Accolades abound but little ego on this Team USA staff: Youre just here to serve

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Chip Engelland is tall and tan. His preferred outfit on the court is a pair of USA basketball shorts that stretch to his knees and a Dri-Fit, long-sleeve T-shirt.

Engelland is, by many accounts, the NBA’s most renowned shooting coach and, fall through spring, is an assistant for the Oklahoma City Thunder. For Team USA, he is a traveling consultant. He commands players’ pregame workouts with curt, sharp direction and encouragement and is efficient to the point where he doesn’t need his voice to call for the next ball from ball kids. A simultaneous raising of the eyebrows, widening of his eyes and nod of his head does the trick.

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Before the Americans’ exhibition game last week against Greece, at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, Engelland was marching a group through its early shooting work when he barked at the lone Team USA staffer seated on the bench.

“Can you go make sure the next group is ready right away?” Engelland said.

And then, almost as if he realized to whom he was actually speaking, Engelland added: “Or someone?”

The man on the receiving end of the command? In truth, he is not used to being spoken to that way.

So Erik Spoelstra — a two-time NBA champion as head coach for the Miami Heat who has guided the organization to six NBA Finals appearances — paused, looked to his left and right and then, almost as if he realized that, within the context of the moment, Engelland’s direction was totally appropriate, hopped off the bench and jogged to the locker room to do what was asked.

This is not a story about ego or rank — or, really, about Engelland. (Although he made a nice cameo, didn’t he?)

It’s about the reality of the coaching staff’s star power for Team USA, where a coach with the pedigree of Spoelstra does the grunt work of an assistant, such as shagging missed shots, cutting video and running errands. And is happy to do it, because, after all, he is one.

“It’s really fun being part of a team and a program — and Steve (Kerr) talks about this — where in the NBA, a lot of things get in the way, and in normal life as well,” Spoelstra said. “When you come together for USAB, it’s all about collaborating and coming together for a common goal, in a matter of six weeks, to try to win a gold medal. You check everything else to the side, and really, you’re just here to serve. Sometimes, it means sacrifice, but it’s really more a matter of serving — serving each other, serving players, serving the program — and coming together to hopefully do something special.”

Kerr is the head coach for Team USA. He has won four titles as coach of the Golden State Warriors and has guided them to five consecutive finals (2015-19) and six overall.

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Joining Kerr and Spoelstra on the bench is Tyronn Lue, who won a championship as coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. Lue steered them to three straight finals (there was a fourth, on the front end of Lue’s stay in Cleveland, when he was an assistant on David Blatt’s staff for the team that faced the Warriors in the 2015 finals). Lue is now coach of the Clippers.

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The last official member of Kerr’s coaching staff is only one of the greatest college coaches ever, a man who took a mid-major program and turned it into a national power: Mark Few of Gonzaga.

Since 1992, USA Basketball’s roster for the Olympic and World Cup men’s teams has been a collection of NBA All-Stars, former All-Stars or rising stars, and this year’s team is no different. But the USA coaching staff for the 2023 FIBA World Cup could be the best in the illustrious history of the program. At minimum, it stands as the first staff where all four are considered to be the best among active coaches at their respective levels (pro and college), with many appearances in championship rounds (NBA Finals and NCAA Final Fours).

“It’s as cool of a lifetime opportunity as you can imagine,” said Few, 60, who’s coached Gonzaga to two Final Fours and has multiple national Coach of the Year awards to his name. “It’s fun to just kind of sit back, look around the coaches’ room and go, ‘Wow.’”

Kerr, 57, was an assistant for the previous two USA Basketball tours (2019 World Cup, Tokyo Olympics in 2021) under Gregg Popovich. Kerr said he picked the coaching staff, with light consultation from managing director Grant Hill and longtime USA general manager Sean Ford.

The staff Kerr originally chose is not the one with him heading to Manila for the World Cup. Spoelstra coached the U.S. Select Team, the younger NBA players who practice against the national team in training camp, in 2021 and was promoted. Few took the slot on staff for college coaches previously held by Villanova’s Jay Wright. The final slot was given to Monty Williams, now with the Detroit Pistons, but Williams had to step aside because of a personal conflict this summer, which left an opening for Lue — who had already agreed to coach the Select Team.

