On Sunday, after dinner, I called my mother in Indiana, like every Sunday. She had heard about the podcast before I had. She listens to more basketball than I do these days.
Doc Rivers was on The Bill Simmons Podcast. He said coaching Giannis Antetokounmpo is not an easy job. He said he has great passing ability. He said he has only one way of playing, toward the rim, with force, and that he wants to force every play. And he said one thing he wishes for: that he would learn to execute better.
My mother asked what I thought, me, the coach of the Sunday-morning U10s.
Let me tell you: in 2000, when I arrived in Charleroi with my bag, there was no podcast. There was the minibus, the bowl of coffee I didn’t yet know how to drink, and a hall with badminton lines. What coaches thought of their players, they said in the minibus, and we arrived in Liège with it in our heads. Nobody listened to it in the car the next day.
I told my mother I don’t pick a side. A player who goes to the rim on every play, I dream about him on Sunday mornings: half of mine shoot from distance before they’ve looked at the basket. A coach who wants players to execute, that’s my job, I say it thirty times a practice. That’s fundamentals too.
My mother thought it over. Then she said: “So there’s one man who wants to go to the basket every time, and one man who wishes he’d do something else once in a while. And they’re talking about the same game. Darnell, that’s called a team.”
I said yes, but here we don’t say it into a microphone. She asked where we do say it. I said: at the club bar, and by Monday it’s over.
And on Tuesday we stack the chairs together, mind you.
She said: see?
It’s true, we checked: BasketNews.
