Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  This pro-style approach caught the eye of several NBA executives, but each time one of them reached out to gauge his interest, Stevens shooed them away. He had a different reply when Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge called in the spring of 2013. Ainge had become impressed with Stevens while scouting Hayward. When Doc Rivers decided to leave the Celtics, Ainge asked whether Stevens was interested in taking his place. He was. The NBA can be a much colder business than college, but if there was one franchise that had echoes of the Butler Way, it was the Celtics. Plus, the timing couldn’t have been better. Brad and Tracy had decided to move to a different community now that their children, Brady and Kinsley, were eight and five years old, respectively. They had sold their house and were staying with Brad’s mother while looking for a new place to live. Had they settled on a house and a new neighborhood, Brad might have been reluctant.

  Brad sat at Jan’s kitchen table, which was covered in plastic to protect it from the kids’ arts-and-crafts projects, and listened as Ainge, two of the Celtics’ co-owners, and the team’s assistant general manager, Mike Zarren, made their pitch. The money was nice, of course, but Stevens was more swayed by Ainge’s offer to give him a six-year contract. In the face of such a drastic rebuild, that long-term commitment spoke volumes. Brad thought it through as he always does. Then he walked into his office at Butler where Tracy was signing payroll checks for the basketball camp and told her, “I’m going to do it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There was much to learn. NBA basketball is much different from the college version, with a 24-second clock and an additional eight minutes of playing time. That equates to a lot more possessions and substitutions for the head coach to manage. Plus, for the first time Stevens was coaching players of comparable size and speed. That forced him to challenge some long-held assumptions.

  For example, he had always instructed his big men to aggressively trap opposing guards while defending a ball screen. When he got to the Celtics, he hired assistants with extensive NBA experience. They argued that now that he had big men who were actually big, he should have them “drop” to the baseline instead of “blitzing” the dribbler. It took some convincing, but Stevens eventually went along. “That was really hard for me,” he said. “I’ve never dropped in my life. Thirteen straight years of hard showing and blitzing.”

  In an effort to accrue all the information he could, Stevens brought Cannon to Boston to work as his basketball operations analyst. He uprooted the team’s video and analytics systems to put in place an infrastructure that best suited his ways of learning. At the same time, Stevens has figured out how to study the numbers without being consumed by them. When he gets bogged down, Austin Ainge, the Celtics’ director of player personnel, will tell him, “Just use your eyes. You’re good.”

  The egalitarian ethos at Butler was a relic of the past. Pro players work under contracts of varying length and compensation. A team’s roster turns over every season, oftentimes within the same season. And yet the fundamentals of the job—the give-and-take, the relationships, the personal development, the empathy—remain very much the same. Stevens realized early on that if he demonstrated to his players that he possessed knowledge that could make them better, he could get them to play the way he wanted, just like they did at Butler. “All the good ones want to be coached,” he says.

  At no time is this more true than when Stevens is drawing up a play during a time out. His players have the utmost confidence in his decision making. “I just think I enjoy that. It’s a puzzle, right?” he says. “It’s figuring out how you can score in a given moment. I watch a lot to prepare for those moments, but it’s not like I’m a savant. All I do is steal from everybody else based on how I watched other teams guard things. I mean, how many tricks can there be at the end of the day?”

  Temperamentally, Stevens was well suited to the task of rebuilding a proud franchise. The Celtics had lost the Hall of Fame trio of Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce that had won the NBA title five years before. It was left to Stevens to sweep up the morning after the party. The Celtics went 25–57 his first season, but they steadily improved thereafter, winning 40 and 48 games respectively the next two years.

  Stevens truly distinguished himself during the 2016–17 season. Though the Eastern Conference was supposed to be dominated by the LeBron James–led Cleveland Cavaliers, Stevens’s slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach enabled the Celtics to win 53 games, sneak up on the Cavs from behind, and snare the No. 1 seed in the playoffs. It was fitting that the team’s success was fueled by a pint-sized point guard named Isaiah Thomas, who was selected with the final pick in the 2011 NBA draft. Thomas was undersized and overlooked, so he played with a healthy chip on his shoulder. He would have been a great fit at Butler.

  The Celtics’ season was tragically upended when Thomas’s sister was killed in an auto accident the day before their first-round playoff series with the Chicago Bulls was to begin. Stevens was all too prepared to play the role of empathetic grief counselor. He had dealt with family deaths several times during his tenure at Butler. Over the previous fifteen months, two of his former players had passed away, one after a lengthy battle with cancer, the other from sudden heart failure. After Thomas learned the news about his sister at the end of the team’s afternoon practice, Stevens went to his house to console him. He encouraged Thomas to spend as much time away from the team as he needed.

  Thomas went home for his sister’s funeral but did not miss any games. When the Celtics lost the first two at home, the Boston media was aflame, but the team’s locker room maintained a detached serenity. “Our perspective was not on basketball at that moment,” Stevens says. “People start throwing around the term adversity, but nobody got caught up in that. I’m telling you, that kind of noise could never have been more unimportant to us.”

