Rick Carlisle and wife
Getty
Head coach Rick Carlisle of the Indiana Pacers and his wife Donna Nobile celebrate the 2025 Eastern Conference championship.
At the age of 65, Richard Preston Carlisle — better known as Rick — has spent more than 60 percent of his life in the NBA. To be exact, Carlisle entered the league in 1984, when the Boston Celtics, who were then the reigning NBA champions, drafted him.
The Celtics did not have extremely high hopes for Carlisle, who was an older rookie at age 25. He started his college career with two years at Maine, then transferred to Virginia where he played two more seasons. He had to wait until age 25 because in that era — and in fact until 2021 — NCAA rules required transfer players to sit out a full season before suiting up at their new school.
Carlisle in just the fourth season of his current tenure as head coach of the Indiana Pacers has now taken the team to only the second Finals appearance since the team entered the NBA in 1976 as part of the more established league’s merger with the upstart American Basketball Association.
Carlisle Made Finals 3 Times and Won Once as Player
The Pacers were one of four out of the seven ABA teams to survive the merger. The New York (now Brooklyn) Nets, Denver Nuggets and San Antonio Spurs were the others.
But if the Pacers are able to get past the favored Oklahoma City Thunder and win their first championship, it won’t be the first ring for Carlisle. So, how did he get here, and what previous championships has he won?
Boston drafted him the third round in 1984, a round that was abolished five years later when the league consolidated its draft to just two rounds — which gives an indication of how lightly Carlisle was regarded as a player.
Nonetheless, he stayed on the Celtics’ roster for three seasons, reaching the Finals each year as a reserve player on team led by four Hall of Famers in Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson. Carlisle’s best season came in 1985-1986, the only year of his three in which the Celtics won a championship.
But the Celtics cut him after the 1987-1988 season. He signed as a free agent with the New York Knicks but missed an entire season due to injury and his playing career ended with the then-New Jersey Nets in 1990 when he played just five games. But the Nets quickly hired Carlisle as an assistant coach. He stayed in that job for a decade, moving to the Portland Trail Blazers in 1994 and the Pacers in 1997. But he never reached the Finals as an assistant.
Carlisle got his first shot at a head coaching job in the NBA with the Detroit Pistons in 2001. He immediately took a team that had won just 32 games the previous season, and had not advanced past the first round of the playoffs since 1991, and got them to back-to-back 50-32 seasons, with trips to the conference semifinals in his first year, and the Eastern Finals in his second.
Carlisle appeared to be emerging as the NBA’s hottest young coach — but he was then rather mysteriously fired after losing the Conference Finals to the Nets.
Success With the Dallas Mavericks
A month after his firing, he was hired by his former teammate Bird, then the president of the Pacers, to coach Indiana. Four years later, after the Pacers missed the playoffs after nine straight years of postseason play, Bird fired him.
Again, Carlisle was not out of a job for much more than a month. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban gave Carlisle a four year, $17.5 million contract. And that is where Carlisle won his first and, so far, only NBA championship as a head coach.
In the 2010-2011 season, Carlisle guided the Mavericks to a 57 win season, still his second-highest total as a head coach (his 2003-2204 Pacers team won 61, but did not reach the Finals). More importantly, the Mavericks won the Western Conference and went on to defeat the LeBron James-led Miami Heat in the Finals, the only NBA Championiship the Dallas franchise has ever won.
Carlisle stayed with Dallas through the 2020-2021 season, after which he voluntarily stepped down.
That summer, he returned to coach the Pacers a second time — or third counting his time as an assistant. Now, 14 years after his first ring, Carlisle is back in just his second Finals as a coach, and fifth overall.