Brad Stevens won his first NBA title last night. He’d won the Horizon League (four times, seven if you count his time as an assistant), the NCAA Tournament’s West and Southeast Regionals, and the Eastern Conference (once before this year), but this is his first championship at the national level. The former wunderkind, still only 47 years old, reached the mountaintop, the latest man to assemble an NBA champion through shrewdness following the age of sales.
Given this long road to the ultimate summit, a comparison to Theo Epstein feels a little off-base. Epstein, after all, won the most storied championship in American sports at the age of 30, then duplicated the feat in Chicago at 42. When Stevens was 30, he was an assistant coach at a little-known low-major in Indianapolis. Still, it’s easy to instinctively connect the boy geniuses. Though they don’t look alike, they’re cut from similar physical cloth, thin white guys a little over six feet tall with short, originally dark hair. They each have a vague technocratic streak. Their career paths run in parallel. Ascension to audacious heights while young for their role, seasons as the hottest commodity in their industry, frustrating collisions with failure, and multiple pivots to new challenges. Most similarly, they each receive the “What now?” treatment more than anyone else in their respective sport. How many times was Theo Epstein asked, when he left the Cubs, how he planned to spend the next forty years of his life? For how long will Brad Stevens be asked whether he plans to return to coaching, specifically in the college game?
I bring Epstein up, then, as a sort of a guideline. Because while he and Stevens are not the same, he does illustrate how varied of options these guys enjoy. We, as fans, sometimes forget there are jobs successful sports leaders can take beyond head coach and general manager and president of baseball/basketball op’s. We know those depth charts, and we know there’s an owner above them, and we know very little else. But sports is a big, big industry. Epstein didn’t need to run for governor to find a new hill to climb in 2020, when he set to work on designing rule changes to improve baseball’s on-field product. He didn’t need to buy an NWSL team this February to get into the world of professional ownership.
In a year, there’s a decent chance the Indiana Hoosiers are again hiring a head coach, and if last time was any indication, Brad Stevens will be discussed until he makes emphatically clear that he doesn’t want the role. Might he take the job? It sure seems doubtful. He hasn’t coached in three years, and he hasn’t been in the college game in more than a decade. He didn’t take it the last time it came available. (Although he hadn’t won a championship then…) More likely, whenever he tires of his role architecting NBA rosters, he’ll move on to a pursuit we don’t know exists. He’ll follow the Epstein route, going somewhere we don’t know at an unexpected moment, yet in a way that doesn’t surprise us at all.
Miscellany
- I’m shocked that only eleven media members vote on the NBA Finals MVP award. I’m not unhappy with Jaylen Brown winning it or anything, but I’m surprised that for an award that big, the voting pool is that small. I wonder how it came to be that way. Is it a logistics thing? The quick turnaround?
- We get our final test tonight on whether the 2024 NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals were cosmically linked. Betting markets did move rather strongly towards the Panthers after the Celtics and Mavericks completed their own Game 5, at least if I’m interpreting this correctly. Other things might be driving that, though.
