mark jackson coaching style — How To Hold The Warriors Accountable (Photo: Ryan Brown / LetsGoWarriors.com)
ORACLE ARENA, OAKLAND, CA — Throughout the past few years during Golden State Warriors head coach Mark Jackson‘s tenure, #DubNation has gotten a heavy dose of his “Just Us” culture.
We at LetsGoWarriors endeavor to peel the thick layers of this onion and, however gradually, unearth other nuances that go beyond such usual and well-known epithets as:
@gswscribe let me know if you get bingo…. #markjacksonpressconferencebingo pic.twitter.com/vX2fNcHuDt
— NSD (@UnkieNoah) November 8, 2013
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First and foremost at the top of his list of changing the Warriors’ culture is defense, but on subsequent levels, we also learned earlier this season that he doesn’t “send anyone to the principal’s office” (aka bench them) for committing a turnover.
Moreover, even as Harrison Barnes continues to be mired in a slump, Jackson keeps insisting — and it’s been at least more than a week by now — that Barnes will be “just fine”.
Yesterday before the Warriors took the court and won against the Portland Trail Blazers, Jackson was pressed on the subject by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat‘s Lowell Cohn, who is a long-time Bay Area sportswriter most notably with the San Francisco Chronicle at one point in time:
Before Sunday’s game, I asked Jackson, “How do you get your guys to play better defense? Do you yell at them, plead with them?”
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“I coach them,” Jackson said. “Hold them accountable. ‘Understand how teams are going to hurt you.’ You prepare. You talk about it. Playing in this league, there’s going to be nights when you have it and there’s going to be nights when you don’t have it. The great teams, in spite of not having it, find ways to get it done.”
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“How do you hold your players accountable?”
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“You hold them accountable by discussing it, whether it be timeout, whether it be taking them out, whether it be correcting them, whether it be practice tomorrow. There’s different ways to hold them accountable. I don’t believe holding them accountable is cussing them out and disrespecting them because then they have the right to hold me accountable by doing the same thing to me. We don’t do that here. We are a professional basketball team with grown men. This is not the first time that we’ve either played great for a stretch or did not play great for a stretch.”
The Warriors are establishing a foundation for the future. It takes repetition and reminders, but eventually Golden State seems to be headed in the direction of a, say, San Antonio Spurs, where the moment a NBA player walks into team’s practice facility, he can almost feel what is expected of him and how Jackson will get the best out of him.
The difference is, Jackson appears to be more of a players’ coach who becomes malleable to the situation, whereas Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, for better or worse, has a certain regime and pecking order in which players must conform to and fit in.
At Jackson’s postgame press conference, even though Andre Iguodala is a veteran, Jackson said he felt like he needed to talk to Iguodala and ask him to be more aggressive.
“No, you gotta talk to him a little bit. He is who he is. He’s not a guy that’s gonna go out there and try to get twenty shots, but you try to let him know that we need him to be a little bit more aggressive, not shooting the basketball, but loking to make plays,” Jackson said, “If that means assisting or shooting, we want him with the ball in his hands looking to make plays.”
Iguodala, often referred to as the “glue” for the Warriors on both ends of the court, confirmed after the game that Jackson had asked Iguodala to be a little more aggressive.
“Be more involved, be more aggressive at the offensive end. Just taking shots,” Iguodala said, “You might have to take one or two bad ones, you know, (to) keep yourself in rhythm. Tonight I felt I might have taken one bad one, but everything was in rhythm, didn’t have to force, was in the game flow, but still aggressive.”
And there’s another example of Jackson’s under-the-radar “new wave” style of coaching: When was the last time you heard a coach suggest to a player to take a bad shot?
Iguodala added, “He’s really good at communicating. That is one thing you never have to worry about Coach.”
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