Coaching legend Ettore Messina of AX Armani Exchange Milan has been inspired by some of Europe's top coaches and, in turn, mentored the next generation of basketball masterminds.
Coaching fraternity: Ettore Messina, Milan
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Messina is one of the most experienced and decorated tacticians in European basketball. A four-time EuroLeague champion, twice each with Virtus Bologna and CSKA Moscow, Messina started his coaching career with Umana Reyer Venice's youth teams. At age 30, he was already Virtus's head coach and less than nine years later, in 1998, Messina won his first EuroLeague crown. Messina had many great mentors when he was a young coach, has helped many future head coaches get their starts and has matched wits with all the great coaching masterminds in European basketball for over three decades.
At the beginning of his career, Messina noted great coaches Sandro Gamba, Kresimir Cosic, Dan Peterson and Bob Hill as early inspirations, though he credited his last coach as a player, Renato Vianello at Reyer Venice, as having perhaps the biggest impact on him.
"Coach Pop has a unique way of combining leadership and psychological strength with deep knowledge and unique X-and-O skills."
"He instilled in me a passion for the game. He coached us through the fundamentals, he was a great believer of the fundamentals, of the reading, of the playing without the ball back then, I’m talking about the 1970s,” Messina said of Vianello.
“He has left a great mark on my personal development, even when, of course, I’m extremely grateful to all the great coaches that I had the opportunity to be an assistant, ending with the greatest coach like [Gregg] Popovich, of course. But you know, when you’re 15-17, there is a person you see like God, like the master, it’s something that stays in your mind and in your heart for the rest of your life."
Messina said that he learned from many of the great coaches he was fortunate to work with and he shared what some of those experiences were like.
"The late Massimo Mangano was a coach that I was very close to, and his enthusiasm, his planning of practices, building defense, was really detailed, and I learned from that," Messina said. "Of course, Alberto Bucci, who was, in Bologna, the head coach and was a person that had an amazing empathy with the team, so the way he was leading the team, his psychological qualities were really impressive. It is something that you cannot really learn but at least you study, follow.
"Coach [Sandro] Gamba has been, I would say, a mentor figure in my life, in my career. I admired him when he was coaching Varese and the national team. I had the opportunity to learn from him, being his assistant. I’m still in touch with him. He’s a person that, even now when he writes a column about the games of Olimpia, I always find something that I have to keep in mind. His 1-4 offense is legendary, the way he built the defense of those teams: he’s a Hall of Famer."
"And finally, I had the opportunity to work with Coach [Gregg Popovic], and Coach Pop has a unique way of combining leadership and psychological strength with deep knowledge and unique X-and-O skills. He’s right there, up in the cloud, and once in a while you can just get closer, touch him a little bit, pick up something and put in your backpack. And hopefully, you feel a little bit better in your profession and as a person just to be around him.”
"Zeljko is a legendary person and a legendary coach. Every time I faced his team or I watched his team, I stole something."
Messina has faced Coach Zeljko Obradovic’s teams many times over the years, including in several championship games and has great admiration for the nine-time EuroLeague champion.
“He is a legendary person and a legendary coach. Every time I faced his team or I watched his team, I stole something," Messina confessed.
Their relationship goes back to Obradovic’s first season as a head coach thanks to the relationship Messina built with the legendary Aca Nikolic, who was Obradovic’s mentor. Messina’s Virtus squad played Obradovic and Partizan in the EuroLeague Playoffs. With the best-of-three series tied at 1-1 with each team having won at home, Messina went to visit Nikolic.
" I go to the hotel to meet Coach Nikolic, to bring him some chocolate, that he loved, and to discuss basketball. And Coach Nikolic was such a pure student and lover of the game that he basically told me for two hours what I have to do to beat them. He was explaining me the weaknesses of my team and where I could improve my team just moving the position on the court of a couple of players. Which is something that I eventually did in the rest of the season, and was the reason why we changed late in the season and won the national championship in 1993," Messina said.
"I have always said that being an assistant coach must be the most difficult job ever because you work like crazy, you don’t get sometimes the credit that you feel you deserve, sometimes you get the blame that you feel you might not deserve."
"But to see this genius of basketball really not concerned at all about winning, losing or whatever, just focusing on improving and helping a young coach to get better and talking about the pure game... in some way, Zelimir translated that: he’s never hiding anything, you can go there, talk to him, and you learn. He has been, I think, a benchmark for all European coaches in the last 20 years."
No coach can be successful without a strong staff and Messina has done well choosing his assistants over the years. He named Renato Pasquali, Giordano Consolini, Lele Molin, Dan Shamir, Evgeny Pashutin, Dima Shakulin and Quin Snyder among his assistants who have gone on to lead teams of their own, while also mentioning Mario Fioretti and Gianmarco Pozzecco, the latter of whom has been already a head coach, as two with bright coaching futures.
"All these people had been so gracious to cope with my bad character and been great friends, loyal, helping, trying to develop our teams and help our teams to win,” Messina explained. “I have always said that being an assistant coach must be the most difficult job ever because you work like crazy, you don’t get sometimes the credit that you feel you deserve, sometimes you get the blame that you feel you might not deserve, so it’s not a great work. And I have been lucky I found so many great coaches willing to sacrifice in that position."
Messina said that he believes he has several current players with the ability to become successful coaches down the road, but added that they probably won’t go down that road because “they are very smart and they know that the biggest difference, unfortunately, is that a player, even after a bad loss or a bad performance, correctly, takes a shower and starts thinking about the next one. You, as a coach, after a bad game or even after a so-so game, you kill yourself at night watching film because you are never happy.
"And the player is right on doing that because all players have to be fresh for the next challenge, and unfortunately, to be a coach, that’s not the fun part. There are many fun parts, but not that specifically."
Among the many reasons Messina is regarded as a legend on the sidelines is because he does much more than improve his players' physical skills or feed them Xs and Os. Messina explained how he helps his players think faster and why that is so important.
"I think we can help players to think faster, I think is one of our great challenges as coaches."
"Our sport is very difficult. It’s very difficult because you have to transform thinking and instinct. Thinking means that you need to, let’s say, define situations, read them in advance and react correctly. When these things become automatic, that as soon as you start something, you already know what you are going to do, that’s instinct, in my opinion, or something that tells you how to face different situations,” Messina said.
“So it cannot be just the wild irrational instinct, because even those great champions that look like they are doing something a little bit wild, there’s always a reason why they do that, because they have seen the situation on the court and they have reacted through their amazing talent. But they have seen it, and otherwise, it becomes something like playing [for the] jackpot at the lottery. Those great players, even when try something that might look wild, they have a reason because they thought.
“And their thinking is so fast that there’s almost something unnatural, like an instinct. It’s a great quality, you can probably help your players to improve that because you can help them to watch the right spots on the court, to look at the defense rather than the offense or whatever, so they can think faster. I think we can help players to think faster, I think it's one of our great challenges as coaches."