Quasar
05-11-2008, 08:33 AM
Great article about how hard NBA stars work and the crazy drills they do... watch that Melo youtube - dribbling while playing catch with the off hand, controlling two balls while doing something else simultaneously, and a lot of other stuff.
They're really THAT good because they work so hard! Would be great to see what Bruce, Manu, and the others do.
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http://www.nba.com/features/ravin_080509.html
An Interview with Chris Paul’s Personal Coach, Idan Ravin [and many others]
SECAUCUS, NJ, May 9, 2008 -- If you were asked who Chris Paul's, Carmelo Anthony's and Gilbert Arenas' coaches are and said Byron Scott, George Karl and Eddie Jordan, respectively, you would only be partially correct.
Even though they're on different NBA teams, Paul, Anthony and Arenas, as well as players such as Elton Brand, Jerry Stackhouse and Rudy Gay, all share the same coach, Idan Ravin.
You may remember Ravin from a recent Jordan Brand commercial featuring Carmelo Anthony (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TypQ-iYqiLg)running a gamut of intense workout drills with a man at his side pushing him every step of the way.
That man is Ravin. I caught up with the Washington D.C. based training guru to discuss the breakout success of one of his clients, Chris Paul, and to talk about the unique perspective on the NBA game that his job affords him.
I want you to break down Chris Paul’s game for me. What does he possess that makes him so good?
Idan: There’s sort of the esoteric things and then there’s sort of the substantive, basketball things. I think it’s the esoteric things that make him really special. At the end of the day, everybody in the NBA can go right, they can go left, they can shoot a jump shot, I mean everybody has a certain threshold of talent. But what makes him so special is his incredible tenacity and love for the game. It’s not like this cliché, “We work hard.” Everybody says they work hard. But it’s the efficiency and sort of the smarts in which he maximizes his time. He’s super. He’s tenacious. He doesn’t back down.
"Melo learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast, Elton Brand learns fast and Chris was learning just as fast as they were. So I’m thinking, 'This kid is interesting to me.'"
I can give you a story, it kind of goes back because I’ve worked with Chris for a long time, it was from when I was prepping him for the Draft. Workouts are always really, really challenging and Chris wanted to workout with somebody else there with him. And I told him, “No, Chris, you have to do everything by yourself for a while.” So I remember, I got a call from a top front office person from an NBA team who was going to be in the area and they wanted to stop by our workouts. So I said, “Sure, you guys can come by.”
This was a senior, senior head guy from a team.
So I called Gilbert Arenas, and I was like, “Hey Gilbert, why don’t you come by and workout today with Chris.” Gilbert was like, “OK, sure.”
So we pull up the gym and Chris is waiting outside and I see his eyes just light up, because not only is he working out with someone, he’s working out with Gilbert Arenas who is like a top seven player in the NBA. He was excited to finally get to go and battle.
The first half an hour we just did a lot of drills and stuff, and the last half an hour we did a lot of competitive drills with a lot of 1-on-1 and spots. I probably want to say Chris won every single game. Now, 1-on-1 doesn’t mean much, but it does mean something. When you’re a 19-year old kid and you’re going up against a top six or seven player in the NBA and you don’t back down, you’re just ferocious.
After the workout Gilbert came up to me and was like, “That kid is going to be special.” To this day, Chris and Gilbert are very good friends. But that minute kind of showed me that there’s no fear in him.
When you step off the court, he’s a gentle, humble, kind, modest kid, but in those 90 feet, he’s a lion, man.
You see this kid come in and you see his mental toughness and his willingness to be great, that’s got to be a challenge for you to take all that and turn it into something better. What was your approach with him, specifically?
