by Seth Davis
It is not so much the joy of winning as a disdain for losing that drives Stevens. He is often called a genius, but that is not true. Rather, he is diligent and persistent and a synthesizer of information. His thorough, meticulous, disciplined preparation, and the knowledge he accumulates during that process, is what empowers him to get his team to Us. It’s hard work but a labor of love.
Stevens dives into his game-day routine like he does all his endeavors, with quiet, burning, even-keeled intensity. He wakes up early, sees his kids off to school, grabs a cup of coffee, and secludes himself in his home office. He spends a lot of time during the season speaking one-on-one with his players, but he is not a big “meeting guy” when it comes to his staff. He will organize a conference call to start the season and assign everyone their responsibilities, but aside from a few confabs along the way, his assistants work in their own silos just like he does. For each opponent, one assistant scouts the offense and, one the defense, and a third evaluates personnel. The coaches email their written reports to Stevens and send him their video edits via Dropbox. These are due to him by noon the day before. He likes to stay a game ahead, if possible. That’s why he almost never sleeps on airplanes. If he can get some work done late at night, he won’t have to cram the next day.
Sitting at his desk and sipping his coffee, Stevens will pore over the information his assistants have compiled. Then he will watch that opponent’s three previous games, start to finish. This takes about six hours. Next he will take all those videos, select a smaller handful of clips, and edit them on his laptop. That’s the reel he will show his team later in the day. Stevens wants the video to be precise, with the plays in the exact right order. The last thing he ever wants to do is waste anyone’s time, most of all his own. Unlike many NBA teams, the Celtics do not hold morning shootarounds. Stevens prefers that his players get their sleep. They will meet at the arena a few hours before tipoff, go over the game plan, get up some shots, and then get to work.
While he edits videos and analyzes the math, Stevens takes notes on a pad full of templates that he has developed over the years. Once all his watching and note taking is done, he will use his laptop to retype his notes onto another template, which has just enough room for the information that really matters—offensive and defensive sets, individual tendencies, plays to be executed in certain situations. He will also compile a list of plays that he can draw up according to the situation. The names are derived from the person or team he stole them from—“Minnesota” or “Chicago,” for example. Another play might be called “Tibs” because he saw Timberwolves coach Tom Thibodeau run it, or “Spo” for something Miami coach Erik Spoelstra did, or “Mack” for a play run by the Israeli professional team Maccabi Tel Aviv. If one of Stevens’s assistants saw that list of names, it would mean nothing to him. Each reference conjures for Stevens a corresponding action that he can draw up on a clipboard for his players.
When he is through typing his notes, Stevens will print out the sheet and stuff it into his back pocket. Most games, he won’t even bother pulling it out. This is not because he has a photographic memory. It’s because he has spent so much time poring over the information that it has entered his brain and stayed there.
He is able to maintain his routine without being enslaved by it. “I know what I need to accomplish,” he says, “but it doesn’t have to all go perfectly to plan.” He doesn’t work off a daily checklist, but about a dozen times a year he will sit down and fine-tune his methods to ensure the machine is humming properly. His wife, Tracy, is in awe of his persistence. “It is amazing to watch him do the same thing every day,” she says. “The routine has evolved a little bit over the years, but the importance of having a routine that prepares him has stayed the same.”
In the midst of all this work, Stevens will send several text messages to his players, both individually and as a group. Some of these he sends the night before, so as soon as they wake up they will have something from him. His teams tend to play the way he works—efficiently, intelligently, consistently, intensely, all the while maintaining their collective even keel.
An NBA season is a marathon, with 82 regular season games, a couple dozen more in the preseason and postseason, plus all the training and travel in between. Stevens knows that he needs to take a break and have a little fun once in a while. He allows himself intermittent breaks. He goes for a run. He eats lunch, usually an egg panini. (But not the same meal every time.)
And he plays fifteen minutes of Ms. Pac-Man. Tracy got him the tabletop console as a gift several years ago. Stevens could play different games on it (such as Galaga, Frogger, and Donkey Kong), but Ms. Pac-Man is the first in the sequence. He started there and stayed there. He doesn’t study books or YouTube videos to get good at the game. That would be excessive. Rather, he learns by doing. He’s a math guy at heart, and the way he figures it, fifteen minutes times 41 home games adds up to a lot of eaten power pellets and blinking ghosts, not to mention all those points-yielding fruits. His strategy, not surprisingly, is well thought out. “I play for score, not boards,” he says.
The game is a perfect diversion for many reasons, but most of all this one: It always ends with a loss. Ms. Pac-Man always gets killed by a ghost. Stevens hates to lose, but that’s okay because he owns the game and can simply hit the start button and try again. The pleasure’s in the process. Each new game is a chance to get better.
* * *
• • •
His childhood was quite comfortable. He is almost apologetic about this. Even the name of the neighborhood where he grew up, Colony Woods, hints at an idyllic, Eden-like existence. Brad Stevens had two doting parents and no siblings, but he never thought of himself as an only child, because he had so many buddies living nearby. “Our house was always crawling with kids,” his father, Mark, says.
