The biggest story of the Mavericks’ offseason was DeAndre Jordan reneging on his verbal agreement to sign in Dallas. The topic was broached at the Mavs’ media day, but coach Rick Carlisle didn’t want to get caught up in hypotheticals:
A comprehensive history of Rick Carlisle imagining a world in which cows are kittens
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Carlisle on if DeAndre Jordan became a Mav that he would have fixed their rebounding: "If cows were kittens, there’d be a milk shortage."
— Bryan Gutierrez (@BallinWithBryan) September 28, 2015 wait what
So, like, I know what Carlisle is getting at. If you got rid of all the cows and replaced them with kittens, the world would lack milk because cows produce most of our milk and subadult cats produce no milk. Dairies would probably turn to sheep or goats or water buffalo or something and overcome the cow rapture, but I digress. The cows-for-kittens exchange is not real, so we do not consider it. Just like DeAndre Jordan being a Maverick.
Still, that is a bizarre and roundabout way of dismissing a hypothetical question -- “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle” is a more familiar version, if a bit creepier -- and I’ve never heard that saying before in my life. Wanna know why? Because, I’ve learned, only Rick Carlisle says that.
The first reference I can find to Carlisle’s unique aphorism comes from a 2005 Michael Smith column about the then-Pacers coach missing out on Coach of the Year, but not dwelling on the snub. Smith notes that Carlisle uses that line often:
Carlisle reminds me of someone. Yes. If Bill Belichick coached hoops, he probably would look and sound a lot like Rick Carlisle.
Carlisle, like Belichick, never dwells on the circumstances, just the solutions. He loves to say that if “cows were kittens there would be a milk shortage.”
Here’s Carlisle in 2011, when asked if the Mavericks would have beaten the Hornets if things broke differently down the stretch:
(If Tyson makes his fts, or Kidd doesn’t foul...) “If Cows were Kittens, there’d be a milk shortage.
And here’s Carlisle in 2012, when someone noted the Mavericks could have avoided overtime against the Rockets had Brandan Wright scored at the end of regulation:
It’s all yours, Farmer Rick. Let’s talk about the almost-alley-oop to B-Wright at the end of regulation:
“If cows were kittens,” Rick said, “there would be a milk shortage.”
That's all I can find on record from Carlisle, but the plot thickens. Not only is Carlisle the progenitor of this strange saying, he's also passed it through his coaching tree, albeit with some bastardization, like a game of telephone. Kevin O'Neill was a Pacers assistant under Carlisle in the mid-2000s. In 2008, he was head coach at the University of Arizona, and remarked at the end of that season about his team's bevy of injuries:
I believe that if we wouldn’t have had major, major injuries we would have won more games, but if cows had puppies there would be a milk shortage.
Not quite it.
