the positional revolution, this time from Jesse Blanchard of 48 Minutes of Hell. Blanchard writes that defensive roles are much harder to define than offensive ones, which makes reclassifying (or declassifying, so to speak) defensive positions a nearly impossible task. The more NBA basketball I watch and the more NBA people I speak with, the more convinced I've become that off-the-ball decision making composes at least 50 percent of a defender's grade. It's important to have wing players who can smother isolation scorers, big men who can bang down low and guys all over the floor who can defend the pick-and-roll, but the margins of the game are won and lost because of the quality and speed of rotations, recoveries and anticipation. That's going to be true irrespective of how we define or redefine what a point guard, power forward or center looks like.
• We've heard a lot about the Orlando Magic's "4 out/1 in" scheme over the past few seasons. Here's what it looks like.
• While we're on the topic of what constitutes a power forward, should Rudy Gay be spending time at the 4? Joshua Coleman of 3 Shades of Blue: "Team USA is apparently content to live with their lack of size in the traditional post position of PF by maximizing their talent and athleticism at those spots by playing Rudy Gay at the 4 with Andre Iguodala and Kevin Durant manning the SG and SF positions, respectively."
• An evocative piece by Bethlehem Shoals about his trip to the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame has two of my favorite things in one place -- basketball writing and travel writing. On seeing Wilt Chamberlain's jersey from the 100-point game in Hershey: "I couldn't help but stand, slack-jawed, for several minutes. I took in every detail of the fabric, trying to read the game's action, or Chamberlain's mood, through the patterns of sweat and scuffs. Most telling was the long blood stain across the back, where someone had evidently clawed the big man as he took the individual game past all acceptable limits."
• Dave of Blazers Edge: "So much attention gets paid to [Greg] Oden's physical struggles that his true potential Achilles' Heel gets overlooked. The mental and emotional aspects of the game and the league will be Oden's biggest bugaboos. After three years of substantial non-playing his connection to health, basketball, championship-level play, and teammates is fishing-line thin. The organization will have quite a task reeling in such a huge specimen on that fragile line. Greg is more used to rehabbing than playing. He's more used to trying to decide what movie to watch than watching film. Competition is absent, muscle memory faded, rhythm non-existent. How will he adjust to his renewed calling and the renewed expectations...expectations with which he was never comfortable in the first place?"
• Kevin Durant's first dispatch from Madrid: "I’m really looking forward to this whole experience. It should be a lot of fun. I’ve never been to Europe, never been to Spain, never been to Turkey or Greece. I’m looking forward to that and just being able to interact and be around some of the best players in the league. Guys like Rudy Gay, Iguodala, Rajon, Lamar…just to be with those guys and learn, it’s going to be pretty cool and it’s going to help me."
• Jeremy Wagner of Roundball Mining Company on Carmelo Anthony's lame-duck status in Denver: "Carmelo already lacks defensive intensity and is not known for restraint on offense when it comes to letting shots fly. How much worse will those characteristics be accentuated if Melo is longing to be somewhere else."
• Could a breakout season by Brook Lopez propel the Nets to the postseason?
• If you take a look at the Wins Produced metric, it turns out Jason Richardson and Jared Dudley (both still with Phoenix) were the Suns' biggest overperformers during the postseason and Amare Stoudemire and Leandro Barbosa (both no longer with the Suns) were the team's biggest underperformers.
• Matt Hubert of D-League Digest lays out five Nancy Lieberman storylines as she takes the reins as head coach of the Texas Legends. Hubert wonders if Lieberman will be the target of any chauvinistic abuse from fans.
• Scott Schroeder breaks down the 10 must-see D-League games in 2010-11.
• A slew of teams introduced small modifications to their jerseys on Monday. The Jazz returned to an old motif and won the day.
• Chris Paul: Big fan of Coca-Cola's Freestyle Fountain.
• The commercial realities of globalism disappoint Donyell Marshall.
• Ben Q. Rock of Orlando Pinstriped Post tweets: "Oh man, guys, do a search for '2010 nba rookie portraits' on Getty. Some incredible stuff up there."
• The cheapest seat in the house for the Heat's home opener will run you $185 plus service charges.
• There are few guys in the league more fun to talk shop with than Ryan Gomes. Throw Gomes on the list of "players most likely to coach." When it's all over, Gomes has his eyes set on the Providence College gig.