Idan: I think in the beginning you want to gauge where they are. Everyone going to the NBA has a great pedigree and resume, right? So everyone has a certain threshold, but it’s more about finding out, “How fast does he learn?” You can put him through a drill that works on his dribbling efficiency and how he scores and how fast he kind of captures and learns the drill makes you think, “Man, that's unbelievable.” Melo learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast, Elton Brand learns fast and Chris was learning just as fast as they were. So I’m thinking, “This kid is interesting to me.” So then you make the drill so unbelievably unreasonable and rigorous every time and he wouldn’t back down. He kept on trying to master it. And then you reduce the time on a drill and he tried to beat the time. He kept on showing you things about how competitive he was. You’d say, “Gilbert does this drill in 47 seconds” and Chris would be like, “I want to do it in 45.” I was just thinking, “There’s something special here.” But after that Gilbert Arenas workout I was like, “Man this kid is going to be something tremendous.”
Chris Paul was asked about this confidence on the day he won the Rookie of the Year trophy and he mentioned all of the workouts leading up to the draft where you pushed him to work his hardest. How rewarding is that to know that you are helping shape guys’ careers?
Idan: It feels great. To know that you’re an integral part of their career is a great feeling. I kind of take a lot of pride in it. The fact that they trust you with their careers is also something great because there’s a million people they could choose to work with, there’s a million people in their circle and then they choose you and it becomes a great relationship over time.
Let’s just say we know Chris Paul is going up against Tony Parker. Is that something where you’ll go up to him or he’ll go up to you to talk about certain matchups?
Idan: On stuff like that, it’s more like he already knows what he has to do kind of thing. I think in terms of the bigger picture, it’s not like, “Chris, here’s how you’re going to beat Tony Parker off the dribble.” It’s more of the big picture like, “You need to continue to be very efficient with your moves, you need to work on your angles better, you need to stepback stronger …” It’s more things to keep the big picture rather than how are you going to compete against a particular player.
So most of the work happens over the summers, I guess?
Idan: No, not at all. I have a lot of work during the year. For example, when Elton Brand was coming back I was with Elton Brand for five weeks until he got cleared and then I spent a month with Gilbert Arenas after he got cleared by the doctors. So, I do a lot during the year as well. I think I have sort of a core group of guys that do above and beyond what is normally expected. Come around April I do pre-Draft with the Draft guys and after that I got to prepare Melo and Chris Paul for the World Championships and once that’s over I have all of the league guys, so it’s kind of become pretty much year round.
You look at what having Michael Jordan’s trust did for Tim Grover, as Chris Paul establishes himself as one of the top five players in this league, that’s got to start bringing you more clients. Has that helped?
Idan: You know what, I hate to sound … I have a really good client base already. Fortunately I have a really good base of clients I work with – seven or eight All-Stars – so with respect to Chris helping business, I’m sure it does, but I don’t really see it that way. My concern is more like, “Let’s make sure every year that Chris is ready to go and that Chris keeps on getting better and better and better and one day he’s a Hall of Fame player and his jersey hangs from the rafters and there’s nine championship rings on his fingers.” My priority is each kid and not whether or not my business grows.
Part of the appeal of your workouts seems to be the individual attention and sort of private bunker mentality that the players take on when they train with you. How funny was it to see one of your sessions in a national ad campaign for the Jordan Brand?
Idan: When Melo and those guys asked me to do that commercial, I was like, “Sure,” because I think in many ways, people think that those All-Stars just were born All-Stars and I don’t think people see how much time and effort goes into what they do.
It’s sort of the classic, “If I was 6-9, I’d be in the NBA too.”
Idan: Exactly. And then people start throwing the word “politics” around or “favoritism” and I always think that that’s the biggest excuse you could ever give. Because I don’t think people even understand, Melo’s day is so full with so much, he has nine ba-zillion off the court responsibilities, and he has a family and he has friends and he has a life he wants to live. But he still commits himself to perform and to practice.
Like I said before, it’s a very cliché expression to say, “work hard.” Because anybody can say, “I work hard.” But at the end of the day it’s like, “What exactly are you doing?”
The point of that commercial was, “Man, these drills are really hard and they challenge 12 different sensories.” They challenge the way to see, the way you feel, they challenge your peripheral vision, they challenge so many different things that not only does it become a physical workout, it’s a mental challenge as well.
That’s a good segue. I read how you try to strengthen players’ minds. Tell me about that? Is it sort of the mind over matter principle or are we talking about something else?
