Hardly anyone expected the Jazz to be up in the West, even after the first two weeks of the NBA. Its good results have caught by surprise and its fabulous sensations, more. Basically, the cycle change seemed resounding in the summer, when both its benchmark on the bench (Quin Snyder) and its pillars on the track (Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert) left the franchise. The three had commanded the project for the last five years. In exchange, Utah received a good handful of players with an asterisk and a lot to prove. And, above all, an abundant injection of the future in the form of first rounds of draft (up to 10 potential, 7 insured and 3 other trade options) from the Cavs and Wolves. Thinking about the future seemed the main plan. But, for now, celebrating the present, that future can wait.
The case of Utah comes to reveal how wonderful and indecipherable is sport, whose maximum degree of emotion is reached when it is accompanied by the unexpected. That same case serves, incidentally, to remember that one of the main architects of this success, his coach Will Hardy, was not expected in these scenarios either. Not at least looking back over a decade.
It was the year 2010 when, just two weeks before his graduation from Williams College (university center in the state of Massachusetts), the young Will Hardy, then 22 years old, was still pondering where to direct his professional future. Doubts ruled him. He was passionate about basketball and, in fact, during his four years at Williams he had been part of the team. But he knew his limitations: he could not dream of a playing career that offered no guarantee of sustainability. And valuing something different, some technical position, was impossible for him due to his lack of contacts. Who was he, Hardy thought, other than an almost anonymous student at a small college off the competitive radar.
Fate came to the rescue. One call would begin to change his life. Curt Tong, a retired former coach – he directed the aforementioned university for a decade between the 1970s and 1980s – and who lived in Williamstown, summoned him on campus. Hardy knew Tong -or so he thought-, since he had acted as a kind of mentor for him during those years. In that relaxed talk, Tong asked him if he knew what he wanted to do when he graduated. The boy, sincere, confessed that he had begun to value jobs in the financial world or press offices. Upon hearing this, Tong cut him off. “I think you should opt for another type of job. For example in the San Antonio Spurs”, he pointed out. The young man smiled, pretending that the joke sounded good.
But that was not a joke. To Hardy’s surprise, Tong had a close friendship for more than 25 years with Gregg Popovich, coach of the Spurs and then an NBA legend. The journalist Adam Himmelsbach recounted on his day how that conversation, in which Tong admitted his closeness to Pop, perplexed Hardy. “I’ve known you for four years, you know that every day I watch as much basketball as I can… How come you didn’t tell me that you’re close friends with Popovich?”
The story, once told, made sense. Tong left his position on the Williams bench in 1983 to become a sports manager at Pomona-Pitzer University in California. Gregg Popovich had been there for four years. Both worked side by side for five years, specifically until another call, this time from Larry Brown to Gregg Popovich, changed the second’s plans. This is how Popovich would get to the NBA. What would remain unchanged would be his friendship with Tong, with whom he found chemistry early on.
“Look Will, Pop called me, he’s looking for people for his video department in San Antonio. He wants smart guys. He asked me if she could recommend any…and I have given him your name.” Almost 70 candidates applied for the Spurs job. But Hardy impressed in the interview and, to top it off, he came endorsed by a man Popovich blindly trusted. Will’s dream would start there.
His knowledge, however, had taken off long ago. Addicted to video analysis, Hardy found in his coach at Williams, Mike Maker, the perfect link to get answers to the many questions that the game had in store for him. His instinct would do the rest. In the Spurs they would perceive it soon. “In the beginning he was the guy for everything,” he told Himmelsbach. “From picking up people at the airport to accrediting personnel for events, but once I began to have a presence in all kinds of sports processes, that had incalculable value,” he acknowledged when Globe of Boston in his day.
In just one year, he rose through the ranks in the video department. Department that, two other courses later, she was already directing. And when Chad Forcier, a Spurs assistant for nearly a decade, left the franchise in the summer of 2016, Popovich knew who to turn to. “Will, you will now be an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs.” Hardy was 28 years old.
His extraordinary ability to interpret and adjust the game earned him a special place in Popovich’s working group and the complete trust of the teacher. And despite the fact that the Knicks considered giving him the position of their bench in 2020, only another friendship developed in San Antonio (that of Ime Udoka) managed to get him out of Texas. Last year, Hardy returned to Massachusetts to serve as Udoka’s assistant on a Celtics team that finished runner-up in the NBA.
Just a few weeks after the Finals, Danny Ainge, now in the Jazz offices, picked up the phone to convince Hardy. He knew that he was his man. Little did he care about his age (34), which makes him, along with Joe Mazzulla (Boston), the youngest coach in the current NBA. Ainge knew what mind he wanted to project the new Jazz into.
Tong, who died in 2017 at the age of 82, did not see Hardy debut as NBA head coach. What he did know was that his destiny was there and aiming high. Will Hardy’s journey, one of the slates of the future of the competition, has just begun. And in Utah they celebrate it well.
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