“I was on my mother’s couch at 3 in the morning watching the World Championships (in August, 2006, about a month before NBA camps opened), and he’s playing for Spain, and he grabs his foot, and I say, ‘he just broke his foot,’” Fratello said. “We had played him during the season before, and he had, like, this black line on his foot, but he finished out the rest of the season.”

Without Gasol, the Grizzlies, who’d won 49 games the season before, started 6-24. And Fratello, a former NBA Coach of the Year with the Hawks, lost his job.

“The taste is bitter in your mouth when it first happens, depending on what the circumstances are,” he said. “A lot of guys have places they go to, a place in Florida or a place in California. They’ll just go and get away. Sometimes they get away from their families; sometimes they get away by themselves. They return the calls of the people they need to talk to, People want to call and say ‘I’m sorry.’ But you can’t call everybody back. You find comfort in your friends, your really close friends. Sometimes you spill your guts to the one or two people you know can keep it to themselves.”

Pau Gasol's foot injury in 2006 was, in Mike Fratello's opinion, a factor of his eventual firing.

Indeed, another now former Grizzlies coach, David Fizdale, fired last month by Memphis, went home to decompress in his native California -- where he hadn’t lived in more than 20 years. The shock to the system after getting fired is immense.

“You go from a schedule that is all-consuming and really, you’re talking about 12-to 14-hour days, to basically not doing anything,” says Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, the president of the National Basketball Coaches Association. “And that’s a challenge. That’s a big challenge.

Carlisle, like almost everyone in his line of work, also survived being fired. In Detroit, he posted back to back 50-win seasons in two seasons, was NBA Coach of the Year in his first season (2001-02) and made the Eastern Conference finals his second, yet was fired after the second. In Indiana, his Pacers won 61 games in his first season, but were devastated by age, injuries and the aftermath of the brawl at Auburn Hills in 2004.

“That’s why we’re there,” Carlisle said of the coaches’ union. “I’ve been through it. We’ve had a lot of guys through the years that have been through these situations. The person involved has to take a deep breath, and he has to have the proper support and guidance. We all get into this knowing there’s a high level of expectation. It’s a very binary and high stakes business, and termination is one of the risks of a dynamic business.”

Coaches know that almost none of them get to leave on their terms.

Rick Carlilse (center) was Indiana's coach during the 2004 brawl at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

“You understand that’s part of the equation,” said Lionel Hollins. He had two coaching stints with the Grizzlies (1999-2000; 2008-13) and one with the Brooklyn Nets (‘14-16) that ended in termination. His second Memphis firing came after he’d won 56 regular-season games and taken the Grizzlies to their first Western Conference finals.

“I’ve been fired as an assistant coach, or not brought back; your contract runs out and they already know they’re still going to fire you and not bring you back, so they say they’re not going to renew your contract,” Hollins said. “That happened to me twice, both in Vancouver and when I was with the Suns. I was fired in Vancouver after being the interim coach for 60 games. In those situations, it wasn’t hard to take …

“The only time when it’s tough is … there’s two reasons it’s tough. One is when you think you’ve done a good enough job, and the second part is when a lot of negative news is circulated to justify the move. I can take firing; it’s not a problem to me. But when there’s stuff written every day, and leaked every day, to paint you as being a bad person or a bad coach or however they paint it, then that bothers me. But as a coach, you have to deal with all of this, and you have to be secure in who you are. You have to do what you think is right.”

Hollins, too, was uncertain in the initial days following his dismissal in Memphis.

“It takes you a while to come to grips with the reality, and also get your life on track doing something other than what you’ve been doing every day,” he said. “You get up, you have meetings, you go to work, you have meetings, you work out, you get with the team, you have practice, you have more meetings, you watch film, you’re doing all of that. And one day you wake up and you don’t have to do any of that. It is a shock to your system -- your psyche, your body, everything. It takes you a while to adjust to not doing anything. I stayed in my bed for three or four days and stayed in the house and (didn’t) go out -- not because I was embarrassed, but because I didn’t know what to do.”

Lionel Hollins discusses his strategy and ways as coach of the Grizzlies.

By contrast, after former Raptors and Timberwolves coach Sam Mitchell’s stints ended in Toronto (2009) and Minnesota (2016), he went traveling with his family, did things that he wouldn’t have been able to do had he still been grinding at the job.

“First of all, you feel a little embarrassed,” Mitchell said. “Basically, someone is saying that you weren’t good enough, or you didn’t do your job good enough. And then, if you get fired during the season (as Mitchell was, 17 games into the 2008-09 season by the Raptors), the weird thing is, your staff stays. Your staff’s intact, and you’re the one that’s getting fired, so you’re the one going into your office cleaning out your desk. It bothers you. It really does. And then you have to take a minute and sit back, and you try to figure out why.”

Mitchell believes his season at the helm in Minnesota helped pave the future for this year’s Timberwolves.

In 2015, Sam Mitchell was trying to teach the young Timberwolves key fundamentals.

“If it wasn’t for some of the things we did in Minnesota, there wouldn’t be a Jimmy Butler” there, he says. “Because if we wouldn’t have played Zach LaVine, and given him an opportunity to grow and develop, Chicago wouldn’t have traded for him. They wouldn’t have traded an established All-Star for a guy who hadn’t shown his potential. So you just have to look at it from the standpoint that you’ve dome your job, and you hope that other people around the league realize that you did your job -- even to the detriment of you.”

After he was fired by the Nets in 2016, Hollins sought internal answers rather than external ones. He was marketing his e-commerce business, I Train Fundamentals, at the Final Four in Phoenix last March when he was introduced to Peak Performance, a company designed for self-improvement in multiple areas.

“We covered almost every situation I was in,” Hollins said, “in terms of, what did you do here, and did you do the same thing over here? And what was successful over here, and what was not successful over here? So you’re taking every situation, and you’re highlighting all that you can remember in your mind that was good, and you’re taking all that was bad. And there’s some things that were good that, when you go to another situation, you have to do differently, and make the adjustment.”

The year-plus lull in NBA coaching firings -- there were none in the 2016-17 season, the first time that had happened since 1971 -- was abruptly ended when Phoenix fired Earl Watson on October 22 just three games into the season. Fizdale’s ouster came with Memphis at 7-12, coming off bad home losses to the lowly Mavericks and Nets.

While Fizdale’s deteriorating relationship with Marc Gasol was cited as a chief reason for his dismissal, the Grizzlies didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the matter internally, either with the players or with the team’s interim coach, J.B. Bickerstaff -- which is part of the dilemma for coaches: often, they don’t know exactly what went wrong.

“I didn’t go into any great explanation,” Grizzlies General Manager Chris Wallace said after the firing. “I just said change has been made and J.B. has our full support. We can get the season back. Whenever there’s a change situation, I stole this line from my old boss Pat Riley -- when change rears its inevitable head, embrace it and run with it.”

The NBCA gets right to work when a coach is let go. Two full-time in-house lawyers meet with the fired coach and their representatives within 24 hours, to go over what the terms of their contracts entitle them. Most teams, for example, put “offset” language into the standard coach contract; if a coach signs a contract with a new team, the new team pays part of the remaining money the coach is owed by his old team.