ONE TREE IN A FOREST
Stevens shuns praise amid league of notable coaches
Ron Adams spent one year with the Celtics as a veteran assistant coach charged with introducing Brad Stevens to the NBA.
It’s been four years and three league titles since Adams left to become Steve Kerr’s defensive guru in Golden State, but he planted an early standard for the Celtics coach.
“If he writes a book, the chapter on me will probably be That Guy Didn’t Know What He Was Doing,” said Stevens, shaking his head with a half-smile, and the same sense of embarrassment when asked about who he is now — one of three finalists for NBA Coach of the Year.
Because he is in Indiana at a memorial service for his grandmother, Stevens won’t be at the enormous and glitzed-up Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport tonight, when the league presents its annual awards show.
The experience probably would be wonderful, but the notion of awards — especially awards connected individually to him — have a squirmy effect on the Celtics coach.
Asked recently why he gets so uncomfortable, Stevens said, “There’s a ton of good coaches in this league — every year there’s 30 good coaches and it changes some at the end of each year.
“Just the nature of the game and how competitive it is,” he said. “Some of the people I steal the most from have 20-plus wins or 30-plus wins. That doesn’t mean they’re not doing an incredibly elite job. I just think when you go through this list of 30 coaches, to pick three is silly. It’s nice to be on a team that achieves something, and we know that individuals benefit from that. But from my standpoint, I don’t consider myself in that league. The first thing I’d like to improve as much as I can and I do so by watching the other 29 coaches.
“It’s always an honor to be recognized, but I take it with enough of a grain of salt, because some of that stuff is irrelevant in terms of trying to achieve the next task.”
Stevens willingly associates himself with that word: stealing. As someone whose own influence has landed on hundreds of whiteboards, he sees it all as a kind of X’s and O’s cosmos, free for exploration.
Never mind that opponents occasionally try to beat him with his own stuff.
“I don’t consider anything to be mine. It’s all basketball,” said Stevens. “You try to fit in actions to your team that fit the strengths of your team. If we’re running something that’s been in the last 11 years I’ve been a head coach, there’s a version of it run somewhere. You do tweaks to fit your roster or your team.
“But I can very easily say I’ve stolen a lot more than I’ve been stolen from, I can tell you that.”
Or maybe it’s more a matter of osmosis, especially for a son of Indiana who grew up in a state where the air spreads basketball theory.
It wasn’t stealing when the adolescent Stevens watched Indiana and Purdue play, or when he began playing for Bill Fenlon at DePauw University.
“I played in a motion-based system because I grew up in Indiana when Bob Knight and Gene Keady were running motion,” said Stevens. “The whole state ran cutting off the ball. You didn’t run a ball screen your whole career coming into the mid-90s in Indiana.
“Then I played for a college coach and we ran everything from Carolina break to the triangle because he played for Tex Winter (at Northwestern),” he said. “Then I get to Butler and it’s all ball screens because we had a little dynamite 5-foot-9 point guard that you couldn’t keep in front of you. That blended into kind of a ball screen motion, and now you come into the NBA and you’re learning from everybody all the time.
“You’re always taking bits and pieces from those things. And you’re watching your opponents, seeing what they do best and trying to incorporate it for your team. To me, that’s figuring out what works best for your team. You want to be constantly on the lookout for what will make your team better.”
His coaching tree is starting to bud. Walter McCarty — fellow Hoosier, Rick Pitino protégé and member of Stevens’ staff for the final four of his five years as a Celtics assistant — has gone home to take over the men’s basketball program at the University of Evansville. Ron Nored, Stevens’ point guard at Butler and a Celtics staff member for two years, was recently hired as a Charlotte Hornets assistant.
Celtics assistant Jay Larranaga is increasingly listed in NBA coaching searches.
“I just love seeing their success. I just love seeing those guys move,” said Stevens. “I’ve been fortunate. Seeing Ron Adams win a couple of championships has been fun. I learned so much more from him that year. To see everything from those guys from Ron Nored to Walt, to the staff we have here is what’s fun about it. Jay should be getting those calls, and Micah (Shrewsberry) should be. All these guys. But it’s fun to see those guys pursue what they want to pursue.”
But the peril of coaching — the cliché that coaches are hired to be fired — rarely stands out as much as tonight’s Coach of the Year field of Stevens, Utah’s Quin Snyder and Detroit’s Dwane Casey.
The latter, voted Coach of the Year by his peers in the coaches association, was fired a month ago by Toronto. Like awards, some of these personnel decisions don’t hold much weight for Stevens.
“Everybody looks at things their own way, but it’s clear that Dwane’s an excellent coach,” said Stevens. “Excellent coaches — and that’s why he got hired right away by Detroit, and to me it should be him or Quin that win the award. There were a lot of guys fired this year that I thought were ridiculously good coaches.”
He undoubtedly stole from a few of them, too.