biba
10-23-2007, 02:27 PM
Are coaches the next wave of Euro invasion?
Oct 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Dave Feschuk
Basketball Columnist
http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/269318
Now that European players are an NBA staple, how long until European bench bosses use their exotic passports to board the NBA's coaching carousel?
The immigration won't be effortless. Coaches on the continent have reputations as authoritarians – "borderline dictators," is how Darrick Martin, the Raptors' backup point guard put it the other day. And Martin would know. He tells of spending a few weeks this past summer working out with CSKA Moscow, the Russian-league powerhouse, when he sat down to a team meal and ordered a glass of wine.
"The other guys said, `You should ask Coach before you order that,'" said Martin "I was like, `I'm 36 years old. I'm a man. I've got a kid. If I want to order a glass of wine ...' But I thought, `Okay. I'm in their environment, in their culture.' So I went up and said, `Coach, can I have a glass of wine?'"
Ettore Messina, the club's revered Italian coach, granted the request. But as Martin said, "that stuff would never fly in the NBA."
Still, to assume European coaches couldn't adjust to NBA dynamics would undersell their potential. And clearly their influence already looms large. Mike D'Antoni, coach of the Phoenix Suns, speaks in a West Virginian drawl that makes it easy to forget he honed his game, as a player and a coach, in Italy. And just last week there was a report that Gregg Popovich, the coach of the four-time NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, was waxing enthusiastic about the offensive schemes of Greece's Panathinaikos, who are coached by Serbia's Zelimir Obradovic.
"I can't wait to watch the films and see some of the things they run," he said. Ditto Mike Brown, coach of the NBA finalist Cleveland Cavaliers, who has spoken recently of reading a hoops textbook penned by Messina as though it were gospel.
No one is pretending that European concepts – free-flowing offences and oft-complex defences – will translate directly to the NBA game, since the discrepancies in rules are considerable. And no one is underestimating how difficult it is to break into the closely guarded fraternity of NBA coaches.
Still, it's an interesting historical cycle, the strategic bedrock laid in the United States being honed abroad and imported as a value-added product.
Maurizio Gherardini, the Raptors' Italian-born assistant general manager, who once translated U.S. hoops textbooks into Italian, said the cross-pollination is "a way to recognize the quality and success of international basketball." He said Popovich and Brown are simply doing their due diligence as professionals in a global game.
"To be updated on what's going on around you sometimes, you need to be more humble, more open to eventually be able to pick up whatever makes sense for you," said Gherardini. "Reading a book just for the hell of reading it is very easy. Reading it with an open mind, sometimes it can help you."
So are the Raptors, with their Euro-coloured roster, similarly picking the brains of the Euro masters?
"No, not really. I'm comfortable with the stuff we're trying to do," said Toronto's Sam Mitchell, a stubborn son of Columbus, Ga., the NBA's reigning coach of the year.
This is the kind of remark that sends a certain segment of the hoopwise populace into a tizzy. Mitchell, though he played in France, often comes off as close-minded in his view of the European game (and he cites the stylistic gulf between the NBA and the Euroleague as the chief reason for his habit of largely ignoring what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic).
The coach said he looks elsewhere for input – not to Europe, but to proven NBA quantities.
"For me, I'd rather go with Red Auerbach (legendary coach of the Boston Celtics), who won 13 championships. I like what Phil Jackson did, won nine championships. And I look at what Pat Riley said," said Mitchell. "It's not necessarily about their sets. It's about their mindset, how they dealt with players, how they dealt with certain situations, how they dealt with losing streaks."
Still, the ongoing globalization of the game, not to mention the U.S.'s series of humbling defeats on the international stage, have put a spotlight on the strategic resources that live abroad.
"There is no doubt there are many coaches over there that could come over here and be successful," said Jeff Van Gundy, the longtime NBA coach who, after being fired by the Houston Rockets at last season's conclusion, begins this year as an ESPN broadcaster. "I'd be interested to see who's going to be the first NBA head coach to hire one of those guys as an assistant, to give them a better opportunity to be a head coach."
