On Sunday, after dinner, I called my mother in Indiana. I told her that Mike Conley, 39, had run Boston’s rotations during a preseason game against Charlotte. Joe Mazzulla had asked him before the game. According to Basket USA, it was his first step into coaching.
She wanted to know what he had done. I told her: two minutes in, Derrick White picks up his second foul, and Conley leaves him on the floor. White doesn’t foul again, and Conley sticks to his plans. My mother said that was brave. I remembered 2000, my first season in Charleroi. Two fouls early on, and my coach sat me for the whole first quarter. I never knew if he was right. Nobody checked.
Conley told Basket USA it was “really about finding out how a coach thinks and what it means to have control of that kind of decision.” And Mazzulla sat next to him, guiding him on a few points. Let me tell you, that’s how I started with my U10s: a club veteran next to me, tapping my arm when I forgot the box-out.
I added that in the GM survey, half of them named him as the active player who would make the best coach. That Sam Hauser said he would be “a hell of a coach”. And that Conley hasn’t decided anything yet, he just wants to stay in basketball, as an executive, a coach or something else.
There was a silence on the line. Then my mother asked who had picked Conley. I said: his coach. She asked why his coach wasn’t coaching. I said it was to teach him. She said that if you want to teach someone, you let them do it and you keep quiet. I reminded her that Mazzulla did talk a bit.
I sit next to the treasurer too. And I talk a lot, mind you.
My mother thought it over, then said the boy had left a player with two fouls on the floor and that the player hadn’t picked up another. She said: see? He has already understood that you trust people.
It’s true, we checked: Basket USA.