Idan:I think it’s a bunch of different things. You create situations that are so rigorous that you can accomplish situations that aren’t so rigorous. I’ll give you the example that if you can take a three-hour test in one hour, then you can obviously take the test in three hours. You create situations that are so unreasonable that when all of the sudden they’re reasonable, they look like a piece of cake.
Then you have situations where it’s not only to be able to do the drill, the drill has to become instinctive. You can work on something and they guy can think, “Oh yeah, I can do it,” but if the situation presents itself on the court, is that going to be your intuitive response? The only way for it to become that is to have done it so many times in 55 different ways at such high speeds that your body will all of the sudden be like, “OK, that’s how I have to respond to this situation.”
Is it a fraternity among you guys or is more like competition? I know David Thorpe has parlayed his coaching into an analyst gig with ESPN.
Idan: I don’t know any of them and I don’t know what anybody else does. It’s not that I don’t care, but what everyone else does, good for them. It if works, great. I just know what I do and I just focus on my guys. You know what I mean? I don’t come from any of those fraternities, from any of those basketball fraternities, to me this business has just grown organically. I don’t have business cards. I have a website but I did that begrudgingly just so I don’t have to talk too much, because I’m kind of shy. So that’s how it works in that respect.
I read that you worked with the Mavericks team at one point. How did that suit you? Do you think you’d give up your private practice to become an assistant coach for a team? Dave Hopla, a personal shooting coach, recently joined the Wizards in a similar capacity.
Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, teams call me in all the time and say, “Hey will you work with our guys?” I’ve gotten a ba-zillion job offers. I’ve gotten a lot of job offers but it’s just sort of a balancing of interest. I’m not saying that I’m wed to anything in particular. If something came up that I feel like, “That’s a win,” and I want to do it, I would do it. But I don’t need a job. I have great, great players. I have great freedom. I work with a ba-zillion guys. I’m my own boss. I know a lot of guys chase the jobs, but I’ve had a lot of job offers. Who knows? If the New Yorker called you tomorrow and say, “Hey, we want you to write for us,” you’d think about it. You think, “Do I want to leave? Maybe I can be like a consultant/freelancer.”
I saw on your other business venture’s website, NicheClick Media, that you wrote “I have some good stories so remind me to tell you when we meet…” OK, so tell me one.
Idan: With the players, you mean? Oh my God, there’s so many funny ones. I’m trying to see where I should start.
Some of them are kind of like good-feeling stories.
One example – God, Melo might kill me for telling this story – so Melo had a baby, a beautiful young boy, right? So, Melo never wants to miss workouts. I remember, we were at workouts and it was his fiancée’s birthday and he told her, “Hey, it’s a spa day for you, I’ll watch the baby.” So he brings the baby to workouts. In between drills, he’d finish the drill and then the baby would start crying. So Melo would take the baby carriage and walk the baby all the way around the basketball court and the baby would stop crying. And then he’ll come back and do a drill. And then if he has to burp the baby or something, he takes out the burping bag and does what he’s got to do, and then comes right back to the court. But it’s nice because I think no one sees that very good, gentle, kind, humble side of Carmelo and that’s why I’m the first to defend him all the time. People don’t see the ba-zillion nice things that he does.
I can give you another instance. Jerry Stackhouse is my guy. He’s a great guy. I travel a lot with the players and I remember we were down in a small town in North Carolina and we were at a restaurant – a small, little diner type of thing – and we end up seeing a childhood friend. You could tell the guy was kind of down on his luck, you know? The guy was bussing tables. So Jerry gave him a hug and he was talking to him for a little while. Then at the end of the meal, I saw Jerry take out a couple hundred dollar bills and he folded them up into little, tiny rectangles and he put a couple singles on top of these hundred dollar bills and he left them as a tip. I thought, “Wow, what a thoughtful thing to do.” He didn’t embarrass the guy by taking out a couple hundred dollar bills and throw it in his face. It was such a thoughtful way of doing a nice thing.
I’ve seen guys do stuff like that all the time. So, when the media bashes these guys when they mess up, you know, we all do. We all mess up. I wish they could see the ba-zillion nice things that these guys do all the time that no one knows about.
