Black coaches gain more chances in the NBA after demand for players

Jamahl Mosley traveled all over the world for basketball.

He played for professional teams in Mexico, Australia, Spain, Finland and South Korea. He was a member of the Denver Nuggets coaching staff and in charge of player development when Carmelo Anthony played there. He was assistant coach for the Cleveland Cavaliers for the four long years after LeBron James left the Miami Heat. Dirk Nowitzki’s final years and Luka Doncic’s early years at the Dallas Mavericks? Mosley was there too, as an assistant coach.

He worked for 16 seasons on NBA technical committees, developing his talent and looking forward to his big break as head coach.

At university, he followed his mother’s advice and chose to play on a team whose coach was black in order to learn leadership skills from a person who looked like him. Doubts about whether he’d ever get a job of the kind he’d been hoping for have only surfaced in recent years, when he’s participated in seven selection processes for NBA head coaching posts — and been turned down every time.

“Because I knew I was qualified for the job,” Mosley said. “And I knew I had done well in interviews. And I knew I had the skills to do the job.”

Executive and coaching positions on NBA teams have long been dominated by white men, although more than 70% of the league’s players are black. But this year Mosley ended up getting caught up in an unusual trend in the preseason signings: 7 of the 8 head coach posts that were vacant in the league were filled by black candidates.

Five of them, including Mosley, reached this post for the first time in their careers. The others are Wes Unseld Jr. of the Washington Wizards; Willie Green of the New Orleans Pelicans; Ime Udoka of the Boston Celtics; and Chauncey Billups of the Portland Trail Blazers.

“Fifteen years ago, we probably wouldn’t have gotten those jobs,” said Green.

The breakthrough in representation — now 13 of the league’s 30 head coach posts are occupied by blacks and two of the other head coaches are not white either — came amid a broader national dialogue about race and team practices at the time of hire professionals.

Black players have made their voices heard, looking for changes they feel should have happened a long time ago.

“This is a blemish in the league, and no one can deny it,” said Michele Roberts, executive director of the NBA Players Union, “and we need to keep working to make things better.”

‘A natural cultural link’

Long before he became coach of the Celtics, Udoka was, in his description, a basketball scholar. As a teenager in Portland, Oregon, he videotaped the games of some of his favorite college athletes, such as Lawrence Moten of Syracuse University and Lamond Murray of the University of California at Berkeley. Afterwards, he would go to a block near his house and try to imitate their movements. Udoka still has a stack of these VHS tapes in his house.

“I wasn’t the most athletic or the most talented guy,” Udoka said, “and so I really needed to use my brain to find some advantage. the coaches noticed that in me”.

Udoka grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood, attended a black school, and had black coaches. He wasn’t especially aware of race issues, he says, because that environment was all he knew. But his high school coach “always preached the idea of ​​family, unity and brotherhood,” Udoka said, and these were lessons he carried with him throughout his life.

Udoka played for several NBA teams, as a specialist defensive wing, and it was during this period that, in his words, he “caught the virus” of a career as a coach. Udoka helped create an Amateur Athletic Union team in Portland that included Terrence Ross and Terrence Jones, two future NBA players. He also attended coaching clinics organized by the NBA players union.

After ending his playing career, he began working as an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs in 2012 under coach Gregg Popovich.

The Celtics spot came in June, when the team announced that Brad Stevens, who had run the team for eight seasons, would become the new president of basketball operations. Jaylen Brown, one of the team’s young stars, said in a recent interview with The Undefeated that he had asked the club to hire a black coach. The issue of representation was also important to him.

“Players were asking, demanding, to see more guys like them on the technical committees,” Udoka said. He added that “in the coaches’ work, I think there has been a shift from the emphasis on tactics and game plans to the value of relationships. And black coaches will have a natural cultural bond with their players.”

Complaints increasingly audible

About three years ago, Rick Carlisle, president of the National Basketball Coaches Association, began to hear from more and more young assistant coaches from different backgrounds that they felt they weren’t finding opportunities. real means of conquering posts as head coaches.

The league and association of coaches soon began developing the NBA Coaches Equality Initiative, a development program for young coaches, with the goal of ensuring that qualified candidates are considered when job opportunities arise. Since 2019, numerous workshops, conferences, round tables and networking events have been held.

And there’s an app, a coach database that launched last year and now includes profiles of about 300 coaches, and the league’s powerful figures — club owners, president and other executives — have access to the names, Carlisle said. . Coaches can upload their résumés, talk about their philosophies and even post videos of their interviews online.

It’s like a version of the Bumble app, but aimed at basketball coaches. And it’s all part of a broader mission, said Oris Stuart, the league’s director of personnel and inclusion.

“We have an ongoing dialogue with our teams about the importance of ensuring that the process is inclusive in their decision-making,” said Stuart. “Our focus is on the importance of ensuring that the best talent is considered, that our reach is broad, and that we strive to go beyond the pre-established networks that people have always worked with.”

But over the past 12 months, the lawsuits that led to the hiring of two white coaches – including Carlisle’s for the Indiana Pacers – have been criticized for not appearing to be inclusive.

‘A systemic issue’

As an economics student at Johns Hopkins University, Wes Unseld Jr. envisioned his career in investment banking. But he spent two summer vacations, before graduating in 1997, as an intern at the Washington Wizards.

His father, Wes Unseld, who was one of the most famous players on the team then known as the Washington Bullets and is a member of the basketball Hall of Fame, was working as the team’s general manager after seven seasons as head coach. Unseld father offered his son the opportunity to learn something about working at basketball in case the financial world wasn’t the right choice for him.

“If you want to be a part of this business, you need to learn about it,” Unseld Jr. remembers his father telling him. “I thought that, well, it would be nice to learn about basketball, but my dad told me I’d go through every department. Public relations, public relations, marketing, sales… whatever role you name, I’ve done it.”

Unseld, who was a good college basketball player (Johns Hopkins plays in Division 3 of American college basketball), soon realized he couldn’t put basketball aside and soon became one of the many anonymous workers who make up the NBA work.

After eight seasons as a scout for Washington, he spent the next 16 seasons as assistant coach for several teams in the league. Refined offensive schemes. Helped build defenses. At Wizards, his nickname was “The Genius”, for his attention to detail and instinctive knowledge of the game. In Denver, he helped turn Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray into stars.

But I couldn’t find a job as a head coach. Unseld Jr. says he was never sure race was a factor. “If an opportunity doesn’t materialize, it’s sometimes easy to ask if that’s why,” he said. “Maybe so. It’s hard to say.”

At the start of the 2012-2013 season, there was a record 14 black head coaches in charge of NBA teams, but the number has dropped in subsequent seasons, showing that progress can be tenuous. Unseld Jr. said, “The NBA is a business that works around a network of relationships, like all businesses.”

“If you don’t have a connection with the powerful, it can be difficult,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s an open way of not interviewing black candidates or not giving nonwhites a chance; what might happen is that these candidates don’t have the network of relationships they need to get the job. It’s more of a systemic issue. “

Roberts has praised the coaches association for its efforts to address the issue in recent seasons, but the real strength, she said, comes from the players.

“A happy team is probably a more successful team,” she said. “And if players believe managers are ignoring the concerns they articulate about coaching staff, what motivation would they have to stay on a team?”