The presence of basketball has been as prominent in the life of Nancy Lieberman as any person over the past 35 years. At age 17, she was tapped to be a member of the U.S. National team and had already won an Olympic silver medal before packing up her Camaro and driving down from her home in Far Rockaway, Queens, to Old Dominion University in Virginia. At ODU, Lieberman established herself as one of the premier women's players in the nation. The award for the most outstanding female point guard in Division I basketball? It's called the Nancy Lieberman Award.

Lieberman built on that achievement as a professional in the 1980s. After her playing days, her career has run the gambit from WNBA coach, WNBA executive, ESPN analyst and president of the Women's Sports Foundation. She runs youth clinics, is active in countless charities and speaks all over the country to kids and grown-ups.

This fall, another line will find its way onto her résumé -- Head coach, Texas Legends.

The Legends are the Dallas Mavericks' D-League franchise, which means Lieberman will be the first women's coach of a men's professional basketball team affiliated with the NBA.

There's always a difficult balance when highlighting a milestone like this one. Reducing it to a stepping stone on the road to gender equality does a disservice to a smart organization that made a smart personnel decision. A basketball conversation with Lieberman doesn't sound much different than the same discussion with other D-League coaches or NBA assistants. She sounds exactly like ... a veteran basketball lifer with the experience, smarts and confidence to be leading a professional team.

But pretending that this is a natural hire is disingenuous. Both Lieberman and the Mavericks have committed themselves to an unprecedented pursuit. Things are going to be different in Frisco, Texas, because very few young male athletes have ever conceived that a woman -- even one with Lieberman's body of work -- could be in the middle of a huddle. Whether they're conscious of it or not, many of these guys will initially have to translate Lieberman's voice into something more familiar with their basketball experience.

Lieberman is aware of all this. We discussed the new job with her last Thursday:

From a tactical standpoint, please tell me about the Nancy Lieberman coaching philosophy.
I don't think it's applicable to the NBA Development League. There will be things that are applicable -- whether they're quick hitters, whether it's some continuity -- but you're dealing with different elements. You're dealing with the 24-second shot clock, getting the ball over half court in eight seconds, with the defensive three-second rule. This changes a lot of the strategy defensively and offensively that you don't encounter internationally, in the WNBA or in college basketball. I've learned more about the NBA style of basketball in the last six months. I know a lot about basketball -- it's been my life. But I've sat down with everyone from Vinny Del Negro to Alvin Gentry to Phil Weber to Mike Brown to Larry Brown to Rick Carlisle because it's very important to me as I go forward to make sure to learn and see what other people do, and then establish what my philosophy is going to be. Right now, I don't have any players. I don't know if I'm going to have athletes, or pure shooters, a legit big. Most cases in the D-League, those 7-footers aren't plentiful. So I'll be glad to share my coaching philosophy once we know what we're working with.

Point taken. So how will that development process play out?
I think it's important for us as a new franchise to be open-minded. We're going to have a coaches' retreat next week. We're each going to say, "This is what I do." "David Wesley, what's been successful for you? Scott Fleming, what's been successful for you? Troy Truvillion, what's been successful for you?" We have devoured the league over the past six months. We've used Synergy to break down every player. If they go left, we know how many dribbles they take. We know the defenders. We've watched and studied games. I know that we want to be interchangeable. I actually like how the Iowa Energy play. They have a great array of talent and everybody is interchangeable. They play hard. They defend. They try to take away penetration. They force you into lesser-percentage shots. They're well-coached. I've identified coaches and teams whose styles I like.