  Many teams in that circumstance would have wilted, but those Celtics had gotten to Us long before the playoffs began. They stuck together and rebounded to win four straight and eliminate the Bulls. Then they got by the Washington Wizards in the conference semifinals in seven games before coming face-to-face with the reigning NBA champion Cavaliers in the final. After Cleveland walloped the Celtics by 44 points in game two, Stevens asked Barlow to research the records of how teams performed in the game following a 40-point-plus loss in the playoffs. Barlow found they were 4–3. Stevens relayed the information to his players in hopes of boosting their confidence. Sure enough, in game three the Celtics managed to come back from a 21-point deficit and scrape out a three-point win despite playing without Thomas, who had sustained a hip injury. The team fought gamely but eventually succumbed to the Cavaliers in five.

  As his circumstances, fame, and net worth have changed dramatically over the past decade, there is one thing about Stevens that has remained consistent: his demeanor. Sure, he tends to be a little more animated on the NBA sideline than he was at Butler, and now that he is coaching grown men he is more inclined to drop an F-bomb when he wants to make his point. For the most part, however, he strikes a serene pose on the bench that is distinctly at odds with that of most of his peers. Many people, including Stevens, have suggested that his cool exterior masks a painful churning within, but I’m not buying it. That would be inauthentic, not to mention inhuman. A person cannot fake who he is for this long. If Stevens appears cool on the outside, I believe it’s because he really is that cool on the inside. He does not discipline himself this way because he is trying to be a good guy. He does it because he wants to win so badly. As he puts it, “I can’t be wild and crazy and think.”

  Besides, it’s not just the difficult moments when Stevens maintains his equipoise. He seems constitutionally incapable of experiencing elation as well. He constantly amazes his Celtics players and assistants when he bypasses any semblance of celebration following dramatic wins. He’s immediately on to the next thing.

  My particular favorite Brad Stevens m
oment occurred on January 20, 2013. Butler was hosting Gonzaga on a Saturday night in a much-hyped game between powerhouse midmajors. ESPN had manufactured the matchup and sent its GameDay studio crew to lend it a big-time environment. The game more than lived up to the hype as Butler sophomore guard Roosevelt Jones lofted up a runner at the buzzer to give the Bulldogs a dramatic win. The shot unleashed a wild scene with fans rushing the court, but Stevens betrayed no emotion at all. Not only did he decline to celebrate, he didn’t even bother to unfold his arms. Rather, he simply lowered his head and walked toward the opposing bench, where he shook hands with Gonzaga coach Mark Few as if they had casually met on the street.

  When I bring this up to Stevens, he tells me he was just doing what came natural. “I think the bigger the moment, the more I get focused on what’s next,” he says. “If you can keep perspective in a moment like that, you can really get to your team. Because something big just happened and everybody’s locked in.”

  “But didn’t you miss out on the jubilation?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t care about that,” he replies. “The satisfaction I get is more internal. For me, jumping up and down is not the same as just going in your office, leaning back in your chair, and being like, That was special. That was a pretty cool moment.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Alex Barlow was a high school senior in Cincinnati, he wasn’t good enough to earn a Division I scholarship. But he had ambitions to be a head coach, so he tried to find a place where he could walk on and maybe get a chance to play. Barlow visited a few different schools, but only one head coach took the time to meet him when he arrived, show him around campus for a couple of hours, and then sit with him to discuss his potential within the program. That coach was Brad Stevens. “And this was just two weeks after they had lost to UConn [in the championship game],” Barlow told me. “I had visited some Division II schools. All of them sent out a director of basketball operations or an assistant coach to greet me. And here’s this dude who just coached in two straight national championship games, and he’s greeting me at the door. That made me think that he was about what he said he was about.”

  Stevens had a record of playing his walk-ons, and he told Barlow that he would have every chance to compete for minutes. Stevens was true to his word. Barlow moved into the starting lineup early in his sophomore season. He made a game-winning shot over No. 1–ranked Indiana that forever earned him a part of Butler lore. A few weeks later, Stevens put him on scholarship.

  After Barlow graduated in 2015, Stevens hired him to be the Celtics’ assistant video coordinator. Late one night, Barlow was riding the team plane. It was about three in the morning, and everyone on board was asleep—or so he thought. Barlow woke up momentarily and looked over to see the team’s head coach watching game video on his laptop. He was still very much the same guy who first greeted him at the door of Hinkle Fieldhouse. “Sometimes people think it comes easy to him,” Barlow says. “That’s because they underestimate how much time and preparation he puts into everything. He’s obviously very smart, but he prepares better than anybody I’ve ever been around.”

  And yet unlike many coaches who fall victim to the grind, Stevens has a deft instinct for when he needs to pull back and recenter himself. That instinct came in handy after the Celtics lost back-to-back games late in the 2016–17 season. When they landed in San Francisco for a date with the Golden State Warriors—not exactly the opponent an NBA coach wants to see when his team is on a losing skid—Stevens took a couple of his assistants on an impromptu bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. “When I was twenty-eight, I probably would have poured over more film that was meaningless and confused myself,” he says. Maybe it’s coincidental that the Celtics won that night, but I doubt it.