Brad’s parents were both professionals. Mark was an orthopedic surgeon; his mother, Jan, was an educator. They gave him their full attention and took him everywhere, so he was around adults a lot. Tracy says he was “the center of their universe,” but Brad’s parents also took measures to make sure he wasn’t entitled. They were regular attendees at the Zionsville United Methodist Church in Indiana, and they sent Brad on mission trips to Louisiana and Texas, where he helped feed needy people in downtrodden neighborhoods. Brad also got a painful lesson on the fragility of life when the fifteen-year-old boy who lived next door was killed in an auto accident. Humility, gratitude, and faith were the core values in the Stevens household. He started there and stayed there.
Brad’s first encounter with struggle came when he was a senior at DePauw University, a Division III school located in Greencastle, Indiana. He had been a very good basketball player at Zionsville Community High School, setting school career records in points, assists, steals, and three-pointers. He had hoped to play for Indiana, or any other Division I school for that matter, but he wasn’t good enough. So he ended up at DePauw. He was a frequent starter during his first two years there, but midway through his junior season, with the team mired in a losing skid, he saw his playing time dwindle. He barely got off the bench as a senior. Tracy, then his college girlfriend, could see how hard it was for him. “We would talk about it a lot because he was really struggling,” she says. “Basketball had been such a strong part of his identity. To have that change was really tough on him.”
As he stewed over this turn of events, Stevens and a fellow senior turned their ire on the freshmen who were taking their minutes. After one particularly harsh practice, the coach, Bill Fenlon, called the two of them into his office and dressed them down. When Stevens objected—“What are we supposed to do, just lay down for these guys?”—Fenlon gave him his first lesson on leadership. “No, you should play hard,” he said. “But do it in a way that brings them along. Don’t create a divide.”
Stevens felt ashamed. He also realized he had a choice. He could either quit the team or make the most of the situation.
He chose to persist. “Nothing could have been better for my coaching career than that experience,” he says. “I rode the roller coaster of emotions until my senior year, and then I became content when I came to the conclusion of, ‘Hey, moron, it’s not about you. It’s about being as good of a teammate as you can be and putting your best foot forward every day.’”
Looking back, there really was no other option. Stevens loved basketball way too much to quit. Growing up in Indiana, he was naturally inculcated into the state religion. His parents used to record Indiana games on television, and they can remember him being transfixed by the action on the screen since before he was in kindergarten. Brad grew up reading the sports pages, digesting the box scores daily. He had a hoop in the driveway, of course, but much of his time was spent at the fully paved court located in the backyard of his friend’s house. The neighborhood kids would play all day and then ride their bikes to the local Dairy Queen. Losers bought ice cream. “Those were fun days,” Stevens says.
His life was a buzz of activity. Even as a young boy, Stevens always had to be playing games, running around the neighborhood, doing something. Like many of the coaches in this book, he suspects that had he been tested, he would have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. “I clearly have ADD—clearly,” he tells me. “I’ve been told by specialists in that field that I would probably have been on some sort of medication.” He is an avid reader, but he confesses that he usually puts the book away when he is about halfway through. If he gets a long email, he clicks out by the second paragraph. His wife calls him the “cruise director” because whenever he goes on vacation, he plans a full slate for the family. Jan recognized these patterns when Brad was young, but she was never concerned. “I loved the energy he had towards life,” she says.
Tracy Wilhelmy met Brad through mutual friends when they got to DePauw, but it wasn’t until they started dating as sophomores that she understood where his heart was. On their third date, he took her to a high school basketball game. The game was an hour’s drive away, and Brad talked about Indiana high school basketball the whole way there and back. “A basketball nerd through and through,” she says. “He was an encyclopedia. We had been friends for a year, but I didn’t know he had this love. I didn’t think it was weird. I actually thought it was really cool because he was so passionate about it.”
Tracy also got an early lesson in her new boyfriend’s hypercompetitiveness. A few months into their relationship, he invited her to Florida to take a vacation with his parents. She envisioned a few days of relaxing under the sun, but instead he engaged her in a series of competitions—at tennis, board games, shuffleboard, even running on the beach. He won everything. At one point during a tennis match, she finally got exasperated and said, “What is wrong with you?” She estimates that their lifelong series record in Scrabble is 500 to 2 in his favor. “I don’t know why I keep playing,” she says. “I guess I’m a tortured soul.”
Temperamentally, Brad took after his mom more than his dad, but the family member he most favored was Jan’s father, Jack Lothamer, a high school teacher, coach, and principal in Ohio. “He was a very commonsense guy, very practical. He was patient and calm and thought things through,” Jan says. For a guy with no economics or business background, Jack also turned out to be a pretty savvy investor. He didn’t have a lot of money, so he had to make his choices wisely. Jack gave Brad one heck of a tennis—and life—lesson when Brad was a kid. “You can win a lot of matches,” Grandpa Jack said, “by staying patient and waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.”
