Caseloads
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Joined: 7/29/2001
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Things can get physical when players battle for jobs, as the Nuggets' Nikoloz Tskitishvili, left, and Ryan Bowen prove. Training camp includes the period from the first gathering of a ballclub to the beginning of the preseason games. And, for the most part, the crucial importance of those seven to 10 days are cloaked in a workaday dullness. At the start, the coaching staffs focus on instituting their teams' generic game, one piece at a time: This is the way we'll cut, pick, curl, pop-up, pin-down. These are our defensive rotations. Wing-passes, pivot-passes and reverse passes will be thrown and received just so.
All the pages of the playbook -- including fastbreak and early offense, halfcourt sets, press-breakers, in-bounds plays -- are introduced and rehearsed. Terminology is also established as a locational and procedural shorthand -- e.g., "garden spot," "pinch post," blind pig" and "line of deployment," as used by the Lakers.
Every team's requisite training camp exercises are always tedious and repetitive, but some coaches' drills create unique problems. "Flip Saunders' drills are the most complicated," says one well-traveled vet. "Yet the coaching staff never fully explains them, so newcomers to the Timberwolves wind up stumbling around and looking like fools. The only guys who can get through Flip's training camp drills are guys who've already played for him."
When Tex Winter coached the Houston Rockets (1971-73), his star player, Elvin Hayes, asked to be excused from the training camp drills. "Even though Elvin was an All-Star," Tex says, "the truth was that he had the worst fundamentals of any player I've ever coached. His footwork was terrible, and except for his one dribble-and-spin move, he just couldn't handle the ball. We had a lot of basic drills that he simply couldn't execute. He tried to avoid these drills by making believe he was hurt or by getting his ankles retaped. Finally, he came up to me and said, 'Coach, it's too embarrassing for me to be out there.' So I excused him and designed a series of four-man drills."
Rookie Drew Gooden, right, can expect a crash-course introduction to the Grizzlies playbook. A new head coach must focus on overcoming the habitual reluctance of veteran players to embrace any new system. For veteran teams under holdover coaches, however, the X's and O's and the jargon are already familiar and training camp is mostly a reaquaintance process. And rookies are always in a daze, because NBA teams can have up to 10 times the "calls" that college teams have (and 100 times more than high school clubs).
Training camp is where the coach aims to set the tone for the entire season. Let the players start off by taking short cuts and the upcoming season will be long and painful. That's why Bill Cartwright, starting his first full season at the helm of the Chicago Bulls, was barking at his squad for their carelessness and lack of hustle 10 minutes into Day One.
Most NBA teams convene their training camps far removed from the bright lights and normal thrill-a-minute temptations available during the regular season -- the Knicks in Charlestown, S.C.; the Hornets in Westwego, La.; the Clippers in the College of the Desert, Palm Desert, Calif. To further maximize the players' on-court learning time and minimize any leftover energy, the core of NBA training camps are the dreaded two-a-day practices.
The standard schedule calls for the first two-hour session at 10 a.m. or so (late enough for the players to get sufficient sleep, early enough to prevent them from partying the night before), then another beginning anywhere from 4 to 6 p.m. Some players will go to any length to avoid these grueling two-fers -- like Shaq, who for two consecutive seasons has strategically scheduled foot surgery so as to avoid training camp altogether.
When Gene Shue coached the Washington Bullets, his innovation was to have his double sessions run back-to-back, with only a short break for a light lunch/skull session. The idea was to have the players finished by 3 or thereabouts to give them a lengthy recovery time. A great idea for both young, resilient players and creaky veterans.
Players are educated on the team philosophy during camp -- but not many are asked to sign pledges like the Hawks' Dion Glover. Two-a-days also make physical demands on the coaches, especially the ex-players suffering the residual knee, back, and/or hip pain characteristic of all aging athletes. During the four hours of daily practice, nobody hurts more than Larry Brown, who, even with his double-hip replacements, remains a disciple of the Dean Smith philosophy in which the head coach is omnipotent and the assistants are merely silent drill-masters and fetchers of loose balls.
But the pain also transcends methodology: No other NBA coach utilizes his assistants more than Phil Jackson, yet Jackson suffers constant torment because of the gradual disintegration of a spinal fusion done back in 1967.
Also, unless they've spent the summer yelling at their kids -- "Get back on defense! Swing the ball! Push it!" -- coaches always develop sore throats during training camp.
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