Becky Hammon is just the start of a revolution
Let’s talk about the Becky Hammon boomlet.
As usual, Hammon is in the news, and rightfully so. The longtime WNBA star has succeeded wildly in a top assistant role with Gregg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs. She’s coached their summer league team, is universally acknowledged as the head coach in waiting and managed to put to bed the idea that men cannot be led by a woman.
Accordingly, she received the full New Yorker treatment, where a number of prominent NBA figures, from Popovich to Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, weighed in on her behalf. Popovich said of the idea that Hammon could be a head coach in the league: “If somebody is smart, it’s actually a pretty good marketing deal — but it’s not about that. It’s got to be that she’s competent, that she’s ready.”
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Kerr echoed this, pointing out that Hammon is the one person “who could possibly get an interview” for a head coaching job.
It is worth deconstructing why this is. Hammon is in position to grab a head job because she’s managed to succeed in an apprenticeship role with Popovich — not because he decided to go hire a woman, but because while with the San Antonio Silver Stars, Hammon tore her ACL, pushed her way into the Spurs’ orbit and impressed him. That is a sequence of events that proved fortuitous, but it also spotlights the real barrier to women coaching in the NBA in greater numbers: opportunity.
There are plenty of people who would argue that coaching in the NBA is not the be-all, end-all of coaching, and they’d be right. Pat Summitt famously responded to calls that she coach the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team by inquiring why anybody would think that is a step up. But it isn’t an issue of NBA vs. WNBA. It is a numbers game.
Men can coach in the NBA. They can coach other men in college. They can coach women’s college teams, and they can coach WNBA teams.
Women don’t get in the room to interview for the NBA positions, nor the men’s college jobs. Not at the head coaching level, and very infrequently at the collegiate level, either. Few are even getting assistant gigs. All of this serves to make the funnel vastly smaller for the talented basketball minds who are women. Fewer women can join the industry, remain in the industry and put themselves in position to succeed in the industry if they have access to a smaller portion of the total coaching job pool.
Even Hammon herself said when she began talking with Popovich and asked to join their meetings and practices, it was with the idea of eventually coaching women. This is no surprise: before Hammon, it didn’t seem possible to women, not because there aren’t plenty of capable candidates, but rather because men won’t let them in the room. Ask Kara Lawson, the highly-decorated Tennessee star and WNBA icon, who the Kings wouldn’t let into practice because it would “distract the players.”
While that ownership group slunk away as failures, players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant and many others have consistently touted the WNBA and the basketball knowledge of its players and coaches. So you decide whether you want to trust their basketball acumen, or that of the Maloofs.
I would argue that the biggest advancement last season on this front wasn’t Hammon’s continued trajectory — including turning down both the Florida women’s and Colorado State men’s head coaching jobs as she barrels toward history — as it was the Kings, under different ownership, hiring Jenny Boucek as an assistant. And there’s a simple reason: Jenny Boucek didn’t come to the Kings as some kind of perfect leader nonpareil skeptics could simply dismiss as an anomaly.
Let’s be real here: Jenny Boucek did not have a good 2017. As head coach of the Seattle Storm, she lost the locker room, her Storm underachieved and she was fired before the end of the season.
This is not, of course, a reason the Kings shouldn’t have hired her. The NBA is filled to capacity with men who have lost locker rooms and failed to reach the end of seasons before teams fired them. It is, rather, a huge step forward for equality that the same league where Byron Scott received four different opportunities to lead teams gave Jenny Boucek an assistant’s role the same calendar year she inexplicably chose to defend Sylvia Fowles with single coverage for an entire half.
And this is truly how to close the gap: it is a numbers game. As Popovich put it, “When 10 other teams have a Becky Hammon, that will tell me the culture is changing.”
So who should these 10 Becky Hammons be? It is a tribute to the depth of intellectual basketball talent that virtually everyone I asked had a different answer.
Take Rebecca Lobo, for instance. The ESPN analyst and Basketball Hall of Famer chose a popular pick among those surveyed: Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve.
“She’s smart, knows hoops and has the right personality,” Lobo said. “And she’s perfected the in-game interview blowoff.”
Indeed, it defies all logic that no NBA team has ever reached out to Reeve, who has led the Minnesota Lynx to four WNBA titles and two other trips to the WNBA Finals over the past seven years. Whether she’d consider it is another matter, of course — her list was too long to name, she said, and dependent on “who actually WANTS TO” coach in the NBA.
For Tamika Catchings, the WNBA all-time leader in win shares, coaching has never been a career goal — though she’s eager to become a general manager someday, and any front office that interviewed her would do well to hire her immediately, no matter what league. Catchings chose a fellow Lady Vol as her top choice to coach in the NBA.
“Kara Lawson,” Catchings said. “She’s got great knowledge of the game and she’s super steady. Never too high or low, even when she’s broadcasting. I think she does a great job of explanation and she knows how to get the best out of people.”
(Again, who are you siding with: the great Tamika Catchings or the Maloofs? Right, I thought so.)
NBA experience mattered to many who considered this question. For Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma, that led him to Hammon. For his successor as head coach of the USA Basketball women’s team, South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, that led her to someone in-house.
“Coach Lisa Boyer on our staff,” Staley said. “Because she has NBA experience working with John Lucas in Houston and knows the game of basketball.”
But experience isn’t everything. Bill Laimbeer, who has no shortage of history in both the NBA and WNBA, picked someone still playing in the league.
“Tanisha Wright,” Laimbeer said. “She has great mental toughness, an understanding of how hard a player must work and a burning desire to win.”
But the wide variety of answers is, itself, the real answer here. The change the NBA needs isn’t hiring Becky Hammon. It is making sure that more practices include the next Becky Hammon, and the next Kara Lawson, too. It is including this talented pool of women who grew up around the game, playing the game, coaching the game to ensure that they have a true shot at all the coaching jobs in America.
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As Popovich said of Hammon: “It has nothing to do with her being a woman. She happens to be a woman.”
All over America, the same is true of so many talented coaches, on the precipice of making basketball in all its forms even better.