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“We were all in agreement on Mark, Spo, Ty,” Kerr said. “They’re such great coaches, all so highly qualified. They were all really no-brainers.”

Kerr and Lue coached against each other in all of the Warriors-Cavs finals. Lue followed Spoelstra in coaching his team to four straight finals (OK, one year, Blatt was the Cavs’ coach and Lue was the chief assistant, but work with me here), and the two of them have the shared experience of being head coach to LeBron James.

Spoelstra and Few are both from the Portland, Ore., area; Few was an assistant coach at Gonzaga, while Spoelstra was a point guard at conference-rival Portland.

Few also is close with Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown, a former assistant to Kerr. Spoelstra said he got to know Kerr a little when Kerr was a TV analyst for TNT before becoming coach of the Warriors, and Spoelstra was coaching the Heat.

“He would do a lot of our games, and I always found it really interesting the questions he would ask you,” Spoelstra said. “You could see immediately that he was a deep thinker and that he looked at things from a lot of different viewpoints than just the traditional ones. His questions were more coaching-related, different than the ones you would normally get.”

When it comes to a genuine relationship among the coaches, especially the three NBA coaches, there really wasn’t one prior to this Team USA experience.

“I’d never had a meal with any of them,” Kerr said. “I’d always felt their imprint on their teams when we played those teams, so there was always a lot of admiration and respect, but we were limited to pretty much saying ‘Hi’ before and after the games.

“It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have (Spoelstra and Lue) on staff, because I liked both of them so much that I wanted to get to know them and work with them.”

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Lue, 46, said Kerr reached out to him in 2018, when Lue had to step away briefly from the Cavs for health reasons, and again two seasons later when Cleveland fired Lue after James left as a free agent and the team lost its first six games at the start of a rebuild.

“Steve and Brad Stevens were the first two guys to reach out and check on me, just to see if I was OK,” Lue said. “I just think building that bond, and the respect we have for each other, coaching against each other in all those finals, it went a long way.”

The USA coaches had a private room for their daily meetings at the team’s posh Abu Dhabi resort, where the Americans stayed for seven nights. It was up a flight of stairs from the team’s private lobby where the buses picked them up and dropped them daily, totally separate from the marble-floored, second-story general lobby, with huge glass windows looking out toward the Persian Gulf.

Inside the coaches’ room were a conference table and leather-backed chairs, all the trappings for a collection of high-powered executives to hash out classified game plans and share sensitive trade secrets.

But usually, Kerr, Lue, Spoelstra and Few would sit in mesh shorts and T-shirts at a round table covered in cloth in a cavernous ballroom where the entire USA traveling party went each day to eat.

“Steve obviously leads the meetings … but everybody says everything,” Few said, trying to explain the dynamic.

Depending on the day, Kerr is either announcing his ideas for a practice plan or initiating a discussion of the game plan for that night’s opponent. Scouting reports are done by the assistants; for instance, Lue was in charge of scouting Greece, while Spoelstra handled the scout for the Germany game Sunday. Hill and Ford are often in the meetings too, and depending on when and where they are, the traveling consultants — such as Khalid Robinson (whom Kerr brought from the Warriors), Jeff Van Gundy, Engelland and Jamahl Mosley — are listening as well.

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The assistants can, and do, on occasion, disagree with Kerr, who encourages differing viewpoints and dissenting opinions.

“Yeah, (we disagree), but in a good way,” Kerr said. “We all just throw stuff out and debate different things. That’s one of the best parts about it, one of the most fun parts about when you get into a debate and not everyone agrees, because that’s when the basketball stuff really comes out and you debate the pros and cons of doing it a certain way.”

Lue and Spoelstra both are known for crafting elite defensive strategy in the NBA, whereas Kerr’s complex motion offense for the Warriors helped revolutionize the sport. Kerr is implementing the basic, simpler actions the Warriors use on offense into Team USA.

Lue and Spoelstra both add their wrinkles on offense, but that side of the ball is more Kerr’s responsibility. While the American team was in Malaga, Spain, Spoelstra missed a week of Team USA’s world tour to be at the Naismith Hall of Fame ceremony, and in that time, Lue emerged as the chief architect of the defense.

Lue made a name for himself in coaching circles for his defensive game plans in the NBA playoffs, when there is only one opponent in a series and days to work on specific coverages to take away an opponent’s strengths and expose weaknesses.

