Author Topic: Article featuring Stevens in WSJ  (Read 1269 times)

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Article featuring Stevens in WSJ
« on: December 21, 2020, 03:16:38 PM »

Offline Boris Badenov

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Today's Wall Street Journal has an article "The Case of the NBA’s Most Stolen Play," which features Stevens among others.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-stolen-play-brad-stevens-steve-kerr-11608518626?mod=hp_featst_pos3

It's probably pay-only but here are some decent excerpts:

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"How does an idea travel from a small college in Kentucky to Celtics coach Brad Stevens, Warriors coach Steve Kerr and the highest levels of basketball?"

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At the biggest moment of an NBA Finals game with a championship at stake, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr called a play for the greatest shooter in basketball history.

The Warriors had practiced this play many times, but they had never used it before Game 6 of the 2019 Finals. This was the perfect moment, Kerr decided. His team was down one with the season on the line, and he wanted the ball in Stephen Curry’s hands. 

But what he drew that night wasn’t his play. Kerr had taken it from Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens. And it wasn’t entirely his play, either.

“It’s all stolen,” Stevens said. “We’re all thieves.”

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The play’s origins go back to Georgetown College, an NAIA school in Kentucky, where an inventive coach named Jim Reid liked watching the late West Coast basketball games and doodling observations. That’s how Reid, who died in 1996, discovered this set...

Mike Beitzel was the coach of Hanover College when he visited Georgetown in the 1980s to share beers and talk basketball in a basement with Reid and his staff.

Beitzel brought Reid’s play back to Hanover and called it “Tiger” in honor of the Georgetown Tigers. Then it began to spread. Miller took a coaching job at DePauw University, another Division-III school in Indiana...

It was a fateful decision. DePauw had a senior guard that year who would become one of the finest basketball coaches of his generation. His name was Brad Stevens.

Lots of interesting tidbits going on from there...including the fact that its current form used by Kerr and others--which changed the focus from a backdoor layup to an open 3--was an innovation by Stevens on the original.