Smith on coaching fast track
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Only four seasons ago, Nevada Smith was coaching basketball at an NCAA Division III college. Now he has taken another step to possibly coaching in the NBA.
Smith is the new head coach of the Miami Heat’s team in the D-League, the minor league for the NBA. Smith will take over the Sioux Falls Skyforce in South Dakota.
Sioux Falls is a long way from Vandergrift, Pa., where Smith played at Kiski Area High School. But the Skyforce might put Smith closer to the NBA.
This is another chapter in an interesting coaching ride that has quickly taken Smith from a small-college coach to the doorstep of the NBA. Four current NBA head coaches are former D-League head coaches — Luke Walton (Los Angeles Lakers), Earl Watson (Phoenix Suns), Quin Snyder (Utah Jazz) and Dave Joerger (Sacramento Kings). Other former D-League head coaches are NBA assistants.
“I think you always have the ultimate end goal of wanting to be a head coach at the highest level,” said Smith. “But you have to take it day by day and this is the best opportunity for me.”
The D-League has some former NBA players — and usually a number of future NBA players. On NBA opening day rosters for the 2015-16 season, 30 percent of players spent time in the D-League.
Smith, 36, has spent the past few weeks with the Heat at its training camp in Miami. The first week of training camp was in the Bahamas.
This is actually Smith’s second head coaching job in the D-League. In 2013, not long before he was getting ready for another season as the coach at Keystone College in eastern Pennsylvania, the Houston Rockets hand-picked Smith to be their D-League coach and Smith spent two seasons with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. He spent last season doing some NBA scouting and consulting, but established a working relationship with Heat coach Erik Spoelstra.
“I met him right after I was done with Houston,” Smith said. “I came down to Miami a couple times throughout the season last year, caught a couple games and we were able to talk throughout the year. I was with [the Heat] for the NBA summer league and things just kind of grew from there.”
Smith was introduced as the Skyforce’s coach last month. He is now part of an organization run by legendary team president Pat Riley.
A question with Smith is what kind of style will his team play in South Dakota? Smith was a great shooter as a player. He graduated from Kiski Area in 1998 before playing at Bethany College, where he was the school’s all-time leading 3-point shooter when he graduated in 1992. As a senior, he was the top 3-point shooter in the country in Division III.
At Keystone College, his teams were big on 3-point shooting. In his first year as a D-League coach, Smith’s Rio Grande Valley team averaged 45 3-point attempts a game and averaged 123 points.
“I think style will be determined by the roster we have, which we don’t know yet,” Smith said. “I think it will be all Miami Heat principles, all Heat terminology. But it will be molding a system around the guys you have.”
Smith has lived most recently in Saratoga, N.Y., and got engaged last month to Lindsay Brown. He wouldn’t mind getting married to an NBA team someday in the future.