'I love you, Coach’: How a summer in Miami built a bond between Marcus Smart and Jay Larranaga, and transformed his shooting

https://www.masslive.com/celtics/2019/05/i-love-you-coach-how-a-summer-in-miami-built-a-bond-between-marcus-smart-and-jay-larranaga-and-transformed-his-shooting.html


MY NOTE:  This article is from MAY, 2019.  It refers to LAST summer's work.  Still, it helps to explain how/why Marcus Smart went from being the worst shooter in the NBA to a decent one and is a tribute to our coaching staff.  There is no offseason anymore, not for players nor coaches.



'I love you, Coach’: How a summer in Miami built a bond between Marcus Smart and Jay Larranaga, and transformed his shooting



Updated May 6, 2019; Posted May 6, 2019




Jay Larranaga and Marcus Smart watch game film before a regular season game



By John Karalis | JKaralis@masslive.com



This should be Marcus Smart’s time.

The Boston Celtics are playing the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference semifinals, and Smart has been watching from the bench as he nurses a torn oblique. Instead of trying to rip the ball from Giannis Antetokounmpo or making Khris Middleton uncomfortable on the perimeter, Smart sits in a suit, waiting for biology to run its course.

Earlier in the day, as he has most days since his injury a month ago, Smart worked through the basketball portion of his rehab with assistant coach Jay Larranaga. Instead of their usual pregame routine, Smart tested his balance and range of motion while keeping his jumper sharp.


There is one similarity between the rehab and the game preparation, though.

The slapping five.

Larranaga is constantly demanding and encouraging. Smart is constantly pushing and accepting direction. And no matter what they’re working on, there’s a dap in between.

There’s a thing with these two. It goes beyond the typical coach-player connection. The way they work together, the way the dap each other, the way they communicate; there’s a bond.



“Jay’s been a big help for me,” Smart said. “He spent countless hours out of his day, out of his life, out of his family’s life to spend with me.”

It started two years ago, when they spent a summer together in Miami. The bond was built through hard work, arguments, philosophical challenges and an understanding that both were working toward a common goal.

The result was the best shooting year of Smart’s life. Now, as Smart hopes to use that improved touch in the playoffs, the bond shows itself in a dogged rehabilitation from a painful injury.


Devotion to develop

The Boston Celtics were never supposed to be in the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals, but Isaiah Thomas kept willing them to wins and carrying them beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. However, the conference finals proved to be the brick wall to their cartoon coyote. Even with Thomas, the LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love-led Cavaliers were too much. Without Thomas, who left with his now infamous hip injury in Game 2, the Celtics were cooked.


The Celtics managed to get one good punch in, though. Avery Bradley’s game-winning 3-pointer gave Boston a win in Game 3 and, for a moment, a sliver of hope. While Bradley was the hero, Smart was the star, scoring 27 points and hitting seven of the 10 3s he took. Boston lost the next two games, ending their season, but the series began Smart’s journey towards becoming a better shooter.

“Coming off that season,” Larranaga said, “he really wanted to take his game to another level, physically, skill-wise.”

Smart planned on working out in Miami that summer. Larranaga saw an opportunity to help, especially since he had access to the practice facility at the University of Miami, where his father, Jim, is the head coach.

“I talked to Brad,” Larranaga said. “I said… I’d like to try to devote this summer to help Marcus just continue to grow as a young player.”

“He came down and spend the whole summer with me working,” Smart said. “So, we got that bond and I trust him with everything he says to make sure he’s setting me up for success.”


Basketball is non-negotiable

The neat-and-tidy story is that Smart devoted himself, Larranaga put him through the paces, and Smart is now a decent shooter with good habits. But just like the making of any sausage, the process can get a bit ugly at times.


“He says that,” Larranaga said with a laugh when told that Smart trusts him implicitly. “He still loves to argue.”

Trey Davis, Smart’s childhood friend and former UMass star, joined him for the workouts. Davis has played for the Boston Celtics summer league team and the Maine Red Claws, and he agreed there was tension early in the process.

“The first couple of weeks I could see maybe a little attitude or things like that, but as he grew through the summer of Miami, things simmered down,” he said.

Larranaga added, “I’m very argumentative, he’s very argumentative, we’re both very strong-minded and have a lot of basketball background. So, it’s not like he’s taking my word with no questions asked. We wear each other down, I’ll say. But there’s definitely a mutual appreciation and a mutual respect.”

