AIMING HIGH IN THE NBA
Ex-Sharks boss one good season away from head coach job in premier league
WHEN asked for a specific game or a moment in time that really stands out for him during his 10 years of playing for and coaching the Sheffield Sharks, Chris Finch identifies an entire season.
“Beating Manchester for the title in my second year as head coach, 1999, was probably the highlight,” reflects the 49-yearold from Cambridge, Ohio.
“Not just the final game, but that season as a whole because we’d put together a new team, I’d learned a lot from my failures of the first season and we had some great guys on the team.
“We were probably the story of the season. Manchester had spent a lot of money chasing a title, they were the favourites but we came out of nowhere and beat them to the post.”
Two decades on and there are echoes of that second season in Sheffield as Finch continues a journey that he hopes will one day result in a head coaching position in the National Basketball Association.
Finch is an associate (assistant) head coach with the New Orleans Pelicans in US basketball’s premier competition.
The Pelicans are the third NBA team he has worked on, having previously been employed in similar roles with the Houston Rockets and Denver Nuggets.
Like Sheffield at the start of the 1998-99 campaign, New Orleans have a different look about them to previous years, due largely to the haul of young players and draft picks they received from trading away their star player, Anthony Davis, to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Unlike the Sharks of 21 years ago, and pretty much any team in the history of the sport, New Orleans begin the 2019-2020 season with the most exciting player to come out of the college system in half a generation. Zion Williamson is the future of the NBA, a 19-year-old, 6ft 6in power forward who is the most-hyped rookie in the NBA since LeBron James 16 years ago.
Without playing a competitive game yet – and he will not for a few weeks due to injury – Williamson’s presence has turned the hitherto small-market Pelicans into the team chosen by broadcasters to tip-off the season against defending champions Toronto Raptors overnight.
Part of Finch’s role with the Pelicans is to help Williamson justify the hype, much like James
was able to, winning three titles and making the NBA finals in eight straight seasons.
“Zion is going to be a special talent, we’ve seen that already,” says Finch. “He’s a great kid, he’s highly coachable, he’s pure, he plays the game the right way.
“He wants to win, he wants his team-mates to succeed. Sometimes I’m not sure he realises quite how good he can be, but I’m sure he’ll figure that out. Like LeBron, you can tell he’s been raised well. If your foundation is good, I don’t see you straying from that.”
Finch has been laying his own coaching foundations for 22 years. He came to England to play for the then Sheffield Forgers in 1993. He was fresh out of college in Pennsylvania and despite helping the newly-rebranded Sharks win a British Basketball League title in his early years, by the age of 27 he had reached the conclusion that his playing career was taking him nowhere.
“I knew long-term I wanted to coach,” says Finch. “Our coach at the time had taken a job with Manchester and (Sharks chairman) Yuri (Matischen) asked me would I be interested in the job? I jumped at the chance. I was fortunate at the time to coach guys I had played with, they were all good dudes, they allowed me to coach them. The way I was wired I was a natural leader on the floor anyway.”
The 1999 title – which saw him named coach of the year – was the first of two in six years as Sharks’ main man, plus a host of final appearances across various competitions.
But after 10 years, Finch sought a new challenge. “We’d gotten to the point in Sheffield where we were continuing to try to do more with less, resources were starting to tighten up,” he recalls, with no trace of bitterness. “I had the opportunity to go to Germany, and Sheffield were super supportive. They wanted me to go and fulfil my potential. It was an incredible experience in Sheffield, I was fortunate to work with and for a group of people who gave me the opportunity to not only play and coach, but particularly on the coaching side, figure out who I was.”
That education continued with spells in Germany and Belgium and as coach of Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics, by which time the NBA had come calling.
“Honestly, I never dreamed of being in the NBA,” says Finch.
But he finds himself there now, one good season away from a head coaching job, with that grounding in Sheffield never far from his memory.
It was an incredible experience in Sheffield.
New Orleans Pelicans assistant coach Chris Finch.