That might be the snag in the storyline. The most qualified European-based candidates for NBA success aren't likely to be enticed by an offer to earn the typical NBA assistant coach's stipend of a few hundred thousand dollars. They generally live comfortably, at the helm of winning clubs, on seven-figure salaries.
So it will require a leap of faith from an NBA general manager to make the deal.
Who will be first? David Blatt, the Princeton-educated Israeli-American who coaches Istabul's Efes Pilsen and led the Russian national team to the European championship last month, is an obvious possibility who has expressed some NBA interest. Obradovic, though he is arguably the most successful of all the Euro coaches, is thought by some to be less interested in conquering America. And then there is Messina, whom Martin praises for his ability to instill discipline and precision in his unit.
The story goes that Messina – "a big brain," in the words of Gherardini – is not only fluent in Italian, English and Spanish. He learned Russian in his spare time, which comes in handy on the practice court.
Said Martin: "When he wanted to yell at me, he'd yell in English. When he wanted to yell at Italian guys, he'd yell in Italian. When he wanted to yell at the Russian guys, he'd yell in Russian. I said, `Coach, you know how to yell in every language.' And he knew (profanity) in every language, too ... which was pretty impressive."
Euro coaches who could probably make the jump to the NBA:
ZELIMIR OBRADOVIC, 47
Serbian coach of Panathanaikos
Credentials: Six Euroleague titles and a silver medal for Serbia at the 1996 Olympics.
NBA street cred: A former elite point guard who counts among his former teammates Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac.
DAVID BLATT, 48
Israeli-American coach of Turkey's Efes Pilsen
Credentials: One Euroleague title. A European championship for Russia last month.
NBA street cred: Won't take a job that's beneath him. "I'm not looking to come over and ... be a third or fourth assistant," he has said. "It would have to be a pretty special situation, and no one has made that offer."
ETTORE MESSINA, 48
Italian coach of CSKA Moscow
Credentials: Three Euroleague championships.
NBA street cred: Speaks four languages, Italian, English, Spanish and Russian. Knows profanities in at least three.
Plenty of candidates, but tough-love coaching styles could be a hard sell for NBA players
Oct 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Dave Feschuk
Basketball Columnist
http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/269318
Now that European players are an NBA staple, how long until European bench bosses use their exotic passports to board the NBA's coaching carousel?
The immigration won't be effortless. Coaches on the continent have reputations as authoritarians – "borderline dictators," is how Darrick Martin, the Raptors' backup point guard put it the other day. And Martin would know. He tells of spending a few weeks this past summer working out with CSKA Moscow, the Russian-league powerhouse, when he sat down to a team meal and ordered a glass of wine.
"The other guys said, `You should ask Coach before you order that,'" said Martin "I was like, `I'm 36 years old. I'm a man. I've got a kid. If I want to order a glass of wine ...' But I thought, `Okay. I'm in their environment, in their culture.' So I went up and said, `Coach, can I have a glass of wine?'"
Ettore Messina, the club's revered Italian coach, granted the request. But as Martin said, "that stuff would never fly in the NBA."
Still, to assume European coaches couldn't adjust to NBA dynamics would undersell their potential. And clearly their influence already looms large. Mike D'Antoni, coach of the Phoenix Suns, speaks in a West Virginian drawl that makes it easy to forget he honed his game, as a player and a coach, in Italy. And just last week there was a report that Gregg Popovich, the coach of the four-time NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, was waxing enthusiastic about the offensive schemes of Greece's Panathinaikos, who are coached by Serbia's Zelimir Obradovic.
"I can't wait to watch the films and see some of the things they run," he said. Ditto Mike Brown, coach of the NBA finalist Cleveland Cavaliers, who has spoken recently of reading a hoops textbook penned by Messina as though it were gospel.
No one is pretending that European concepts – free-flowing offences and oft-complex defences – will translate directly to the NBA game, since the discrepancies in rules are considerable. And no one is underestimating how difficult it is to break into the closely guarded fraternity of NBA coaches.
Still, it's an interesting historical cycle, the strategic bedrock laid in the United States being honed abroad and imported as a value-added product.
