Process Over Results: Spend Enough Time In Basketball, You’ll Get The Mark Jackson Coaching Style (Photo: @MarkJackson13 Twitter profile pic)
STAPLES CENTER, LOS ANGELES, CA — This will be a hurried, unedited, poorly written piece, but I had to get it out there at the right time, and after being swamped putting up, what, about a dozen posts for #DubNation to digest between Game 6 and 7?
I’m not the only one saying this, but I just wanted to tell you that Game 6 epitomized why Mark Jackson is an incredible coach, that the Golden State Warriors are lucky to have him — kudos to Joe Lacob for picking him in the first place — and that basketball is really about process over results.
Some of you may know that I believe the X’s and O’s of coaching is vastly over-rated. I draw my experience from coaching adult Asian-American All-Star teams and traveling across the country to play in various tournaments.
But this time, I’d like to draw my parallels to Jackson in my philosophy of basketball to my “day job”, which is running Dream League, a recreational basketball league for adults that has been running for 12 years now, and counting.
After over a decade of being frustrated with teams that sign up and “sandbag” (enter a team much more qualified to play in a higher division than they register for) by bringing in “ringers” (players who are really good, too good for the other competition in the division they signed up for), I slowly evolved Dream League into not having any divisions anymore.
Sure, we have general guidelines. I have three general tiers because you have to start somewhere, but it really doesn’t matter. Every week, I match up the teams, they play each other, then I rank them. Let’s take San Francisco for example. Usually we have about 30-40 teams there. Every week I painstakingly schedule them based on how strong teams they claimed they were and, based on the results of the game, I re-rank them and schedule them for more games.
When playoffs arrive, I determine the brackets by the results and the eye test. I try to make the cuts based on, say, a #1 seed not blowing out a #8 seed, at least on paper. If I feel that there’s any matchup to start a bracket in which a higher seed will blow out a lower seed, I’ll re-stratify the cut-off points.
Anyways, the point I’m trying to make is that, at the end of the day (sorry for the cliche), whatever team you put in the league, you’re going to end up earning a championship. Nine times out of ten, your team will settle in with other teams that are similar in caliber. You can’t go and pickup a ringer to win you a game. The ranking system adjusts for that.
And that’s really the beauty of basketball. An opportunity for a team to grow together and play better together. Over time, you value the process rather than the results. You can put a team of friends together in Dream League and not feel pressured to break up that chemistry you’re trying to develop, because your team will always be competitive, as we really don’t have divisions.
Aside from the many championships I’ve won as coach of the traveling team — and the ones that I’ve lost (you lose count at some point) — I am most proud of the team of “free agents” that I put together in Dream League. We ended up staying together for years and some of us became friends off the court. We learned each other’s strengths and weakness, adapted to them, accepted each other for who we were. I think we may have won a championship, but I honestly don’t remember. That’s almost irrelevant.
That’s what we have with the Warriors.
Granted, the NBA is a business, but at the same time, it’d be a bad business move for Lacob to put this process at risk. It’s really, really, really hard to establish a good chemistry, to have the ability to grow as a team with the right foundation. It’s not to be taken lightly.
Firing Jackson could set Golden State back for years.
I don’t see Lacob as a guy who grew up in the trenches, battling in basketball games with his teammates, so I truly hope Lacob has enough smart people around him who have, who will tell him that the only option after this season is over is to sign Jackson long-term, and to a much-deserved hefty raise.
In Game 6, you saw the Warriors play at their utmost potential. Draymond Green and Harrison Barnes giving the effort to close out on shooters in the waning moments was enough for me to be proud of this team and what Jackson has built.
Jackson also out-coached a future Hall-Of-Fame coach in Doc Rivers. Jackson gave us his all, subbing in players in key moments. Going offense-for-defense for every second of every minute when necessary. He even called a play out of timeout that was an alley oop from Marreese Speights to David Lee. Think about that. Speights to Lee! The last two options the Clippers would’ve expected.
That’s some pretty incredible X’s and O’s right there, even though they’re not my focus.
The focus is on the players, the locker room, the experience. Show me another guy out there that can create this environment, especially with the potential that it still has.
Alright, I’m done. For now.
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