So when his college coach phased him out just as his playing career was winding down, Stevens’s PEAK profile started to be forged. It taught him the value of persistence when things didn’t go his way. It taught him to consider the thoughts and emotions of others. It forced him to decide who he was and what was important to him. And it imparted a very important piece of knowledge: No matter how much you plan, no matter how much you prepare, sometimes life is not fair. As much as he loved basketball, for the first time he understood there was a much larger game to be played. Hey, moron, it’s not about you.
* * *
• • •
When they weren’t playing their respective sports or hanging with friends at DePauw, Tracy and Brad spent a lot of time together in the library. He liked to work in a cubicle on the third floor; she was one floor below. Even though it seemed they spent about the same amount of time studying, Tracy noticed that by the time final exams came around, she would be up all night cramming, while Brad was always in bed at a decent hour. “He was never stressed out before a test,” she says. “He was much more efficient than me.”
Brad was an economics major in the Management Fellows Program, which was designed to combine an academic curriculum with real-world business experience. He does not remember much from the material he studied, but he did figure out his own best way to acquire knowledge. He wrote notes while he read his textbooks. When he was through, he rewrote those notes in cleaner, more organized form. He noticed that as he went through this process, the information magically entered his mind. This resulted from discipline, not genius. Once the test was over, he pretty much forgot the stuff.
His most salient moment of clarity came during an elective leadership seminar his senior year. The class exposed him to the teachings of Robert K. Greenleaf, an Indiana native who founded the notion of servant leadership. Stevens had done some volunteer basketball coaching in the past, but he had never seriously thought about entering the profession. The two coaching icons in his home state, Indiana’s Bob Knight and Purdue’s Gene Keady, were hot-tempered, old-school disciplinarians whose primary mode of communication was beratement. It never occurred to Stevens there was another way to go about leading. Learning about servant leadership was a life-changing lesson in the art of authenticity.
“I remember thinking, This makes sense,” he tells me. “Do you want to be around somebody who lifts you up, or somebody that breaks you down? That’s why whenever people ask me what’s your leadership style, my answer is, ‘It should be you.’ There’s an authenticity that is needed for leadership. If it’s not real, then it’s not going to work.”
When Stevens was a junior at DePauw, he earned an internship at Eli Lilly and Company, the pharmaceutical conglomerate whose headquarters are located in Indianapolis. He was so impressive that he scored a full-time position upon graduation. The job suited his skill set, and it paid quite well, to the tune of about $44,000 per year. One of his primary responsibilities was to help set up a new incentive structure for the company’s sales force, which he presented to a roomful of executives during a company retreat in Arizona. He was also in charge of planning that weekend. Figuring that all those people wouldn’t want to come to Arizona and spend their time attending stuffy meetings, he budgeted periods for recreational activities like golf, horseback riding, and swimming. He also set up a group dinner off-site. It was a dream job for a natural-born cruise director.
Eli Lilly’s most prominent drug at the time was Prozac, which treats depression. To that point, Stevens had not given much thought to mental wellness, but working on that account opened his eyes to just how many people were dealing with depression without their friends and family knowing it. He credits that experience for making him a better coach. “I think a lot of people in sports have missed the boat on mental health,” he says. “You have to be empathetic in knowing that everybody has their own lives, and everybody has something tough going on. You need to make sure you understand that before you coach them.”
It was a good gig with a bright future. Yet there was something missing: a scoreboard. To feed that jones, Stevens continued to do some coaching at local AAU teams and camps. He also made a few bucks working the basketball camp at Butler University, a private school in Indianapolis with a storied basketball tradition. It was an exciting, challenging environment. Stevens clung to a Butler assistant coach named Thad Matta and
soaked up all the information he could. “He was always right by my side, asking questions, asking if I needed help,” Matta tells me. “He was young, but you could see the wheels were turning.”
It didn’t take long for Stevens to come to an obvious, albeit unconventional career choice. He decided to leave his cushy office job with the stable future to take his shot at coaching. Neither his girlfriend nor his parents were surprised. One of the people whom Stevens called looking for advice was Matta, who had just been promoted to head coach at Butler. Matta suggested that Stevens come to work for him as a volunteer assistant. The job came with no salary, but it offered a foot in the door. Stevens had a couple of possibilities at Division II and Division III schools, but he had always dreamed of being in the NCAA Tournament. He felt like he underachieved as a player, so his only chance was to get there as a coach.
Stevens moved into a friend’s basement and found a part-time job at Applebee’s. Before he started at the restaurant, a position opened up on Matta’s staff. Stevens moved into the full-time but low-paying role of director of basketball operations. Tracy was thrilled for him—that is, until Matta asked him to accompany the team on a trip to Finland that forced Brad to miss Tracy’s brother’s wedding. She was furious. “We broke up for about two hours,” Tracy says. “It turned out to be a good thing, though, because at least I knew what I was getting into.”
The idea to change careers might have seemed risky, but Stevens never felt that way. He felt authentic. Each day, he walked into work and passed a statue honoring Tony Hinkle, the legendary coach at Butler whose career spanned five decades. Beside the statue was a stone plaque listing the five principles that constitute the “Butler Way.” Among those tenets was the word Servanthood. Whenever Stevens saw that word etched in stone, he knew he was in the right place.