I know the stated position of everyone who does what you do is, "This is the job that's in front of me," but where do you hope to be in 10 years?
The only pressure on me is the pressure that's self-inflicted. I'm used to winning. I'm not really sure I know much about losing, so I expect to be successful and I expect our franchise to be successful. I haven't spent my life aspiring to be on an NBA bench. My focus has been to change the lives of the people who need me. I'm not going to get into a situation where it's, "Oh my God, what if we lose?" We are going to be successful and we're going to win and I'll tell you how: 20 percent of the NBA are players who have experience in the D-League -- guys like J.J. Barea, Chris Andersen, Sundiata Gaines. Look at the coaches who have moved up. Look at the referees who have moved up. So 80 percent of my guys I'm coaching for life. We're going to make them better men. We're going to give them great information so they're better decision-makers. We're going to build their character and self-esteem. And we're going to make them better basketball players. Does that translate into our winning a D-League championship? It very well could. But more than anything we'll coach our guys up.

It's hard to broach this part of the conversation without being reductive, but what you're describing sounds like a fairly unique approach. I'm wondering how much of it is derived from the very particular challenge you're undertaking as the first female head coach in D-League history.
We will make the irregular regular. I am perceived as irregular because I am a woman coaching men. We're going to make this regular. People ask me all the time how guys are going to take information from a woman. As far as I know, guys have been told what to do by women their whole lives. From their mothers, to their girlfriends, to their sisters, to their wives. So I think taking information from a woman is a non-point. If you're qualified to do a job, then you're qualified to do a job. I'm qualified for this job and so is my coaching staff. My job is to make my guys more valuable. The holy grail is the 10-day contract. We know that and we want to empower our players -- and coaches and people in our front office -- to get to the next level. If that means that I don't, then I'm OK with that. If it means I can get David Wesley, or Scott Fleming, or Troy Truvillion a job in the NBA one day, I'd be thrilled to death. My job is to make my guys more valuable. It's really not about me.

Women tell men what to do all the times, but for these guys, men have exclusively been the authority figures in their basketball lives.
I think the end message will be similar, but the methods and how they get the information could be different. I'm excited about it because I'm not going to be in practice f-bombing people. That won't be me. I'll be firm and I'll be fair. We won't tell people what to do. We'll explain what we'd like them to do. We'll show them what we want to do. Then, they'll do it. I will work their tails off. Trust me. I'm not as nice as I'm faking it on this conversation. I will work them really hard, but I'll love them on the other side. And they need to know they're loved and cared for. But that doesn't mean you can walk over me, through me. That won't happen. But look, I'm going to kill my guys so I might as well be nice to them. I have high expectations. I haven't made it in a man's world for 35 years by being soft, scared or insecure.

To that point, the diversity question is a tricky one, because diversity isn't an end to itself. Is it correct to say that having a qualified woman in a high-profile gig normally reserved for men is important not because it's really cool to break barriers? It's important because professions benefit when the people who populate them have different stuff to offer? Does that make sense?
Let me tell you about my conversation with [Pittsburgh Steelers head coach] Mike Tomlin. I had TiVoed how he handled himself in press conferences when he first got the job. Think about it: Bill Cowher had resigned and the Steelers hired a 34-year-old black man to be their head coach. So this is how the conversation goes. I say, "Hey Mike, it's Nancy. It's really nice to talk to you. 34, black, coaching the Super Bowl Steelers, what did you go through?" Then I went, "White, female, 52, coaching men." He said, "Oh my God." I said, "Thank you. Can you share with me some of the curve balls that were thrown at you?" He said, "Can you come to Pittsburgh?" And I was there a week later, and now he's like my brother. Isn't that amazing?

It is. But I'm sort of fascinated by this image of your breaking down film of Mike Tomlin press conferences.
One of the things that's important to know is that perception is reality. So I knew early on that there were some things that matter that take no talent and I have to master those things. I have to be able to work with other coaches. I have to be able to watch film. These things don't take talent. They're energy and effort, and that's what I did the first couple of months. I just started looking at coaches that do really well in press conferences, whether it was baseball, football, basketball. He would either change the question or be very direct. To me, Mike is a minimalist. I really liked how he handled the media. He handled the questions in an impeccable manner and with class. I'd watch his facial expressions. Did something get to him or not get to him? When I told him that, he was stunned.