In the wake of the record contingent of 14 French players currently in the NBA, including Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs, coaches from the same country are attempting to establish themselves in the highly competitive North American basketball league.
“The French touch intrigues,” said Max Lefèvre, an assistant coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, where his countryman Rudy Gobert plays. But international coaches – regardless of their nationality – are well aware of the difficulties in integrating into the “big league,” where the regular season is ending on Sunday, April 13. “Americans are even more patriotic in coaching than at the player level. They take great pride in teaching basketball,” said Guillaume Vizade, coach of the French club Le Mans, who maintains constant contact with “this other world.”
The NBA opened up to the rest of the world at the turn of the 2000s, under the leadership of former commissioner David Stern, but franchises and their owners remain reluctant to trust international coaches, whose basketball culture is different. Only three of the 30 NBA teams are led by Europeans: the Brooklyn Nets, with Spaniard Jordi Fernandez, the Toronto Raptors, with Darko Rajakovic of Serbia, and the Memphis Grizzlies, with Tuomas Iisalo of Finland, a former Paris coach, who was promoted two weeks ago.
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