That mutual respect came with a mutual understanding -- basketball was non-negotiable.

Summers in Miami for the young and rich invariably include a bit of beach time and nightlife, but the non-negotiable aspect of this summer was that everything else was tabled when it came time to work on Smart’s game.

“We used to go to the gym almost three times a day. At night it was nothing but shooting, like almost 300 to 400 shots. Just makes,” Davis said. “That meant if it was time to work out or we wanted to get to the gym, everything else come second. ... We were really there for him, just pushing him and encouraged him each and every day.”


The workouts included video sessions where all three would share their opinions. The video sessions broke everything down to the finest details. They looked at footwork and balance. They got into the nuance of how to come off screens.

Like a carpenter sanding edges down to a fine finish, Larranaga and Smart began to find small mistakes and slowly grind them away from his game.

“Jay’s great about communicating the small tweak consistently, communicating the simple focus consistently and that’s it,” Stevens said. “There’s no major overhaul, there’s no major change in it. For Marcus, like most guys, it’s about selection and it’s about making sure your balance is good, you’re ready to shoot, you know when your shots are coming.”

Part of the early head-butting between Smart and Larranaga was trying to get the player to change patterns that had worked for him. After all, Smart had not only become an NBA player, but a highly valued one despite his poor shooting.

For Smart, it was getting the right rest, getting the right treatment, watching the right film and consistently honing his craft. He needed to build better habits to reach a new level, even if he didn’t want to at first.

“The reason I love Coach Jay is he’s always been honest,” Smart said. “Regardless of whether I liked it or not, he didn’t care. He was going to tell me what I needed to hear not what I wanted to hear.”


Larranaga believes his job is to have a genuine interest in helping players be better.

“I think I’ve shown that over time, that my number one goal is for him to have the happiest and most successful life he can possibly have.” he said. “So a lot of the stuff we did in Miami was not just shooting related. It was just continuing to grow as people.”

Part of that summer included trips away from Miami to hear from other successful people. They visited Al Horford in Atlanta, Chauncey Billups in Denver, Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly in Charlotte. All of it was aimed at getting players from different backgrounds to share their stories of success so Smart could soak up as much information and maybe incorporate some of their habits into his own routine.

It also included one unscheduled visit.


Kyrie just walked in

Drills are necessary for a basketball player to improve but they’re worthless without putting them into practice, so getting a good five-on-five run is an essential part of any player’s improvement.

“We’d play pickup on certain days,” Smart recalled of maybe the most exciting day of the summer. “I told coach, ‘eh, I’m a little tired, I’m probably not going to play today.’ And he said OK. Then literally he calls me back and said, ‘well Kyrie just walked in and said he ain’t playing ‘til you get here.’ So I’m like ‘oh shit, I’ll be up there in a little bit then.’”


Trey Davis was there, too.

“Kyrie came to the gym while he was still playing with Cleveland,” he said. “He came to the gym. We played pick-up, and from jump Marcus turned it on. That was probably one of his best days that he probably had in Miami as far as playing-wise. He was just killing, destroying.”

They went at each other about a dozen times. Each game was intense, and a different Smart emerged.

“Marcus is always known as a defensive player but he was doing things on the offensive end that I hadn’t really seen,” Davis said. “He was shooting it so well. That day was a nice day. Having Kyrie in the gym and seeing that, that was probably one of the better days that I’ve seen when I was down there.”

After they were done going at it on the court, Smart sat with Irving for another kind of one-on-one.

“Me and Kyrie chopped it up. We were talking a little bit about Game 3 when he was with Cleveland,” Smart said. “Just everything. I picked his brain a little bit about everything he’s going through, he went through, how he deals with certain things, and everything he does on the court. You see him now and the dude is remarkable. Preparing, and we all know how great of a player he is, so for Kyrie to wait on me to come to the gym is something special, so I really valued that.”

Smart also valued another lesson from Irving.

“Everybody in the summertime plays just relaxed, and aggressive. Everyone plays their best basketball in the summer,” Larranaga said. “Marcus is the same. That’s part of all the work he’s put in is because, ‘man, I want to play that way all year ‘round.’... you see Kyrie, that is how he always plays, he plays with that ultimate confidence because of all the work he’s put in.”


