Knock It Down: On The Road In The NBA Development League

One time I made a huge mistake, and now I can’t help but look back and laugh about it.  

It was in February, 2007 during my time working for the NBA Development League as the shooting coach, where I would travel from team to team and work with players. On this particular day, I had driven from my home in Phoenix, Arizona and spent a few days working with the Anaheim Arsenal, before driving to NBA All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas. My plan was to then drive on to Albuquerque, where the Thunderbirds were based and work with players. I’m not sure what I was thinking, because that drive from Vegas to Albuquerque was eight-and-half hours long. 

There I was driving on I-40 when I hit Flagstaff, Arizona. I had already gone about 300 miles from Las Vegas, had another 400 to go to Albuquerque and still had to eventually factor in making the return trip to Phoenix at some point.  

That’s when I reminded myself never to make this road trip again.  

It was one of the many valuable lessons I learned working in minor league basketball and the D-League over the course of five years.   

The NBA Development launched in 2001 with the help of then Executive Director, Karl Hicks, who is now Deputy Athletics Director for External Operations at Florida State University. At that time I had just left working and coaching at Gonzaga High School in Washington D.C. and was living and teaching freshman Algebra 1 at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, and kept hearing about this development league the NBA was going to start. Initially, I contacted Karl and pitched the idea of having a shooting coach work with the players but he said, “No thanks”. I stayed persistent and the following year, I reached out again and since Karl was a Gonzaga High School alum, we had some common relationships, and he decided to give it a try and brought me on to work as a shooting coach with the eight teams in the D-League at that time: North Charleston (Fort Myers, Florida), Greenville (South Carolina), Columbus (Georgia), Mobile (Alabama), Hunstville (Alabama), Asheville (North Carolina), Fayetteville (North Carolina) and Roanake (Virginia).  

I’ll never forget getting that call and being hired by the D-League. I was on my way to Yakima, Washington to work with Bill Bayno and the Sun Kings of the Continental Basketball Association (CBA). 

I continued to live in Las Vegas and teach at Bishop Gorman (for my first two seasons working in the D-League) and would fly on a red-eye on Thursday nights and get into Atlanta on a Friday morning, then would either fly to those individual D-League teams and cities or I would drive. Usually I just rented a car and drove. But I would try and spend a full weekend with each team and even have the opportunity to work with the visiting teams as well. Back then, D-League teams would usually play one game during the week and twice on the weekend, so not only would I work with players on their form and techniques during practice but I would also evaluate their games so I could put together specific coaching plans for future sessions. After a full schedule of working with players and watching games, I would fly back to be in Las Vegas by Monday to teach my classes at Bishop Gorman.  

That was my life in the D-League for five years.  

It was both a hectic and priceless learning experience, thanks to the players and the relationships within each team and the league I built and have maintained over the years. Ime Udoka (San Antonio) and Nate Tibbets (Portland) are both future NBA head coaches in my book and has been great to watch them transition and grow in their coaching careers. My current head coach with the Memphis Grizzlies, Dave Joerger, I met from working in the D-League with the Dakota Wizards. Milt Newton, now the General Manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Dell Demps (New Orleans) Joe Wolf (Brooklyn), Dale Osbourne (Portland), Brandon Williams (Philadelphia), Rob Werdann (Detroit). I was fortunate enough to work for then head coaches like the late Dennis Johnson, Sam Vincent, Michael Cooper, Jeff Malone, Jim Herrick, Kent Davison and Doug Marty, while also working under Michael Curry and Stu Jackson after Karl Hicks had left the D-League.  

During my five years in the league, I was very fortunate to get to know and learn a great deal from these men, and there are so many others too. The same can be said for the players I worked diligently with: Will Bynum, Matt Carroll, Luke Jackson, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Corey “Homicide” Williams and Amir Johnson, who I later worked with during my time with the Toronto Raptors. 

However, what I learned the most during my time working in the D-League was the value of people skills.  

A lot of times, you only have a short window of time to make a solid first impression and to build a connection so you can establish a trust to begin to work with one another as a player and a shooting coach. Like any relationship, there has to be trust. Whether it’s a joke to break the ice or connect the dots through common friendships you may have, creating some sort of bond is always an important part of the process. You might be great a coach, but if you can’t relate to a player on a personal level or they can’t relate to you, that can be difficult to overcome. 

I’ll never forget, too, a talk I had with Sam Vincent, who at that time was a head coach with Mobile and later Anaheim. He validated my belief that maybe one day I could work in the NBA as a shooting coach, as he saw the benefit of my coaching and the time invested with the players.  

During my last season working in the D-League in 2006-2007, I was able to chronicle my travels and coaching work by keeping a blog for the league website. The idea came about from Kent Partridge, who was the Director of Communications for the D-League at the time. He was always interested in what I was doing, so Kent asked me to keep a running blog and I enjoyed keeping entries for those trips. Looking back now, it helps reminds me of a fun time thanks to the people I met along the way – players, coaches, executives, staffs, fans. People who worked in that environment weren’t in it for the money. It was minor league basketball. They did it because they loved the game. 

I still have a soft spot for the D-League.

When I was in Portland, I can remember Taurean Green being sent down to the Idaho Stampede — the Blazers affiliate at the time — and I met up with him during a road trip to Rio Grande Valley, to evaluate Taurean’s progress as part of a back-to-back for Boise against the Austin Toros. I can remember that six-hour car drive and the appreciation for the work put in by players, coaches and staffs, because I was part of that culture and experience before coaching in the NBA for these last eight years.  It’s the same way when Josh McRoberts went from Portland to Boise. While players at that time may have viewed being “sent down” as a demotion, I’ve never looked at it like that.  

I had a finer appreciation for the entire D-League experience because I lived it.