Toughness on video

Teaching NBA players to play hard

At 6-9, the Celtics’ Jordan Walsh has always been a “big man.” But he harasses Austin Reaves full court, makes him change directions, navigates a ballscreen, fights to get back in front, and leaves an elite scorer with a so-so scoring opportunity. There’s a reason this is the kind of clip that I send my NBA clients.

Basketball coaches say many different kinds of things, which are sometimes confusing. But it got super simple when Jazz coach Will Hardy begged his team to “fucking play harder.”

At last, advice that makes sense to all of us! Jump into that stew of caring more deeply about winning. Run faster, jump higher, dive to the floor. Guard full court, foul harder, get more sleep, drink more coffee, help your teammates up off the floor. Put in work.

And most importantly: be tough. This is, in the way coaches talk, very often the difference between winning and losing. I ask players all the time what their coaches said after games. When they lose, it’s typically some form of “they had more energy than us…”

We think of basketball as the sport of tall people, but there are a hell of a lot of 6-9 UPS drivers and pharmacists, and often the reason is because they didn’t have Jordan Walsh’s fight. It helps to be tall, but not if you don’t have enough fight to make winning plays.

Many people, coaches included, think toughness is innate, something you either have or do not.

I disagree. To me, toughness is a talent that can be nurtured, enhanced, and weaponized. Just as Steph Curry can have bad shooting games, guys who normally play hard can suffer poor effort games, too. For Hardy to ask his guys to play harder is a sign he believes they are capable. (No one would tell a bad shooter to just make more shots.)

It’s super fun to race and score, race and block a shot, but what Walsh does here is not fun at all. It’s a grind. But it’s vital to a team’s success and his too. He was a first-round talent who left college after one year at Arkansas and fell to the second round. Now in his third year, after two ho-hum seasons, he’s emerged as a dynamic and versatile defender with a very bright future because he is gifted on offense too. Plays like this are how he distinguishes himself.

Sometimes we think that what it takes to make the NBA is to be tall. But it’s not nearly enough anymore. There are a ton of Jordan Walshes sitting on NBA benches, or more likely playing overseas, or in some cases selling insurance or getting a real estate license. The difference is often simply that not everyone figures out the magical elixir of making it in the NBA, which is to play incredibly hard.

The ones who do it game after game have two things in common: they are winning a lot, and they are rich.

In my coaching work at The Pro Training Center, I am lucky enough to work with basketball obsessives like Collin Terry (former coach in the NBA G-League and at BYU), Pat Quinn (coached Amen and Ausar Thompson and Jonathan Kuminga in their final prep seasons), and Pete Alexandrou (managing partner for our virtual training business for prep players). Between the four of us, we send our NBA clients hundreds of video clips a day, on an array of teaching points.

But our favorite topic is winning basketball, especially through “hard as fuck” effort. It’s one thing to go hard, but it’s another to envision ways to turn a hot motor into wins. As a holiday gift to TrueHoop readers, below is a collection of our favorite moments of playing hard:

The chasedown block

Just as the ball goes in to give the Sixers the lead, try to find Tyrese Maxey. He’s out of bounds, surrounded by teammates. Rookie and elite athlete V.J. Edgecombe and shotblocking stud Dominick Barlow are racing to the rim, so had Maxey not done what he did, assuming he wouldn’t be better at making a play than those two, no one would have breathed a sigh of disappointment. Maxey chose to play harder, racing for the most famous of his 21 blocks this year.

Turning the 20/80 ball into a 50/50 ball