The games will come too fast at the World Cup to be compared to the NBA playoffs, but the urgency to win almost every game is the same as a late-series game in the NBA postseason.

“Ty’s brilliant. I mean, he is brilliant,” Few said. “I didn’t know Ty as well as I knew the other two coming into this, and Ty is just a brilliant basketball mind. There’s been so much information that he’s been subjected to over all these years as a player and an NBA coach, head coach or assistant. He doesn’t forget anyone, any action or the team that ran it, and probably the game and the day.”

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Spoelstra compared Lue to Russell Crowe’s character from “A Beautiful Mind” (or maybe it was Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting,” who can say?) to where Lue can step to any dry-erase board with a marker and have the board full of diagrams in seconds.

“The things you read and hear about Ty, it’s real,” Spoelstra said. “He is like that guy in the movie, writing on the walls … that’s Ty. It’s fun. I really enjoy basketball discussions with him, because there’s the traditional way of thinking, and he can do that, but then there’s the unconventional way of thinking, problem-solving.

“Ty is also a great people person. I can never be that,” Spoelstra said with a laugh.

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On this staff, everyone is a teacher, a student and a thief.

X’s, O’s, do’s and don’t’s will be making their way back to San Francisco and Miami and Los Angeles and Spokane, Wash., when the World Cup is over.

“When Steve and Spo speak, they command the room,” Lue said. “The guys really lock in and pay attention. Steve’s more laid back. Spo is more energetic. When Spo’s speaking, he’s more energetic, more, ‘Let’s go.’ And Spo’s doing scouts, which I bet he hasn’t done in 15 years. Steve and Spo are the two best coaches in the NBA, and Spo’s doing scouts. The players should see that. Won two championships, and he’s sacrificing, doing scouts, running drills.”

Few said Spoelstra, like Lue, had an “unbelievable” basketball mind, and is “so open to sharing and listening.” He echoed Lue’s sentiments about Spoelstra’s commanding presence in any room.

“When he walks in, he automatically brings out all the respect the players, the people on the staff, everyone has for the Heat,” Few said. “It’s interesting, he and I talk about culture a lot. That’s something that we pride ourselves on with our culture at Gonzaga.

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“You know, Steve is more reluctant to talk about it, but even during the course of the year, I kept banging him on just how strong his culture is at Golden State.”

Spoelstra called Few “one of the great Hall of Fame coaches in college who created arguably the best mid-major program.”

“Nobody’s ever done that before,” Spoelstra said of Few, explaining how he fits onto this staff filled to the brim with NBA pedigrees.

But as is the case with any staff, all eyes ultimately look toward the front of the bench or to the center of the huddle where the head coach sits during a timeout.

Lue credits Kerr for commanding respect but also being laid back. Few cites the organizational culture at Golden State as a strength. Spoelstra said he admired Kerr’s “ability to distill a lot of information and then pare it down to what can impact the team.”

On the second day of training camp, Kerr called together not just his three assistants, but also Hill, Ford and Mosley (who was coaching the Select Team), as well as Purdue’s Matt Painter and the Indiana Pacers’ Jim Boylen, who were assisting Mosley, and asked them to write out who they felt should be Team USA’s starting five for the first scrimmage.

As it turned out, the voters nailed four of the team’s five starters by naming Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, Brandon Ingram and Jaren Jackson Jr. The assistants picked Cam Johnson to start that first day and since have gone to Anthony Edwards.

“I think it’s a great skill,” Spoelstra said. “He can find a way to simplify what is complex.”

Kerr said he has gotten “exactly what I’d expected” from the three All-Star assistants. He admires their common commitment “to doing something special and win a World Cup” and the awareness they share that “it could all go wrong,” which speaks to the sensitivity and attention to detail they bring to their roles.

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“All this stuff is relationships and communication,” Kerr said. “From the first day to now, we’re all totally comfortable with each other. We’re joking around, and it’s like we’ve been together for years now.

“It happens quickly.”

More Team USA coverage from Joe Vardon

• Anthony Edwards leads the way in final exhibition
• Overseas tour is a family affair for Bobby Portis
• Steve Kerr is adding some Warriors flair to Americans’ offense
• Tour may be the height of Mikal Bridges’ hoop life

(Top photo of Team USA coaching staff: Juan Ocampo / NBAE via Getty Images)

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