Maurizio Gherardini, the Raptors' Italian-born assistant general manager, who once translated U.S. hoops textbooks into Italian, said the cross-pollination is "a way to recognize the quality and success of international basketball." He said Popovich and Brown are simply doing their due diligence as professionals in a global game.
"To be updated on what's going on around you sometimes, you need to be more humble, more open to eventually be able to pick up whatever makes sense for you," said Gherardini. "Reading a book just for the hell of reading it is very easy. Reading it with an open mind, sometimes it can help you."
So are the Raptors, with their Euro-coloured roster, similarly picking the brains of the Euro masters?
"No, not really. I'm comfortable with the stuff we're trying to do," said Toronto's Sam Mitchell, a stubborn son of Columbus, Ga., the NBA's reigning coach of the year.
This is the kind of remark that sends a certain segment of the hoopwise populace into a tizzy. Mitchell, though he played in France, often comes off as close-minded in his view of the European game (and he cites the stylistic gulf between the NBA and the Euroleague as the chief reason for his habit of largely ignoring what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic).
The coach said he looks elsewhere for input – not to Europe, but to proven NBA quantities.
"For me, I'd rather go with Red Auerbach (legendary coach of the Boston Celtics), who won 13 championships. I like what Phil Jackson did, won nine championships. And I look at what Pat Riley said," said Mitchell. "It's not necessarily about their sets. It's about their mindset, how they dealt with players, how they dealt with certain situations, how they dealt with losing streaks."
Still, the ongoing globalization of the game, not to mention the U.S.'s series of humbling defeats on the international stage, have put a spotlight on the strategic resources that live abroad.
"There is no doubt there are many coaches over there that could come over here and be successful," said Jeff Van Gundy, the longtime NBA coach who, after being fired by the Houston Rockets at last season's conclusion, begins this year as an ESPN broadcaster. "I'd be interested to see who's going to be the first NBA head coach to hire one of those guys as an assistant, to give them a better opportunity to be a head coach."
That might be the snag in the storyline. The most qualified European-based candidates for NBA success aren't likely to be enticed by an offer to earn the typical NBA assistant coach's stipend of a few hundred thousand dollars. They generally live comfortably, at the helm of winning clubs, on seven-figure salaries.
So it will require a leap of faith from an NBA general manager to make the deal.
Who will be first? David Blatt, the Princeton-educated Israeli-American who coaches Istabul's Efes Pilsen and led the Russian national team to the European championship last month, is an obvious possibility who has expressed some NBA interest. Obradovic, though he is arguably the most successful of all the Euro coaches, is thought by some to be less interested in conquering America. And then there is Messina, whom Martin praises for his ability to instill discipline and precision in his unit.
The story goes that Messina – "a big brain," in the words of Gherardini – is not only fluent in Italian, English and Spanish. He learned Russian in his spare time, which comes in handy on the practice court.
Said Martin: "When he wanted to yell at me, he'd yell in English. When he wanted to yell at Italian guys, he'd yell in Italian. When he wanted to yell at the Russian guys, he'd yell in Russian. I said, `Coach, you know how to yell in every language.' And he knew (profanity) in every language, too ... which was pretty impressive."
Euro coaches who could probably make the jump to the NBA:
ZELIMIR OBRADOVIC, 47
Serbian coach of Panathanaikos
Credentials: Six Euroleague titles and a silver medal for Serbia at the 1996 Olympics.
NBA street cred: A former elite point guard who counts among his former teammates Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac.
DAVID BLATT, 48
Israeli-American coach of Turkey's Efes Pilsen
Credentials: One Euroleague title. A European championship for Russia last month.
NBA street cred: Won't take a job that's beneath him. "I'm not looking to come over and ... be a third or fourth assistant," he has said. "It would have to be a pretty special situation, and no one has made that offer."
ETTORE MESSINA, 48
Italian coach of CSKA Moscow
Credentials: Three Euroleague championships.
NBA street cred: Speaks four languages, Italian, English, Spanish and Russian. Knows profanities in at least three.
Plenty of candidates, but tough-love coaching styles could be a hard sell for NBA players