Looking back, Dan Issel has to thank his lucky stars that he didn't commit the one verbal sin that might truly have ended his days as an NBA head coach: Insulting Mookie Blaylock.

	Dave Cowens lost the players long before he lost his job.

Or something like that. All we know for sure in Oakland is that, a day after tossing Blaylock out of a practice, Golden State coach Dave Cowens found himself on the lousy end of one of those requests to go see the general manager.

Cowens was told to bring his playbook, to which the Warriors' players added in near-unison, "But only if you actually have one." In NBA circles, this is generally understood to be a sign that a perceived lack of respect has begun to establish itself among the proud members of a hard-charging professional basketball team.

Or something like that.

Granted, there are at least eleventy-seven different ways for a coach to lose his job, many by his own hand. But clearly the most chilling is the one that's actually only rarely brought into the open air for inspection, and that is the notion that the players really can get a coach whacked most anytime they feel like it.

Not that Blaylock himself was campaigning for Cowens to get lost. On the contrary, Mookie seemed not so much to have worked himself into a rage as to have settled into a supreme state of indifference. The technical explanation for Cowens' tossing the Mookster out of practice last Friday, in fact, was "failure to give a rat's ass," or something fairly similar.

But players abandon their coaches in different ways, and in this they are abetted by the same executives who thought the coaches were any good in the first place. In the case of the Warriors, the GM, Garry St. Jean, looked at the roster he put together, looked at Antawn Jamison and Bob Sura and Danny Fortson and Larry Hughes, and declared that it should be performing better than the 8-15 record it had compiled under Cowens.

Frankly, no. But there's a lot of that going around the NBA. Coaches do it to themselves, which explains in part why Jeff Van Gundy up and left the New York Knicks; not only was Van Gundy clearly in the middle stages of career burnout, but he understood the Knicks to be capable of better work than he was getting out of them.

Did the Knicks quit on Van Gundy? Not so's you could prove it in court, no. But the difference between winning and winning big in the NBA is the difference of a thousand subtleties, including the one about apparent hard work versus actual hard work. Credit Van Gundy with appreciating the difference and suspecting that his coaching was receiving more of the former and less of the latter all of a sudden.

Still, no one on the New York roster was taking Van Gundy down by name. No one publicly presumed to know more than Van Gundy about the Knicks' strengths or distribution of minutes or substitution patterns or the like. In Oakland, Sura had complained about his lack of action, and Jamison had used the phrase "I'm lost" to describe his feeling running around on the court in Cowens' sets, and Marc Jackson still was disgruntled about returning to the Warriors at all, and Mookie apparently summed up the thoughts of a bunch of players with his demeanor in the practice.

And the old adage about it being easier to fire the coach than the players is as true in 2001 as it ever was. Amazingly, the relative quality of those players remains absolutely irrelevant to the conversation.

Cowens didn't have a leg to stand on; he was 25-80 in his mostly sad year-plus tenure with the Warriors, a coaching try by St. Jean that just didn't work out.

Or, depending upon your view, Cowens never had the slightest chance of winning consistently with the undertalented roster he was given to work with, in an organization that now is working on its seventh head coach in seven years.

Cowens' replacement? Brian Winters, a man whose previous head-coaching life saw him laboring with the Grizzlies in Vancouver. Winters worked hard in Vancouver, tried to instill his values and ethic in the players, compiled a 29-135 record and got shipped out.

"I've been a head coach," Winters said the other day, "and it wasn't a pleasant experience where I was."

The view ain't much better from here, bub. Scary thing is, there's a front-office executive somewhere who is willing to believe it should be -- and as long as that remains true, the guys on the court hold all the cards. Deal with it.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.