Larry Drew's path to coach of Hawks

Reached briefly Saturday, Woodson, still making his home in Atlanta, wished to say good luck to Drew and leave it at that. “I’ve moved on,” he said about not having his contract renewed after last season.

The Hawk said Saturday that Drew would not be available until a news conference, which is tentatively set for Monday.

As Woodson did, Drew, 52, has had to invest much of his life as an assistant before getting this shot at the top. Nearly 18 seasons Drew spent in apprenticeship, with stops in Los Angeles, Washington, Detroit, New Jersey and Atlanta.

For the past six years, Drew has worked out of the little office directly across from Woodson’s larger den inside Philips Arena. On game days, Drew sat one padded chair down from the head coach. Granted, that seat was much cooler than the one he now assumes.

How odd, that for a man who will be required to show proof of how he will do things differently than Woodson, just how much of his journey has been in the company of his predecessor.

Coming from their respective colleges on the flatlands — Woodson at Indiana, Drew at Missouri — the two men met on the interview/workout circuit before the 1980 NBA draft. Woodson eventually was taken 12th overall that year by New York, Drew 17th by Detroit.

Both were vagabonds as pros, but their paths kept intersecting. When Woodson was shipped off to the Kansas City (now Sacramento) Kings in 1982, Drew already had been dealt there, playing for his hometown team. And as a package, they were traded to the Los Angeles Clippers two years later.

Drew, the point guard, once joked to an NBA.com writer, “Mike always reminded me that he was going to be my first option [to pass to].”

And Drew did dish to Woodson — and to plenty of others, as those 1982-83 Kings averaged 114 points per game. “Our defense was lousy,” Woodson once remembered. But in the avalanche of points, a basketball friendship grew strong enough that Woodson would bring Drew on board as his chief assistant when he arrived in Atlanta in 2004.

As a Hawks assistant, Drew was a quiet presence. Never much of a screamer in practice, more of a teacher than a taskmaster, he must make the transition to the role of demanding rather than asking.

At Missouri, he won the Sparky Stalcup Award for inspired leadership, so that important quality has always been there.

Untested as a head coach, he has much to reveal about himself — and little time or wiggle room in which to do it. For he will be measured by the Hawks’ ability to progress past the second round of the playoffs, the point where they have stalled the past two seasons.

One fact that has made itself already known: Drew knows point guards.

He was one, for one. Drew may be one of the best players ever to come out of Kansas City, schooled by an older brother in the fundamentals of ball handling and court awareness.

“He may have been the most fundamentally sound seventh-grader I’ve ever seen,” said long-time Kansas City Star metro columnist Steve Penn, a middle-school teammate of Drew’s.

At Missouri, he had a 5-to-2 career assist-to-turnover ratio.

Drew counts among his best friends the all-time, mold-breaking guard, Magic Johnson.

His offseason camp — called Larry Drew Advance Guard Academy — caters to the position.

And he is actively passing along the point-guard gene. His oldest of three sons, Larry Drew II, just finished a tumultuous growing year playing point at North Carolina. His wife, Sharon, has been freely quoted as saying her son is much better at this stage than was her husband.

The couple maintains a home on the far left coast, where the other two teenage boys are California guard prodigies.

If he can develop second-year Hawks guard Jeff Teague, that will mark one of the more immediate departures from Woodson.

Then there will be dozens more distinctions to draw.