The early entry candidates were announced last week. Are any of those guys training with you?
Idan: I expect a lot more, but so far I have Joey Dorsey, DaVon Hardin, Drew Neitzel, James Gist … I’ll have a bunch of guys. I usually have quite a bit.
I’ll group them by position, or group them by situations, so if it’s a pick and roll day, then the bigs and smalls will go together. Or I’ll put the smalls together in the morning and do the bigs in the afternoon. It kind of depends on situations. If it’s sort of a competitive day, then they’ll all go together and do kind of competitive stuff against each other. Every day is sort of a situational day, and that’s how I’ll break it up.
You work with Gilbert and DeShawn Stevenson and they went up against Delonte West, who you also worked with, in the First Round this year -- or the Mavericks with Stackhouse going against the Hornets with Paul. Is it funny to see these juxtapositions of your guys go against each other?
Idan: No, because, you know what it is? They’re competitive people. They play a physical game. Just because a guy gets an elbow or gets a punch or gets a bloody nose or something, to me, it’s not a personal thing. It’s the nature of the sport. I see MMA fighters all the time that hug afterwards. It’s just the nature of being in a physical, physical game that’s very competitive that there’s a lot of stakes going on. I can assure you that LeBron and DeShawn are going out each other, but if they saw each other out during the summer, they’d sit down and have lunch together. It’s a small group of guys that got to a common place together, so they share that bond. But if you’re going to say, “Is Chris Paul going to shake Jerry’s hand during the game?” Why would he? It’s a game. It’s competition. But afterwards, I’m sure they shook hands, they laughed, they broke bread together.
I read that you’re learning from players constantly and you don’t want to be “running in place.” What’s the next step, what’s the next level?
Idan: How do I see my business evolving? I come from a very formal corporate world. I was a lawyer for many years and this and this and everything was about business plans and this is something I love to do and I never really had a formula for it. I just let it grow organically and so, to me, however it evolves, it evolves. I don’t have any plans for it. I enjoy it, I have great players, I’m sure I’ll have more great players. I hope that the one thing I can leave people with is, there is no easy road. No one got there just because they got there.
“Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12 hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
You didn’t get where you are because you were blessed with a pen in your hand. There was thousands and thousands of hours of effort that was put into it. I hope that that’s what people can see. This is not just dreams. You can learn a lot from NBA guys. Because, for you to become a writer or me to become what I do, it sounds kind of normal. But for a six year old kid that lives in New York that says, “You know what, I want to be a NBA player,” there’s 500 million other kids that say the same thing.
But each one of these kids made the right decisions, went to the right schools, made the right sacrifices and put themselves on the line and now they sit in the NBA. I think we can all learn a ton from watching these guys.
I think in many ways, it’s very empowering to be around them, because no dream sounds funny. If you tell me you want to be a juggler, I say, go for it. The funniest thing is a six year old kid going, “Mom, I want to play in the NBA,” and she says, “Well so do the 3,000 other kids in your neighborhood and the 35 million kids in the U.S. and the 25 million kids in Lithuania.”
But think about how hard it is to be in 10th grade and decide you’re going to move 1,000 miles away to go to an all boys school in rural North Carolina, all because your dream is to play in the NBA. How many kids make that sacrifice? That’s why I have a lot of admiration for them in many ways.
I heard a quote by you: “Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12 hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
Idan: Absolutely, because I know my stuff – I’m not the bionic man – but I know if you do my stuff for 75 minutes that you can do anything else. I’m happy to put you on the phone with Jason Richardson, or Melo or Chris and they’ll tell you. And it’s not like I’m running them through quicksand, you know what I mean? It’s just real efficient game-speed type stuff.
So when guys are like, “Yeah, I’m in the gym for nine hours,” I’m thinking, “Man, what are you doing for nine hours?”
Which I have to believe makes you appealing to a guy like Melo or Chris Paul that has all these off the court obligations, because they can max out their time with you.
Idan: Absolutely, because you don’t need that much. It’s like the law of diminishing returns. Do it right, do it the right way for 75-90 minutes and then, leave. It’s like sitting and studying with the TV on. I don’t think you get that much studying done. But if you put yourself in the bunker for an hour and you focus, you can probably get through all of that material.
