ESPN NBA

By Henry Abbott

Not that they have time, but consider the message Real Madrid coach Ettore Messina gets to share with his team's fans on his Sports.ru blog:

I consider myself a tailor whose job is to create the best possible suit for the team. I’m not a prêt-à-porter guy; I don’t produce those “ready to wear” clothes. I’m like a man who makes a suit that’s supposed to fit its owner perfectly. That means it takes time for me to understand what’s best for the team both defensively and offensively. Like, we can defend a pick-and-roll in many different ways. And the way we defended it with CSKA could be ill-suited for a team that’s not as powerful and at the same time is much quicker than CSKA. We have to adjust our pick-and-roll defense, adjust principles of defensive rotations, etc. It’s my job to define through experiment what we should do.

Same goes for the offense. With CSKA, we didn’t run a lot of pick-and-rolls. We liked to create post-up opportunities for our bigs and set plenty of off-the-ball screens for the shooters. But here in Madrid day by day I become more and more confident that this is a team that should use pick-and-rolls more often. We’ve got a lot of frontline players who can pick and pop out, which could give us versatility as far as offense is concerned. At the same time, it’s important not to overlook posting-up that forces defenders inside and creates space for our shooters on the perimeter.

Figuring all this out takes a while and in the meantime we’re not playing consistently and sometimes lose games.

How many times have we seen NBA coaches feeling steamed, because they're in the middle of long-term goals, while being asked by the media and fans about short-term results? This kind of coach-controlled conversation is a chance for coaches to get fans to understand the big picture.

If fans, media and owners can follow the rationale, I have to believe this kind of leadership could help a coach buy the job security necessary to do things the right way.

Similarly, in a world where coaches were expected to explain themselves meaningfully, those without solid plans would have a hard time hiding, which is probably good for basketball too.