Bill Laimbeer added a certain amount of clout to the WNBA when he took over as Detroit’s head coach in 2002. He has led his team to three WNBA titles in three years and has made the Shock into a basketball powerhouse. He talked his bosses out of folding the team after the 2002 season before engineering a worst-to-first championship run the very next season. But after three games into the 2009 season, he called a press conference and called it quits.

The reason? Two words: the NBA.

Bill Laimbeer resigned from his position as head coach of the Detroit Shock.

“It’s time for me to be doing something else,”  Laimbeer said, according to ESPN.com. “I want to coach in the NBA, and I think it was not fair to the Shock to try to coach them while my focus and passion were somewhere else. I don’t have another job, but it is something I want to explore. Whether it is a head coaching job or something as an assistant, that’s what I want to do.”

Laimbeer was a member of the Pistons’ “Bad Boys” championship teams of 1989 and 1990 before retiring in 1993. “I never expected to be here for this long, and I never expected to have this level of success,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a second of it back.”

Post from: EveryJoe

Bill Laimbeer “Shockingly” Resigns