They're really THAT good because they work so hard! Would be great to see what Bruce, Manu, and the others do.
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http://www.nba.com/features/ravin_080509.html
An Interview with Chris Paul’s Personal Coach, Idan Ravin [and many others]
SECAUCUS, NJ, May 9, 2008 -- If you were asked who Chris Paul's, Carmelo Anthony's and Gilbert Arenas' coaches are and said Byron Scott, George Karl and Eddie Jordan, respectively, you would only be partially correct.
Even though they're on different NBA teams, Paul, Anthony and Arenas, as well as players such as Elton Brand, Jerry Stackhouse and Rudy Gay, all share the same coach, Idan Ravin.
You may remember Ravin from a recent Jordan Brand commercial featuring Carmelo Anthony (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TypQ-iYqiLg)running a gamut of intense workout drills with a man at his side pushing him every step of the way.
That man is Ravin. I caught up with the Washington D.C. based training guru to discuss the breakout success of one of his clients, Chris Paul, and to talk about the unique perspective on the NBA game that his job affords him.
I want you to break down Chris Paul’s game for me. What does he possess that makes him so good?
Idan: There’s sort of the esoteric things and then there’s sort of the substantive, basketball things. I think it’s the esoteric things that make him really special. At the end of the day, everybody in the NBA can go right, they can go left, they can shoot a jump shot, I mean everybody has a certain threshold of talent. But what makes him so special is his incredible tenacity and love for the game. It’s not like this cliché, “We work hard.” Everybody says they work hard. But it’s the efficiency and sort of the smarts in which he maximizes his time. He’s super. He’s tenacious. He doesn’t back down.
"Melo learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast, Elton Brand learns fast and Chris was learning just as fast as they were. So I’m thinking, 'This kid is interesting to me.'"
I can give you a story, it kind of goes back because I’ve worked with Chris for a long time, it was from when I was prepping him for the Draft. Workouts are always really, really challenging and Chris wanted to workout with somebody else there with him. And I told him, “No, Chris, you have to do everything by yourself for a while.” So I remember, I got a call from a top front office person from an NBA team who was going to be in the area and they wanted to stop by our workouts. So I said, “Sure, you guys can come by.”
This was a senior, senior head guy from a team.
So I called Gilbert Arenas, and I was like, “Hey Gilbert, why don’t you come by and workout today with Chris.” Gilbert was like, “OK, sure.”
So we pull up the gym and Chris is waiting outside and I see his eyes just light up, because not only is he working out with someone, he’s working out with Gilbert Arenas who is like a top seven player in the NBA. He was excited to finally get to go and battle.
The first half an hour we just did a lot of drills and stuff, and the last half an hour we did a lot of competitive drills with a lot of 1-on-1 and spots. I probably want to say Chris won every single game. Now, 1-on-1 doesn’t mean much, but it does mean something. When you’re a 19-year old kid and you’re going up against a top six or seven player in the NBA and you don’t back down, you’re just ferocious.
After the workout Gilbert came up to me and was like, “That kid is going to be special.” To this day, Chris and Gilbert are very good friends. But that minute kind of showed me that there’s no fear in him.
When you step off the court, he’s a gentle, humble, kind, modest kid, but in those 90 feet, he’s a lion, man.
You see this kid come in and you see his mental toughness and his willingness to be great, that’s got to be a challenge for you to take all that and turn it into something better. What was your approach with him, specifically?
Idan: I think in the beginning you want to gauge where they are. Everyone going to the NBA has a great pedigree and resume, right? So everyone has a certain threshold, but it’s more about finding out, “How fast does he learn?” You can put him through a drill that works on his dribbling efficiency and how he scores and how fast he kind of captures and learns the drill makes you think, “Man, that's unbelievable.” Melo learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast, Elton Brand learns fast and Chris was learning just as fast as they were. So I’m thinking, “This kid is interesting to me.” So then you make the drill so unbelievably unreasonable and rigorous every time and he wouldn’t back down. He kept on trying to master it. And then you reduce the time on a drill and he tried to beat the time. He kept on showing you things about how competitive he was. You’d say, “Gilbert does this drill in 47 seconds” and Chris would be like, “I want to do it in 45.” I was just thinking, “There’s something special here.” But after that Gilbert Arenas workout I was like, “Man this kid is going to be something tremendous.”