Mental hurdles

Smart finished the season with a career-high effective field goal percentage of 53.3. His 56.8 true shooting percentage is more than seven points higher than any other point of his career.

But this is 2019, one full season after Smart’s Miami summer of transformation. All habit-building and tweaking of balance and form were one thing, but Smart had to clear another obstacle before finally seeing some success: himself.

The first hurdle was Smart’s own propensity to go for heat-checks before he was even hot. Smart has always been confident, often to a fault when it came to his own shot selection.

“It’s a big part of development generally of anybody, is making sure that you’re learning where the best spots are -- not just where there are spots.” Stevens said earlier this year. “He’s such a smart player. Like, he understands the game, he sees the next pass, he sees the play ahead. And he also is a home run hitter. So being able to balance being patient and making the next right play and letting it come back to you instead of swinging for the fences is hard for a competitor like that.”


The virtue of patience was not a lesson that came easy for Smart.

“I was shooting the ball well in warmups, workouts, we was getting everything down, repetition, and then I’d go play in a pick up game or something and my shot wasn’t falling, and I’m like ‘what the?” Smart said. “He’s like ‘you gotta wait. It’s going to happen. The shots are going to fall. You put in the work, the work’s going to come out at the right time. And that’s what kinda happened this season.”

Smart’s second hurdle is the emotions he continues to battle.

“We love all that Marcus is. And part of Marcus is his fire,” Stevens said after Smart’s ejection in Philadelphia last month. “As you know, a time or two a year, it gets the best of him.”

Last season, those emotions got the best of him after a late-January loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. Afterward, Smart punched a framed photo in his hotel room, opening up a gash on his shooting hand that nearly cost him his season, or worse.

Smart had already been struggling to apply the lessons learned in Miami. That set him back further.

“When I hurt my hand, it kind of stunned me,” Smart said. “I didn’t know if I was going to play again, what was going to happen with my hand. ... It takes forever to get in shape and takes one day just to get out of it. And it’s kind of like that when it comes to anything that you do. So in my workouts I’ve been shooting, shooting, getting that repetition, now I hurt my hand and I can’t do that anymore, I lose that muscle memory, now I’m trying to rebuild it back with a hurt hand, it just doesn’t work out.”


Stevens has said many times that he thinks the hand injury delayed Smart’s progress.

“I thought the hand stuff really hurt him because I thought he was going to have a really good shooting year last year,” Stevens said. “And once you start a season poorly shooting you have a tendency to try to get it all back at once.”

Smart says he believes everything happens for a reason.

“I lose my mom, but then I have the best year of my career at the same time,” he said. “So last year was just a preparation for me to get ready to take on the responsibility and really open my eyes for what needs to be done this year.”


Fighting together through injury




That life-altering loss snapped a lot into perspective for Smart.

The torn oblique he suffered a month ago has cost him one playoff series, and it might cost him a second but he hasn’t let it get him down.

“Everything that has been going in my life, I think has kind of prepared me for times like this,” Smart said, admitting that prior injuries have led to his share of ‘why me?’ moments. “Before you see a rainbow at the end of the rain, it has to rain first. So you gotta go through some shit before you get a pot of gold at the end.”

A month ago, Smart was comparing his torn oblique to getting stabbed with a knife or getting punched by Mike Tyson. Four weeks later, he’s sprinting at full speed and dunking in drills.


“His detail in the little things, I think, is what helps him come back from these injuries better than other people,” Larranaga said. “People always see the competitiveness. They don’t see this guy does the ladder on a January 3rd, during the dog days, in pre-practice warm up, when no one has energy. He’s doing it at 100 percent, so I think that helps in situations like this.”

For Smart, that dedication is repayment to Larranaga and the Celtics for their commitment to him.

“When you’ve got a coaching staff, a group of guys, where everyone likes one another and you can tell they genuinely care, you just want to go out there and give it everything you have,” Smart said.

Part of doing better is applying the same mental energy to his injury that he did to his improved jumper. The patience he learned when his shot wasn’t falling also applied to when he couldn’t breathe without pain.

“I remember when we first started, I’m like, ‘listen, I’ve been doing this for two weeks, three weeks, and I ain’t seen no results,’” Smart said. “He’s like. ‘it takes takes time!’”

