The Paris head coach touches on the importance of defense, his methods and potentially reaching the EuroLeague
Tuomas Iisalo explains the keys to Paris’s success
Intervjui
8 Min čitanja
It’s advantage Paris Basketball in the BKT EuroCup Finals, having beaten Mincidelice JL Bourg en Bresse 77-64 in Game 1 on Tuesday night. Tuomas Iisalo’s squad has earned rave reviews for the offensive brand of basketball it has played this season, but the Finnish tactician believes that everything starts with the team’s defense.
In Game 1, Bourg was limited to just 43 points through the first three quarters, with Paris leading 65-43. Paris leads the EuroCup in scoring this year (97.4 ppg.), but its third-ranked defense (78.6 ppg.) is what pleases its head coach the most. Many consider Paris to be an offense-driven team but not Coach Iisalo, who agreed with Javier Gancedo of EuroCupBasketball.com that defense is the key to the French side’s success.
“Very few people agree with that, but I do. And if you ask our players, they will also say the same thing,” Coach Iisalo said. “Defense is the one thing that I feel separates the really great teams from the good teams.
“I think it sets up everything; in defense, you build the team chemistry, you build the trust. Defense is a little bit more, let's say, structured, in my opinion, than offense. You obviously need both, but a lot of people, when they see our teams, they think about offense first. However, to be a great team you have to be very good on both ends.”
Obviously, all coaches want their teams to have a good defense, yet the Paris boss understands that by honing in on defense, it creates bonds and chemistry that allow the players to benefit on the other end of the floor.
“We have a very specific way of playing defense and everything is to maximize the work rate of each individual,” the 41-year-old explained. “Everything is done to maximize all the decisions we make and to maximize the teamwork component.”
Molding a style
These days, Iisalo does not have to worry so much about financial restrictions at Paris, but it hasn’t always been that way. When he started out at Tapiolan Honka in Finland and went to the Crailsheim Merlins in Germany, in particular, there were limitations that meant his teams had to think outside the box in order to succeed. Even at fellow German side Telekom Baskets Bonn, a sizeable financial gap existed between Iisalo’s roster and the players that Turkish Airlines EuroLeague duo ALBA Berlin and FC Bayern Munich could afford.
It was therefore his desire to find a way to reduce this financial inequality, which was achieved by a playing style that has now earned rave reviews right across the continent.
“We thought the only way we can get to this is not to put talent against talent, but we can put five-man units or lineups against other teams that rely on talent and make them compete against us on our terms,” he reflected.
“A couple of those things was to speed them up, to have them enter kind of our training methods instead of being in theirs. And the other things being like, ‘Okay, they might have two players that both make one million a year and we have a team that's making 400,000 combined, but together we can play better than they can.’
“We developed those and little by little, we went to clubs that had a little bit bigger budget each time, like let's say a moderate rise from Crailsheim to Bonn, from Bonn to Paris. We noticed that when we have even better talent and more professional players, it gives a boost to the overall idea.”
Like all good leaders, Iisalo is more than happy to take on new ideas, especially if they can improve the overall product. One such example came from his brother, while he also encourages his players to voice their concerns if they see an issue with something; everything is geared towards finding a way to improve.
“There was a suggestion by my brother against Bayern with the [Andrea] Trinchieri teams because we were getting killed on the short roll,” he comments. “And we designed this – nobody had really done this type of system. We had a problem and suddenly we were like, ‘Hey, actually, this works really well also in other situations.’ There is a problem, then we figure out a solution. And it kind of evolves after that.
“But we always said to the players, ‘If you find a weakness in our thinking, you have to tell us.’ You have to tell everybody because that's the only way we can fix it. And by giving up this ego, you know, and this position of having to be right, we can be stronger. It's kind of like an antidote. The more we see something, the more we’re like, ‘Okay, if we fix this, that can't hurt us anymore. And we are stronger now as a system and as a team.’”
Iisalo’s playing days came to an end 10 years ago, when he was just 31, so he can still put himself in the mind of a player. The benefit to that is he has a better idea of the type of things that can aid his roster when it comes to getting better.
Players carrying notebooks
One such idea that he introduced was getting his players to carry around a notebook with them. This is a way of being able to jot things down during the season and be one step ahead of the competition, particularly when practice time is at a minimum.
“Yeah, we started this tradition in maybe the 2021 season,” Iisalo comments. “The only real superpower is learning faster than the others. In this profession, you have about six weeks in the preseason to get your sh*t together as a team and have everybody on the same page. It’s a very, very short amount of time.
“Every year we start with giving out the notebooks, going through the rules. I know I'm a very fast learner in many things, you know, but I can't learn anything that I don't write down. I forget it right away. And the best part of that is when you write it down, that's the moment where you learn because you have to really think, ‘Wait, what am I writing?’ It’s similar to writing an essay or an idea or a book. And we encourage them to put it in their own words and to have just that memory of writing it, and then they can go back to this.”
For Iisalo, his only wish is that he had a notebook to write his thoughts after practices during his time as a player. There is a potential downside, though: coming up against a player who has been jotting these things down over the years, as is the case with Bourg’s Jeremy Morgan, who spent two years playing under the Finnish tactician at Bonn between 2021 and 2023.
“One thing that's apparent is that no matter how well you start off the season, it's always the best teams that are the ones that improve the most during the season. So it's just about finding different ways to help the players learn the stuff that we are trying to do as a team," Iisalo stressed.
The EuroLeague dream
All of this work, all of this preparation is geared towards one thing: getting Paris into the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague. There is a confidence about Iisalo, particularly with his team 1-0 up in the finals, but he’s determined to not get too ahead of himself.
“I would be lying if those didn't cross my mind every now and then,” he responded when asked about seeing himself in next season’s EuroLeague. “But the best long-term preparation is to prepare well in the short term. We're doing the same thing we started in August, which is just doing everything that we can in order to be better tomorrow than we were today and better in the next game than the previous one. It sounds super boring because just like rinse and repeat, but it fits very well.
“Nevertheless, it's a dream [to get to the EuroLeague]. It's not a not-so-distant dream anymore. We are close, but also very far. And during the season, you are in a tunnel and there's no real time to start breathing or start enjoying any success, but you just keep chugging along. And then at some point, when the last time the buzzer goes off, then you can evaluate what you've done and you can start thinking about the future.
“I think Bill Belichick said it great when [his New England Patriots team] won the Super Bowl and said, ‘Yeah, well, great. We are now one month late on the draft process.’ So the more successful you are, the less time you have to prepare. And if we were to move up to the EuroLeague, it would mean that, ‘Okay, now we’ve graduated to a whole new set of challenges and we’ve got to find ways to compete even better.’ But that's what you look for as a competitor and, really, we have a lot of those in our team. Not just players, but also in the staff."