Chris Paul was asked about this confidence on the day he won the Rookie of the Year trophy and he mentioned all of the workouts leading up to the draft where you pushed him to work his hardest. How rewarding is that to know that you are helping shape guys’ careers?
Idan: It feels great. To know that you’re an integral part of their career is a great feeling. I kind of take a lot of pride in it. The fact that they trust you with their careers is also something great because there’s a million people they could choose to work with, there’s a million people in their circle and then they choose you and it becomes a great relationship over time.
Let’s just say we know Chris Paul is going up against Tony Parker. Is that something where you’ll go up to him or he’ll go up to you to talk about certain matchups?
Idan: On stuff like that, it’s more like he already knows what he has to do kind of thing. I think in terms of the bigger picture, it’s not like, “Chris, here’s how you’re going to beat Tony Parker off the dribble.” It’s more of the big picture like, “You need to continue to be very efficient with your moves, you need to work on your angles better, you need to stepback stronger …” It’s more things to keep the big picture rather than how are you going to compete against a particular player.
So most of the work happens over the summers, I guess?
Idan: No, not at all. I have a lot of work during the year. For example, when Elton Brand was coming back I was with Elton Brand for five weeks until he got cleared and then I spent a month with Gilbert Arenas after he got cleared by the doctors. So, I do a lot during the year as well. I think I have sort of a core group of guys that do above and beyond what is normally expected. Come around April I do pre-Draft with the Draft guys and after that I got to prepare Melo and Chris Paul for the World Championships and once that’s over I have all of the league guys, so it’s kind of become pretty much year round.
You look at what having Michael Jordan’s trust did for Tim Grover, as Chris Paul establishes himself as one of the top five players in this league, that’s got to start bringing you more clients. Has that helped?
Idan: You know what, I hate to sound … I have a really good client base already. Fortunately I have a really good base of clients I work with – seven or eight All-Stars – so with respect to Chris helping business, I’m sure it does, but I don’t really see it that way. My concern is more like, “Let’s make sure every year that Chris is ready to go and that Chris keeps on getting better and better and better and one day he’s a Hall of Fame player and his jersey hangs from the rafters and there’s nine championship rings on his fingers.” My priority is each kid and not whether or not my business grows.
Part of the appeal of your workouts seems to be the individual attention and sort of private bunker mentality that the players take on when they train with you. How funny was it to see one of your sessions in a national ad campaign for the Jordan Brand?
Idan: When Melo and those guys asked me to do that commercial, I was like, “Sure,” because I think in many ways, people think that those All-Stars just were born All-Stars and I don’t think people see how much time and effort goes into what they do.
It’s sort of the classic, “If I was 6-9, I’d be in the NBA too.”
Idan: Exactly. And then people start throwing the word “politics” around or “favoritism” and I always think that that’s the biggest excuse you could ever give. Because I don’t think people even understand, Melo’s day is so full with so much, he has nine ba-zillion off the court responsibilities, and he has a family and he has friends and he has a life he wants to live. But he still commits himself to perform and to practice.
Like I said before, it’s a very cliché expression to say, “work hard.” Because anybody can say, “I work hard.” But at the end of the day it’s like, “What exactly are you doing?”
The point of that commercial was, “Man, these drills are really hard and they challenge 12 different sensories.” They challenge the way to see, the way you feel, they challenge your peripheral vision, they challenge so many different things that not only does it become a physical workout, it’s a mental challenge as well.
That’s a good segue. I read how you try to strengthen players’ minds. Tell me about that? Is it sort of the mind over matter principle or are we talking about something else?
Idan:I think it’s a bunch of different things. You create situations that are so rigorous that you can accomplish situations that aren’t so rigorous. I’ll give you the example that if you can take a three-hour test in one hour, then you can obviously take the test in three hours. You create situations that are so unreasonable that when all of the sudden they’re reasonable, they look like a piece of cake.
