In the world’s best basketball league, the NBA, there is a huge Finnish situation this season.
Lauri Markkanen plays for the Utah Jazz with a mammoth contract of more than 300 million euros in his pocket as one of the league’s best-paid players.
In recent years, it has been celebrated all over Europe Tuomas Iisalo makes Finnish sports history when he is the first Finnish-born coach in the NBA. Iisalo plays a big role as the first assistant coach of the Memphis Grizzlies. For example, he is responsible for the team’s offensive play.
Both are very interesting, but Iisalo’s situation is even more fascinating. Why did this?
1. Iisalon’s Memphis can be successful this season
There are no high expectations for Lauri Markkanen’s season. Utah focuses on looking to the future and who will go alongside Markkanen to build a future champion candidate team.
Karrikoi now only expects that Markkanen will remain intact throughout the NBA season. Just thinking about the general stereotype in the NBA of an injury-prone star, but also the best starting points for next fall’s EC home games.
Iisalon’s Memphis, on the other hand, is an interesting wild card for this NBA season. Memphis made the so-called Huhkajas and put almost everyone on the court except the head coach. As the pieces fall into place, Memphis can succeed. At least as far as a playoff spot, which Markkanen and Utah are far from.
2. Perfect combinations on paper
Last season for the Grizzlies went under the bench. The team’s number one star And Morant brandished a gun on social media a couple of times before the start of the season. Morant was suspended for 25 games. For the rest of the season, Morant was on the sidelines due to injuries.
Many of the other regular players of the team were absent for long periods due to health problems. Memphis was the bottom of the NBA.
Now Morant, the spindly electric rabbit, is back. Expectations are high, because in the history of the sport, Iisalo’s effective offensive play has been played by playmakers like Morant.
Another perfect combination can be a coaching staff. The head coach Taylor Jenkins is known in the NBA as a tough defensive end. When Jenkins and Iisalo’s skills are combined, at least on paper the starting point should be good.
3. The revolutionary handprint is already visible
In the Memphis media before the start of the season, a big topic of conversation has been the team’s new kind of offensive play, which is precisely Iisalo’s main job.
In practice games, the trademark of Iisalo and Memphis’ recent history has come to the fore: a hard tempo. Now Memphis is trying to play faster than it has ever played before. In three seconds, to the other end of the field and towards the basket.
It is even more fascinating that North America has already seen Iisalo’s handprint in Memphis’ playing.
For example, Iisalo’s revolutionary tagging concept, originally taken from Australia, has been on display. The purpose of it is to gain more ball control and on the other hand to immediately put pressure on the opponent in defense so that the whole team goes for offensive rebounds.
Playing principles familiar from Iisalo’s previous teams have also been seen. Playing ball screens and playing patterns from the so-called Iverson cuts.
4. Fascinating contradictions
There is still reason to be patient when annealing. After all, the situation wouldn’t even be this fascinating if everything was rosy from the start.
First of all, Morant and other regular players must stay fit and without headlines for the entire 82-game regular season. Morant has played the most regular season games in his career, even then only 67.
Cold water has already come down the neck when Memphis’ star player and in 2023 the NBA’s best defender Jaren Jackson Jr unable to play in season opener.
The hardness of the Western Conference also brings fascination to the season. There must not be very long weaker episodes during the season.
There is no one hundred percent credit to Memphis in this regard. That’s what the assessments of the American media tell.
Some are calling Memphis a top contender and a playoff team, while others are even out of the playoffs. So it’s an interesting mystery team!
The most delicious prospect would be for Iisalo to continue the same path as in Europe, i.e. constantly exceeding the expectations of outsiders.
Iisalo is also known as a coach who demands extreme discipline. He himself has spoken before about how European basketball and the NBA are different worlds. How will Iisalo adapt to the more star-cult-like NBA?
Already a tough thing
The answer to the previous question is Iisalon based on previous speechesthat probably well. It doesn’t matter how it goes, losing the first assistant coach is still a tough thing. Not only in Finnish sports history, but also on a European scale.
Urheilu investigated the path of all 223 coaches appointed as assistant coaches of NBA clubs this season to the current point. For most of them, the road to becoming an actual NBA coach has gone through several years of farm league coaching or player development coach and video coaching jobs.
This is how the path to the sharpest peak was also opened for this season’s two European-born head coaches Darko to Rajakovic and For Jordi Fernandez.
In the upcoming season, there are a total of 13 European-born coaches in the NBA. Of these, along with Iisalo, only one is a member of the Dallas coaching team Marko Milic has come directly from Europe to the NBA. He came to Dallas with his countryman, the Slovenian superstar, Luka Doncic in the wake of.
The European-born assistant coaches before Iisalo, Rajakovic and Fernandez have been two of the toughest basketball coaches of all time in Europe: Igor Kokoskov and Ettore Messina. Of these, Kokoskov was also the first European-born NBA head coach in all time.
Iisalo’s high esteem is therefore underlined by the exceptional route directly to the number one assistant coach among the iconic coaches.
Of course, many top European names have not wanted to join the NBA as an assistant coach like Iisalo, such as the number one name in the Euroleague in recent years Ergin Ataman. Golden finger of the Spanish national team and assistant coach of Toronto’s 2019 NBA champion team Sergio Scariolo last year turned down an offer to become the NBA’s number one assistant coach.
In this sense too, we have to take our hats off to Iisalo for his courage to leave Europe’s top club in the middle of an uncertain situation in the NBA.