“Everybody wants instant gratification,” Larranaga said. “Everybody. Me. Every person in the world would love to have things fast. We don’t control that part.”


Control was one of the main lessons in Miami, and it’s now the thing that helps keep Smart focused and moving forward during his rehab.

“That time in the summer where we spent everyday together it was ‘focus on the things we can control, let’s focus on nothing but positive things,” Smart said. “You got hurt, you can’t control that. It happened. So why spend all your time focusing on that when you can focus on something that can make you happy, and when you get back out there it helps you.”


I love you, Coach

In Miami in 2017, Smart was, and still is, a player driven to challenge himself and find ways to improve. Larranaga was, and still is, a coach dedicated to the job of helping players do just that.

Along the way, the dynamic between them grew into something more.

“They talked before and after every workout. Ate dinner together,” Davis said. “I could just tell they was building a chemistry and a good relationship with one another and that was something good to be around. When you have a good relationship like that, it’s easier to push each other. Between him and Coach Jay, it’s easier to talk about things. It’s easier to communicate. I think over the summer, that bond grew.”

Larranaga agreed it was a positive summer. Mostly.

“Not every day was positive,” Larranaga said. “I think we both looked at it as a real positive experience. At least I looked at it as a real positive experience in my life. I learned as much from him as much as he learned from me for sure.”

The story of the bond Smart and Larranaga share is in the behind-the-scenes butting of heads as much as it is the on-court success each is now realizing.

“My dad always took me to the gym to work out. I got kicked out of more practices than anybody that my dad has ever coached, and no matter what he was always there the next day to rebound for me,” Larranaga said. “So that’s kind of how I look at my job. Like, regardless of the arguments or disagreements we have, we both know the next day we gotta be there to put in the work.”

As they sat there at the Celtics practice facility, side by side, ready to put in another day of work, the story of getting past another argument got them both laughing.

“So my son was on this last trip, and we were talking about something and he was like do you remember…” Larranaga began, with Smart looking on in anticipation. “He was on the trip with us to Denver when we went to visit Chauncey Billups.”

Smart laughed, saying “Chauncey Billups’ in unison with his coach. Larranaga continued, “and he was like ‘do you remember the argument you and Marcus got into the first night we were there?’ He was rebounding and finally he went and sat down because me and Marcus just kept arguing over the dumbest thing.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Smart said, his voice raised in excitement and glee. “He just goes (Smart rolls eyes to imitate Larranaga’s son), and he just walks off the court.”

“But that’s the relationship me and Jay have,” Smart continued. “We’ve built that. We’ve been through bad times, we’ve been through the great times. That’s what makes our relationship so special. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, everybody knows that. And he knows it more than anything…”

“And I do, too,” Larranaga interjected. “I just hide it sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Smart acknowledged. “But when you’re able to express yourself to someone and then you might want not hear what they gotta say, but you understand. You know that everything they’re saying comes from a great place and that’s what it is with me and Coach Jay. Everything that he tells me, I might not want to hear it sometimes, but everything he’s saying is right and it’s for the right reasons.

“So sometimes I might be like ‘yeah, whatever coach,” and then he’ll text me, and I always text back, ‘I love you coach, thank you.’ And I really appreciate that.”



bob



.

Marcus Smart accomplished something I did not think was possible.  For his first  4 years in the NBA he was a dreadful shooter.  But he is a guy that is a worker and wanted to get better.

In year 5 he shoots 36.4% from deep on 4.3 attempts.  He is not a high volume shooter but if he manages to maintain that level of efficiency he must be considered an offensive factor for the Celtics.  He can start for the Celtics or come charging off the bench.  Either way he remains a difference maker and the longest tenured player on this team.

I still have hope that Brad Stevens abandons his egalitarian approach to leadership and names Marcus as a team captain.  I would also name Walker as co-captain.

Every team needs a captain in sports, in industry and in the armed services.  While every member of any group has a shared responsibility to the group and its' goals, leadership in a more singular status, leads the first wave into battle and draws the line in the sand.

Last year with no team captain, Boston was a rudderless ship on a merciless sea. Coach Stevens failed miserably in bringing the team together.  

Boston is not the only team that did not have a captain.

Come on Brad name 2 captains and use them to communicate with the team when players are reluctant to communicate with you or when they turn you off and do not listen.