Then you have situations where it’s not only to be able to do the drill, the drill has to become instinctive. You can work on something and they guy can think, “Oh yeah, I can do it,” but if the situation presents itself on the court, is that going to be your intuitive response? The only way for it to become that is to have done it so many times in 55 different ways at such high speeds that your body will all of the sudden be like, “OK, that’s how I have to respond to this situation.”
Is it a fraternity among you guys or is more like competition? I know David Thorpe has parlayed his coaching into an analyst gig with ESPN.
Idan: I don’t know any of them and I don’t know what anybody else does. It’s not that I don’t care, but what everyone else does, good for them. It if works, great. I just know what I do and I just focus on my guys. You know what I mean? I don’t come from any of those fraternities, from any of those basketball fraternities, to me this business has just grown organically. I don’t have business cards. I have a website but I did that begrudgingly just so I don’t have to talk too much, because I’m kind of shy. So that’s how it works in that respect.
I read that you worked with the Mavericks team at one point. How did that suit you? Do you think you’d give up your private practice to become an assistant coach for a team? Dave Hopla, a personal shooting coach, recently joined the Wizards in a similar capacity.
Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, teams call me in all the time and say, “Hey will you work with our guys?” I’ve gotten a ba-zillion job offers. I’ve gotten a lot of job offers but it’s just sort of a balancing of interest. I’m not saying that I’m wed to anything in particular. If something came up that I feel like, “That’s a win,” and I want to do it, I would do it. But I don’t need a job. I have great, great players. I have great freedom. I work with a ba-zillion guys. I’m my own boss. I know a lot of guys chase the jobs, but I’ve had a lot of job offers. Who knows? If the New Yorker called you tomorrow and say, “Hey, we want you to write for us,” you’d think about it. You think, “Do I want to leave? Maybe I can be like a consultant/freelancer.”
I saw on your other business venture’s website, NicheClick Media, that you wrote “I have some good stories so remind me to tell you when we meet…” OK, so tell me one.
Idan: With the players, you mean? Oh my God, there’s so many funny ones. I’m trying to see where I should start.
Some of them are kind of like good-feeling stories.
One example – God, Melo might kill me for telling this story – so Melo had a baby, a beautiful young boy, right? So, Melo never wants to miss workouts. I remember, we were at workouts and it was his fiancée’s birthday and he told her, “Hey, it’s a spa day for you, I’ll watch the baby.” So he brings the baby to workouts. In between drills, he’d finish the drill and then the baby would start crying. So Melo would take the baby carriage and walk the baby all the way around the basketball court and the baby would stop crying. And then he’ll come back and do a drill. And then if he has to burp the baby or something, he takes out the burping bag and does what he’s got to do, and then comes right back to the court. But it’s nice because I think no one sees that very good, gentle, kind, humble side of Carmelo and that’s why I’m the first to defend him all the time. People don’t see the ba-zillion nice things that he does.
I can give you another instance. Jerry Stackhouse is my guy. He’s a great guy. I travel a lot with the players and I remember we were down in a small town in North Carolina and we were at a restaurant – a small, little diner type of thing – and we end up seeing a childhood friend. You could tell the guy was kind of down on his luck, you know? The guy was bussing tables. So Jerry gave him a hug and he was talking to him for a little while. Then at the end of the meal, I saw Jerry take out a couple hundred dollar bills and he folded them up into little, tiny rectangles and he put a couple singles on top of these hundred dollar bills and he left them as a tip. I thought, “Wow, what a thoughtful thing to do.” He didn’t embarrass the guy by taking out a couple hundred dollar bills and throw it in his face. It was such a thoughtful way of doing a nice thing.
I’ve seen guys do stuff like that all the time. So, when the media bashes these guys when they mess up, you know, we all do. We all mess up. I wish they could see the ba-zillion nice things that these guys do all the time that no one knows about.
The early entry candidates were announced last week. Are any of those guys training with you?
