Lawrence Frank Looking to Build a ‘Championship Culture’ in Detroit

Detroit Pistons head coach Lawrence Frank has optimism heading into the season, and tells the Detroit News that he’d like to build a championship culture. Which sounds … hard: “The Pistons coach bounces around the facility, anxious to get things going, to see if his team’s .500 finish in the last 42 games of last season was a mirage or harbinger of things to come. ‘The theme is building,’ Frank said. ‘You never start where you finish, you start where you began. You speak to all these champions in different sports and that’s what you get: Part of the house you had to knock down. Now we’ve started to lay some bricks and some foundation, starting with me.’ Frank has had moderate success as a head coach so the reflection process starts at the top, re-evaluating every aspect of his approach after last season. ‘You’re never too old to get better,’ said Frank, who at 42 is one of the league’s youngest coaches, just four years older than Ben Wallace. ‘Tell me why (Yankees shortstop) Derek Jeter can be the hit leader. Tell me why (Celtics forward) Kevin Garnett at his age is having a career year.’ [...] Frank won’t say what stage of development this team is in, or whether he believes they can take the next step and seriously contend for a playoff spot. He points out the cycle of the NBA, how the champion Miami Heat won 15 games in 2007-08, two years after a title and two years before their free agent coup, how the only team to not go through the cycle of winning and losing is the Los Angeles Lakers, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t expect tangible improvement this season. ‘We want to build a championship culture,’ Frank said. ‘We understand how hard the process is and do the things required. The wins will take care of itself.’”