'She’s the coach and we listen': Becky Hammon beats up the NBA Summer League

This might be the NBA’s Summer League but Becky Hammon has been beating the men here and beating them good. The San Antonio Spurs’ experiment of having the NBA’s first female assistant run team in the rookie league has turned into a clinic on what a woman can do if she is handed the same clipboard as a male coach.

On Sunday Hammon’s Spurs won their fifth game in a row to advance to Monday’s Summer League Final, meaning she is a victory away from a championship in her first attempt at coaching. In a month when a woman’s team set the record for the largest television audience for an American soccer game, a woman can win an NBA league title. This has been an immense month for women’s sports.

Hammon is not an imposing presence. She stands just 5ft 6in, with hoop earrings and a ponytail, burying herself in a sweatshirt jacket while the other coaches wear shorts and golf shirts. But this isn’t about size or muscles spilling from form-fitting sleeves, but rather a matter of respect. The players Hammon is coaching this July loom like towers above her, yet they gather quietly around when she calls time outs the way they would Gregg Popovich or Doc Rivers.

“We don’t look at it as female or anything, she’s the coach and we just listen,” Spurs forward Jarrell Eddie said Sunday afternoon.

She has had time to prepare for this moment. Popovich made her an assistant on the Spurs regular team before last season and she became a trusted mind on San Antonio’s bench, working with the team’s point guards, imploring them to get better. But there is a big difference between standing beside a hulking coach who looms with authority like Popovich and taking that chair yourself. “It’s a big step, you’re on the hot seat,” Hammon said Sunday. Getting male basketball players to pay attention has long been a challenge for the best male coaches, let alone a female one in a league dominated by the opposite gender.

And yet Hammon stalked the coach’s box at the Thomas & Mack Center as if this was a place she had always been, a place where she belonged. At times she barked at the referees. At others she shouted out to her own players. When one player on Sunday’s opponents, the Atlanta Hawks, clearly travelled and the referee’s whistle did not immediately blow, she leaped from her chair and demanded a call…which quickly came.

Hammon brings energy.

The summer league is a grind. San Antonio have played nine games in two weeks. NBA teams rarely play a schedule like that. By Sunday the Spurs players were tired. Their knees were sore from so much running. At the start of their semi-final game against the Hawks, they looked sluggish, lifeless. Hammon would not accept that.

“Bring the juice!” she shouted in the half-time locker room.

This is her favorite phrase: “Bring the juice.” She says it often – in meetings, in practices and on the court during games. “Bring the juice.” Don’t slow down. Don’t drag. Don’t give up.

“She’s intense, but she’s not a screamer,” Eddie said.

It’s an important distinction. Professional basketball players do not listen to coaches who yell too much. The game is grueling enough. “The screamers” as many college coaches are called, do not last long in the NBA. Players tune out the relentless assaults jackhammered from the men in the suits. Hammon does not scream, but she demands energy, almost seeming to will it. Soon everyone is running hard.

On Sunday, the Spurs responded to Hammon’s demand. They raced across the court, jumping at the Hawks shooters, challenging shots, batting away passes and tearing off on fast breaks. This is what Hammon hoped to see. She has preached to her team that defense often ignites a stagnant offense and suddenly the Spurs were experiencing exactly what she meant. She knew they were frustrated with missing three throws and easy shots. They could have said – as many basketball teams do – this wasn’t their day and accepted a morning trip home.

But somehow the Spurs didn’t on Sunday. They pushed. They played together. And this might have been the biggest tribute they could have made to their coach of just two weeks.

“That chemistry, you don’t make it overnight. I think they have made tremendous strides from the beginning of summer league down to the end,” Hammon said after the game. “We’re starting to gel together at times, the majority of the times of the game – we still have our moments but we are coming together.”

Such things don’t often happen in the Summer League. Teams usually don’t come together. Mostly they are groups of players thrown together for two weeks, hoping they hit enough shots to get noticed by a team in a foreign league who might pay them a living wage for the coming winter. That the Spurs are playing together is a direct result of Hammon.

“She does her job and she does it well,” Eddie said.

How does a female coach establish herself? She makes the right decisions.

Everything in basketball is about adjustments. The best coaches are the ones who can change things when they don’t work. Popovich is a master at adjustments. Players notice which coaches are the effective at switching plans. Those who make the best decisions are usually the ones who are most respected.

In two weeks Hammon has made dozens of adjustments. Once, in a game where the Spurs defense was having trouble with an opposing team’s screens, she told the players to switch the way they were playing the screens. The next several possessions the opponent got nothing.

The value of a simple change in handling another team’s screens is immense. When it works the coach gets immediate buy-in. If the Spurs weren’t listening before, they were after that. And that made it easier for Hammon to make other adjustments – like moving small forward Kyle Anderson, last year’s first round draft pick – to power forward. The benefit was immediate. On Sunday, Anderson was named the summer league’s most valuable player.

“I mean I’ve learned a lot,” Hammon said. “I wouldn’t say there is any one thing. Your mind is just constantly moving, thinking of different scenarios, not only on your team but their team too, trying to figure out things they are doing. I learned it’s a lot more challenging than being a player on multiple levels. That’s an eye-opening thing for me.”

She speaks fast in the manner of many basketball coaches, but her words have purpose. She was never taken seriously as a player until she got to the WNBA in the late 1990s and became a star simply by being the smartest point guard on the floor, the one who ran harder than everyone else. She can be no different in the NBA. She has to think. She has to push. She has to make the men believe. How can they not now that the Spurs are winning?

How does a female coach establish herself? She makes her players understand.

Most coaches do not take care to properly diagram a play. This might seem like a simple thing but it’s a problem that few in the profession care to confront. They call a timeout, pull the team in a huddle and slash some lines with a pen across the small dry erase boards they clutch in their hands. The players nod their head as the coaches yell, look at the graffiti of scribbles on the board and start asking questions:

“What do I do here?

“Now where do I throw the ball?”

Hammon’s lines are straight. They are neat. They don’t zig and zag and head off the edge of the board into an abyss. When someone is supposed to run to the right, she draws a thick line going to the right. When someone is supposed to throw a pass, she adds a dotted line between the two X’s.

Nobody asks what they are supposed to do.

Nobody asks where they throw the ball.

“She slows up and takes her time with the plays, it’s easy to read,” Eddie said.

If only the other coaches could do that. Maybe they’d be in the final.