  His humility remains his most enduring and endearing trait. When referring to a difficult loss, he tries never to say it was a game his team “should have” won. He says it “could have” won, because “it’s not fair to the other team. I believe that wholeheartedly.” On a recent visit to Ohio State, where Matta served as head basketball coach for thirteen years, Matta invited Stevens to a football practice so he could watch Urban Meyer in action. When they got to the practice field, Stevens asked Matta where he could stand so he wouldn’t be in the way. “I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re the head coach of the Boston Celtics. You’ll be fine,’” Matta says. Stevens stood off to the side anyway and quietly took notes.

  Stevens loves spending time with his family, but he loathes being idle. The idea of sitting through a movie in a theater is anathema to him. “I don’t ever relax in that setting,” he says. When the kids have games of their own, he will often jog one or both ways. It helps him to expend energy and make good use of his time. On the morning after the Celtics were eliminated from the 2017 NBA playoffs, he sat next to his wife at their kitchen table and started to go over the summer calendar. For Tracy, this was a little too much persistence. “Can I at least finish my coffee?” she asked.

  Their home is in Boston, but in many ways their hearts are still in Indiana. They have a summer lake house in the northern part of the state. In 2014, Tracy was appointed to the board of trustees at Butler. They go back there frequently to attend functions, and they meet with high school students in Massachusetts who are considering Butler. The school’s basketball program has come a long way, largely because of the success Stevens had there. Before the start of his final season, Butler was invited to join the Atlantic 10 Conference. The following year, it became part of the newfangled Big East. Hinkle Fieldhouse has undergone a $36 million renovation, which added a video board plus a refurbished locker room and offices. The Stevenses’ ties will remain strong in the wake of Butler’s decision in June 2017 to hire LaVall Jordan, a former Butler player who worked as an assistant with Stevens for Lickliter. Ironically, the job had become vacant because the previous coach, Chris Holtmann, was hired by Ohio State to replace Matta, who had just been fired.

  His old and new worlds merged in an uncanny way during the summer of 2017, when Gordon Hayward, who had grown to become a stellar player with the Utah Jazz, signed a four-year, $128 million contract with the Celtics. Stevens told me it was “surreal” to be wooing Hayward all over again. “We recruited him when he was seventeen, and then we recruited him again when he was twenty-seven,” he said. Later that summer, the Celtics pulled off another blockbuster when they traded Thomas for Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving. The 2017–18 campaign started in horrific fashion when Hayward sustained a gruesome ankle injury in the very first game and was lost for the season. That will make it even more difficult for the Celtics to get past LeBron and his Cavaliers, not to mention those Golden State Warriors. Stevens understands the challenge he has taken on, knows all the pitfalls, realizes the season could still very well end again with a loss, but that’s okay, because the next morning he can wake up, grab some coffee, pull up a chair, lay out his calendar, and start preparing for what’s next. The pleasure’s in the process. Each new season is a chance to get better.

  Dabo Swinney

  “GOD NEVER SAYS, ‘OOPS.’”

  Nobody ever said Dabo Swinney was a man of few words. His speeches become stem-winders. His tangents have tangents. Ask him a simple question, and he will embark upon a lengthy, meandering, disjointed, flighty disquisition that touches on a variety of topics, most of which you never asked him about, yet somehow ends up driving home his original point with remarkable eloquence. As the football coach at Clemson University, Swinney is constantly buttonholing people, holding forth at meetings, chatting up employees, addressing his players on in team meetings. His gift of gab keeps on giving. “He can just talk and talk and talk forever,” says Hunter Renfrow, a wide receiver who came to Clemson in 2014 as an invited walk-on and later became a starter. “Every single day, we’re getting hammered with messages about how we can become better people, how we can become better football players. He can go on for hours
sometimes, just because it means so much to him.”

  And yet Swinney is also highly organized, focused, and disciplined. He has an impressive ability to harvest a high volume of information and funnel it into a single cogent message. To reinforce this skill, he conducts an exercise each summer in which he chooses a single word that will serve as his theme for the coming season. It is an idea he got from Jon Gordon, whom Swinney befriended after reading his bestselling motivational book One Word That Will Change Your Life. Swinney asks his players to do this same exercise. His hope is that they too will find the one word that inspires them to do the small things that make the biggest difference.

  When Swinney sat down to choose his word for the 2016 season, he was doing so at a weighty moment. His Clemson Tigers were coming off a 45–40 loss to Alabama in the College Football Playoff National Championship. Most of his starters, including star quarterback Deshaun Watson, were returning. A coach can spend an entire lifetime without having that kind of a chance to make history, so Swinney felt a greater urgency to find the exact right word. After ruminating on the possibilities for a while, he made his choice. The word was love.

  When I asked Swinney a year later why he made that choice, he was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “That’s just something that’s put on my spirit. I write down a bunch of words, and one of ’em always jumps out. I just kept coming back to that word. Like, ‘Guys, we gotta love what we do, love the grind, love each other, love your school, be passionate.’ When you love something, you want to give that little extra.”