It’s not really in a coach’s nature to continue calling a play that isn’t working. Most coaches like to switch things up, get their players into read actions and keep the defense guessing.
But Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy realizes that, this season, there are going to be times he is going to call a play, see the defense get the better of his players or see one of his players make a mistake, and then have to call the same play again.
It’s going to be important for the young players on this roster to live through the mistakes, and then learn from them.
In these situations, if Hardy were to move on to a different call, there’s a chance that the player who needs to learn might not understand what went wrong, might not understand how to manipulate the defense correctly, or might not know what the correct read or movement was.
So, Hardy is going to have to go against those instincts to switch things up in order for his players to learn things in an effective way.
Easier said than done, right?
“Are you asking if not being who I am is going to be hard?” Hardy quipped with a smile when I asked him about the difficulty involved in this mental shift. “It is, but ... this is not my program. I’m a part of the group. So if I’m asking the players to give and to change certain things about themselves, I have to be willing to do the same thing. Like the players, I will also make mistakes, and I will default to my instincts at times, and I’m going to have to check myself.”
Hardy will have to not only be forgiving to himself in times when he is trying to balance winning and teaching, and perhaps not quite striking the right balance, but he’ll also have to be more forgiving to some of the players.
He knows he’ll be putting a lot of really inexperienced players in tough situations this season and that this is a very trial-by-fire year. But he’s excited about the prospect of learning more from his coaching staff and from the players as the season progresses.
“I fully anticipate that that’s going to be a learning curve for me,” Hardy said. “It’s something that I’ve worked on during the preseason. It’s something that I’m going to have to continue to remind myself of as we go. And, you know, I also can’t be stubborn in those moments — like, we’re going to run the same thing five times in a row, as if I’m trying to prove a point. So there’s going to be a balance there. But, yeah, I anticipate that it’s going to be tough.”
And the internal conflict for Hardy is going to come up in a variety of ways, one of which will be making end-of-game decisions. There are going to be times when the Jazz are fighting in the final minutes of a very close game this season and Hardy is going to have to decide between playing guys who have a lot of experience in those situations, and players who need the experience.
Against the Sacramento Kings in the preseason, Hardy felt good about the way that rookie Cody Williams was playing and elected to let him play out the closing minutes of a very close game.
Of course, that was in the preseason and Hardy knows that those decisions are going to be harder to make when the games count and the pressure is high.
“Getting people experience at the end of the game, you cannot replicate that in practice,” Hardy said. “I don’t care what you do in a practice setting, there’s nothing like the end of the game in an arena. That being said, we’re a team, and we get down to the end of the game, we’re trying to win. So again, that’s where I have to balance, what’s the gap in terms of how much better is this person than that person? Versus, how much will that experience help this person long term, and our team long term?”
These are the questions that Hardy and the rest of the Jazz coaching staff are going to be asking themselves multiple times every single day. And the answers to those questions might not always be easy ones for Hardy to arrive at.