The first time I met Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens was outside Butler University’s famed Hinkle Fieldhouse. It was winter 2012, less than a year after Stevens, then the coach at the tiny Indianapolis school, had led Bulldogs to their second consecutive NCAA championship game. I was with a friend who knew Stevens a little and wanted to say hello. I was surprised Stevens had agreed to meet us. Most college coaches don’t have time for such things, especially in the middle of the season with practice barely more than an hour away.
But as we approached the gym door, I could see a familiar face peering through the glass. Brad Stevens? The doors were locked and he didn’t want to make us wait in the cold, he explained, as he let us inside. He took us to his office, a drab room by the opulent standards of big-time college basketball. The ceiling leaked. He sat on a couch, not a particularly plush one, and acted as if he was in heaven.
As Stevens chatted, asking as much about us as we were about him, I was struck by how unpretentious he seemed. He was like no other top college coach I had come across. Here was a man who had nearly won back-to-back national championships at a school outside the sport’s major conferences and yet he was making none of our conversation about himself. Top college coaches make everything about themselves.
I think about that afternoon a lot as I watch Stevens coach the Boston Celtics, who are into the Eastern Conference finals for a second straight postseason against the Cleveland Cavaliers with Game 1 of the best-of-seven-games seires tipping off on Sunday. What the 41-year-old has done in transitioning from a college coach to NBA coach is not completely unique. John Calipari and Rick Pitino both went from college to the pros with modest success. But they, like most who have tried the switch in recent decades, ran back to the safety of college.
College coaches don’t make good NBA coaches. Because their world is recruiting teenagers around 30-game seasons, they are uptight. Every game is like a playoff game. They often are yelling: at their players, at their assistant coaches, at the referees. NBA players don’t listen to screaming coaches. Their seasons are too long, the wear on their body too great. The men who make the best NBA coaches are those who make everything about their players and not themselves.
There is nothing that says Stevens should be a series away from the NBA finals. The Celtics went into this season with a team that had finals-caliber talent, built around high-priced free-agent signings Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving. Then Hayward and Irving got hurt and yet Boston is still here, led not by stars but by a backup point guard, Terry Rozier, and the dependable post man Al Horford. While so much of the talk this postseason has been about Cleveland’s LeBron James and how he has carried the Cavaliers through the first two rounds of the playoffs, Stevens and the Celtics might be the NBA’s best story right now.
While James has been nothing short of jaw-dropping these last few weeks, the Celtics have been just as astounding in the way they tore apart the Philadelphia 76ers in the second round, beating a more talented team in five games. Yet more impressive than the result was the fashion in which Boston dismantled Philadelphia, holding Sixers rookie star Ben Simmons to just one point in Game 2. There were times Philadelphia, who had entered the playoffs on a 16-game winning streak, looked utterly lost. That was no accident.
“I think (Stevens) observes a lot better,” former Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant recently told Chris Mannix’s Fox Sports Radio show, when asked what separates Stevens from other NBA coaches. “He observes the game, the flow of the game. And the tendencies. He can look at players and their tendencies. And then you can file that away.”
An example, Bryant said, was the play that won Game 3, one in which Stevens sent all the Celtics away from the basket, leaving Horford to catch a lob pass that he dropped in to turn a one-point Sixers lead into a Boston victory.
“I had to laugh,” Bryant said. “He just pulled everybody up. It was prime misdirection. … He used Philly’s aggressiveness and youth against them. He knew they were going to be aggressive defensively, he knew they were going to overplay and now you have Horford on the backside. He’s able to look at the game and make adjustments on the fly. He’s a great coach, man.”
It is widely accepted that the league’s top two coaches right now are San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich and Golden State’s Steve Kerr. Both are masters at building cultures that support their players, that encourage unselfishness. In Stevens’s four seasons coaching the Celtics he has slowly worked his way to that level. He might have reached it faster had he not had the misfortune of twice facing James in playoff series: the first round in 2015 and the conference finals last year.
This year’s Cavaliers are not like others in recent seasons. While James is having one of the great playoff runs of all time, the rest of the team is vulnerable. If Stevens can pull this patched-together group of Celtics past James and into the finals, people will have to notice. It might be one of the greatest feats of coaching the NBA has seen in some time.
The other day, while looking for something that described Stevens coaching style, I came across a podcast interview he recorded for the Positive Coaching Alliance. In the interview he was asked how he let his players know he was working as hard as them.
“My goal is to simplify their lives with regard to the game of basketball,” he said. “When we enter practice I don’t want to waste their time, I want to get in and out of the gym as soon as possible. To do that you have to spend a lot of time thinking about the right way to go about your practice or the game prep … so they have the right amount of information: not too much, not too little.”
A remarkable thought in a world where most coaches make everything about themselves. Stevens never has and now he is on the brink of one of the NBA’s greatest coaching jobs ever.