The Paris Basketball head coach, and newly crowned EuroCup champion, sat down with Javier Gancedo
A journey inside the mind of Tuomas Iisalo
Interviews
11 Mins read
There is not a coach in European basketball who is a hotter property than Paris Basketball boss Tuomas Iisalo.
After leading Telekom Baskets Bonn to the Basketball Champions League title in 2022-23, the Finnish tactician brought his talents to the French capital and secured another continental crown, this time the BKT EuroCup. The 41-year-old has already achieved history, but if he were to do the unthinkable and lift the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague next season, it would be an unprecedented success.
Perhaps that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but with Iisalo, you never know. What is certain is that his coaching career is – and has been – on an upwards trajectory for quite a while now and he will be a valuable addition to next year’s EuroLeague.
Paris wowed fans across the continent by breaking records, notching win after win and blowing teams away with its offense, but Iisalo’s journey has been on a long time in the making.
"I started coaching in the sixth grade. I was 11 years old I think,” he tells Javier Gancedo of EuroCupBasketball.net. “I had a stress-related knee injury and at that point in time, in the middle of the ‘90s or early ‘90s, the cure was six months of no sports. This was a huge blow, obviously.
“Luckily, there was a junior coach in our club who asked me to go and work as an assistant coach with the younger kids. And ever since then, there's been maybe one or two seasons that I haven't been involved in coaching, but it started back then. Now, 30 years have passed.”
"I started coaching in the sixth grade. I was 11 years old I think."
As an inquisitive teenager, Iisalo wanted to do everything in his powers to become the best basketball player that he could be. Little did he know back then, but all that time studying some legends of the game would end up helping him further down the line.
“I think the big change for me was in upper high school when I was around 15. I was in a small town of 7,000 people and just trying to find ways to get better as a player,” he explains. “Amazon was founded back then so you could start ordering books and I soon started ordering a lot of coaching books and VHS cassettes from the Duke team with Mike Dunleavy, Jay Williams, Carlos Boozer. I watched a lot of those games.
“My brother and I, we would spend every day working on our jump shots, watching the best shooters in the NBA – Reggie Miller losing the players on off-ball screens, how he would use his hands to create the openings, how he would read those screens; Allan Houston, I would watch [his clips] on a frame by frame with a VHS and then try to go to the backyard to emulate his shooting form.
“Then I was coaching my brother's team and at some point on NBA.com, they would always feature a playbook from one of the teams. And we actually took some plays when my brother was like 13 from the Utah Jazz. It is a funny thing to laugh about right now. But the kids were excited and there was some structure.”
Even before his playing days came to an end, Iisalo was trying to put what he had learnt into practice. That involved setting up an academy, which started to bear fruit not long after, while one of the main people involved in that project ended up joining Iisalo in Paris.
“At one point, I think when I was 23 or 24, I moved back to Kouvola [in Finland],” he says. “I actually made a pitch to the club that, ‘Hey, I would like to, with another guy, take over the junior department.’ At the same time, I was playing professionally, I was the captain of the team at that point and had just made it to the national team.
“But what if I would also start to run these high-school practices and we build up an academy? And we did. It was really nice. One of the players that went through that was Matti Nuutinen, who had a nice national team career. There was also the player development group that Harri Mannonen ran in Kouvola which produced Tuomas Hirvonen, a very, very good player, as well as Alexander Madsen, who's playing for Andorra right now.
“I was in a good place in Kouvola. And really, I had the best of luck in meeting my mentor there, Harri Mannonen, who 20 years ago or almost 25 years ago was so far ahead of his time that people didn't understand. But it gave me that impulse that, ‘Wait, you can do it this way?’ This is amazing. It's not about how serious you are about this craft, it's about how much time you have to invest. Harri is working for us right now in Paris Basketball. He's basically mentoring all of our coaches and providing feedback about everything.”
A lot of Iisalo’s success has ultimately come down to hard work. Having finished his career as a 31-year-old in 2014, he had already completed all his coaching badges and was able to start work, getting his first job almost immediately with Tapiolan Honka in the Finnish first division.
“You can dream about things, but it was never something that I thought was going to lead to something like this,” Iisalo notes. “Through luck and through effort, it's taken me this far. It was a very active process from my side.