Idan: I expect a lot more, but so far I have Joey Dorsey, DaVon Hardin, Drew Neitzel, James Gist … I’ll have a bunch of guys. I usually have quite a bit.
I’ll group them by position, or group them by situations, so if it’s a pick and roll day, then the bigs and smalls will go together. Or I’ll put the smalls together in the morning and do the bigs in the afternoon. It kind of depends on situations. If it’s sort of a competitive day, then they’ll all go together and do kind of competitive stuff against each other. Every day is sort of a situational day, and that’s how I’ll break it up.
You work with Gilbert and DeShawn Stevenson and they went up against Delonte West, who you also worked with, in the First Round this year -- or the Mavericks with Stackhouse going against the Hornets with Paul. Is it funny to see these juxtapositions of your guys go against each other?
Idan: No, because, you know what it is? They’re competitive people. They play a physical game. Just because a guy gets an elbow or gets a punch or gets a bloody nose or something, to me, it’s not a personal thing. It’s the nature of the sport. I see MMA fighters all the time that hug afterwards. It’s just the nature of being in a physical, physical game that’s very competitive that there’s a lot of stakes going on. I can assure you that LeBron and DeShawn are going out each other, but if they saw each other out during the summer, they’d sit down and have lunch together. It’s a small group of guys that got to a common place together, so they share that bond. But if you’re going to say, “Is Chris Paul going to shake Jerry’s hand during the game?” Why would he? It’s a game. It’s competition. But afterwards, I’m sure they shook hands, they laughed, they broke bread together.
I read that you’re learning from players constantly and you don’t want to be “running in place.” What’s the next step, what’s the next level?
Idan: How do I see my business evolving? I come from a very formal corporate world. I was a lawyer for many years and this and this and everything was about business plans and this is something I love to do and I never really had a formula for it. I just let it grow organically and so, to me, however it evolves, it evolves. I don’t have any plans for it. I enjoy it, I have great players, I’m sure I’ll have more great players. I hope that the one thing I can leave people with is, there is no easy road. No one got there just because they got there.
“Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12 hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
You didn’t get where you are because you were blessed with a pen in your hand. There was thousands and thousands of hours of effort that was put into it. I hope that that’s what people can see. This is not just dreams. You can learn a lot from NBA guys. Because, for you to become a writer or me to become what I do, it sounds kind of normal. But for a six year old kid that lives in New York that says, “You know what, I want to be a NBA player,” there’s 500 million other kids that say the same thing.
But each one of these kids made the right decisions, went to the right schools, made the right sacrifices and put themselves on the line and now they sit in the NBA. I think we can all learn a ton from watching these guys.
I think in many ways, it’s very empowering to be around them, because no dream sounds funny. If you tell me you want to be a juggler, I say, go for it. The funniest thing is a six year old kid going, “Mom, I want to play in the NBA,” and she says, “Well so do the 3,000 other kids in your neighborhood and the 35 million kids in the U.S. and the 25 million kids in Lithuania.”
But think about how hard it is to be in 10th grade and decide you’re going to move 1,000 miles away to go to an all boys school in rural North Carolina, all because your dream is to play in the NBA. How many kids make that sacrifice? That’s why I have a lot of admiration for them in many ways.
I heard a quote by you: “Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12 hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
Idan: Absolutely, because I know my stuff – I’m not the bionic man – but I know if you do my stuff for 75 minutes that you can do anything else. I’m happy to put you on the phone with Jason Richardson, or Melo or Chris and they’ll tell you. And it’s not like I’m running them through quicksand, you know what I mean? It’s just real efficient game-speed type stuff.
So when guys are like, “Yeah, I’m in the gym for nine hours,” I’m thinking, “Man, what are you doing for nine hours?”
Which I have to believe makes you appealing to a guy like Melo or Chris Paul that has all these off the court obligations, because they can max out their time with you.
Idan: Absolutely, because you don’t need that much. It’s like the law of diminishing returns. Do it right, do it the right way for 75-90 minutes and then, leave. It’s like sitting and studying with the TV on. I don’t think you get that much studying done. But if you put yourself in the bunker for an hour and you focus, you can probably get through all of that material.