“I can say that I spent 15 to 20 hours every week just studying and coaching by myself. I wasn't in any university or any program. I just did it first to try to improve as a player, to try to understand what can make me a better player. It wasn’t always successful, but I always learned something.
“The more you invest in something, the harder it is to give that up. But I was very proactive in this way. And I think that's also a part of the reason why I think differently about the game. My inputs were very different. And that's why also the output, which is how our team plays, is also different from maybe many other programs.”
“You can dream about things, but it was never something that I thought was going to lead to something like this.”
It hasn’t all been butterflies and rainbows, though. Iisalo suffered a difficult first season at Honka and spent the beginning of the following campaign coaching the club’s junior B team. Then came a call from Crailsheim Merlins, who were fighting to stay alive in the German top flight. It was a challenge, but one Iisalo was more than willing to accept.
“When I went there, there were only 10 games left. I learned a lot during this time,” he comments. “I learned that a human being needs sleep and food. I learned this because I literally worked 16-hour days. At that point, I really couldn't sleep.
“I came in as a complete novice from Finland and I was telling myself, ‘Don't f*ck this up.’ Not because of a lack of effort. You're never going to be ready for this, so you might as well do [your best] right now. I did everything I could. It wasn't enough. But after that experience, I learned a lot. The next season, we were successful in Crailsheim in the second league, but we couldn't manage to move up. But the next year, we did move up.”
Having suffered relegation with Crailsheim before bringing them back up at the second time of asking, the Finnish head coach was starting to feel the heat as the pressure started to mount during a tricky season back in the top tier. But, as he alludes to, it ended up helping him big time in the long term.
“Seba [Herrera, Paris’s all-action forward] was with me for the second year and it was a very, very difficult season,” Iisalo recalls. “I learned a lot but almost paid a very high price by losing my job because of the results. And that's obviously a reality that every coach has to go through at some point.
“I was lucky enough to keep my job mid-season and we turned around our process to a much more demanding direction. It was a part of my personal growth. At some point, we developed a very good methodology for teaching our system and getting the players to understand what we want in certain situations.
“When I started out as a coach, I was using a collection of drills, exercises and sets from my previous coaches or seeing this at a clinic or this team did this, but it was not very coherent. It was not a logical combination. And then you develop the tools, you develop the methodology.”
"I developed a very fearless attitude in my opinion where I made decisions that were not viewed as popular from the outside."
All coaches have their own idols and people who they have drawn ideas from, and that’s also true of Iisalo. In particular, two Spanish coaches had a way of seeing basketball that caused plenty of intrigue for the 41-year-old, one of whom is a former EuroCup champion and the other a former EuroCup Coach of the Year.
“I learned a lot from coaches like Aito Garcia, who was coaching at ALBA Berlin, because we always lost to them by 30-40 points and I was like, ‘How is this possible?’ I have to learn what he does,” Iisalo recalls. “For example, I would watch his YouTube clinics in Spanish – you couldn’t get subtitles in those. I would write into Google Translate what I thought he was saying and translate those. Then a whole new world opened up for me because it was a very different type of way to organize basketball in your mind than the one I had grown up with, like maybe the Balkan school or the American type of approach.
“The second one who helped a lot in that was Pedro Martinez, who also had great clinics online and would outline the drills to work on for specific concepts and always talked about doing the basic things at a high level – that is the key. I really took that to heart and we developed a nice methodology.”
However, the thing that really provided the biggest change in Iisalo’s coaching journey came during the 2018-19 season, when Crailsheim just survived relegation by the skin of their teeth. For Iisalo, he knew that he never wanted to be in that situation again and thus looked to increase the standards to an even higher level.
“I didn’t want to be the weak link,” he recalls. “At that point I developed much thicker skin. I developed a very fearless attitude in my opinion where I made decisions that were not viewed as popular from the outside or were met with questions, such as taking players from smaller leagues. But I was like, ‘We see something in this and we are the ones who have to make these decisions.’
“You cannot take decisions through fear. You have to make them through your intuition and through the information that you've gathered. This was when the results really changed. After this we won 75-80% of all of our games, first in Crailsheim and then in Bonn. That number went up and now in Paris, obviously in the EuroCup, it’s been extremely high. That was a big personal change during this because I was able to finally, five years after I had retired as a player, kind of kill the player inside me and become a real coach. After that, it's been a very different experience.”