“Keep playing!”
From my seat at the FedExForum press table, a few yards behind, where Memphis Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins walks on the sidelines, “Keep playing! That’s the word I heard Jenkins yell at his team more than anyone else during last season. Wasn Wasn, didn’t they call you? Is a gunshot coming out? Did Pass warn a defender? Forget it right now. Instead, “Keep playing!”
“This ‘keep playing’ mentality means the game doesn’t stop, the game helps keep moving,” Jenkins says, calling from his car two days after the Grizzlies season ended at the Orlando NBA Bubble. “What happens in the afterlife or what happens to a player at some point will not be the same in an upcoming game, in the next possession, from one game to another.”
For a young team, the youngest team in the NBA, the occasional reminder that the routine never stops is really helpful. After limping through the NBA qualifying schedule in Orlando, with no 3 rotation players (Jaren Jackson Jr., Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones) due to injuries, the young Grizzlies still controlled to make their way into an entry game opposite the Portland Trail. Blazers.Array The grizzlies, crowded, lost 126-122, but made an exciting display for their biggest crowd of the season, rookie of the year scoring 35 issues in 42 minutes. The Grizzlies lost, but they left everything there.
What happens in the afterlife or what happens to a player at any given time will be the same in a long-running game, in the next possession, from one game to another.
Now, back in 901, the Grizzlies will take a moment to rest, heal and reflect on the season it was. No one expected much from a rebuilding team with a first-year head coach, however, the Grizzlies finished the 34-39 season in the search for playoffs in the West, and demonstrated quite definitively that waiting for the next-generation Grizzlies to grow up might not be enough. while the suspects.
Grind City Media met Taylor Jenkins last week right after leaving the NBA bubble in Orlando, where he said he was looking ahead so he could “enjoy the family circle time, locate that wonderful work-life balance, and then can’t wait to get it. go back to the gym with our boys and get back to work.”
Grind City Media: Well, for starters, I say welcome home.
Taylor Jenkins: Thank you!
GCM: It’s a small question, but is it general to feel smart about that defeat to the Blazers in the entry game?
TJ: You can ask for that and my answer will be more than an addition of emotions. Obviously we’re disappointed with the defeat, but to know how we play a match of this magnitude, I’m proud of the boys. I’m going to skate for that (laughs).
GCM: (laughs) I completely understand.
TJ: Because you never feel smart after a defeat or when you leave with ethical victories.
GCM: I know what you mean. Obviously the zero defeat, however, it’s wonderful to see the team on this stage and on national television go out and play like this.
TJ: Oh friend, yes, on national television, in an entry game, and then all the time we play without 3 of our most productive players. Our boys gave each other an opposite chance to one of the league’s groups. You just need you to come back with a W. If we’d made it the next day, I think Portland was going to be gassed. We would still have had a hard time, but it’s those “what if” those who enter the sport.
GCM: You have a different experience than many coaches: move to Wharton and do a specialization in psychology. When did you know you wanted to be a basketball coach?
TJ: Across college, I identified that I was looking for a basketball coach. I played sports in development: baseball, football, basketball and football for a year. I enjoyed the power of team sports, competing for anything every day. In college, I trained young people from the center for 3 of my 4 years and felt another passion.
I felt the same love for the game and the competition, but in another role. I also enjoyed training and being in those kinds of environments, so the combination of two of my passions, training and play, began to come to mind. Then the story is fixed only once I get my first chance.
GCM: I’m asking because being NBA head coach has been its purpose for some time. And you’ve been G League head coach and NBA assistant coach for some teams, and this season, despite everything, you had your first chance to be NBA head coach. So what was it like moving to that seat? Was it particularly different? Or were it basically the same things you did, only on a bigger stage?
TJ: It’s another thing to be head coach. As you mentioned, as an assistant for so many years, I understood what it meant to be head coach. So when you replace that seat, it’s another one. Your feelings want to replace, your attitude wants to replace, your painting procedure will also have to replace, and it is clear that in the end, the decision-making you want to make for the common good, for the total team, which also replaces.
Having very smart delights as an assistant coach and running with wonderful coaches prepares you for a moment like this. But his first year as head coach, with all the new things he has to go through, is different from the ups and downs he’s witnessed as an assistant. Now you live them as head coach. It’s another one. There are many other tactics to describe it, but it’s a wonderful pleasure to be in that leadership position and do what you love.
GCM: Just talked about making decisions for the smartest on the team. During the games, I sit to your right and see that you are in the depths of a typhoon with so many things falling at the same time. How to stay focused on this bigger image and not get caught in the moment through this bad decision, this game, this plan? I hear you yelling at the kids all the time, “Keep playing!” How do you focus on this overview?
TJ: Honestly, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned as an assistant, looking for the head coaches I’ve worked for, is what it means to have a global mindset. It’s not just a season, it’s literally owned as a coach. He is constantly making plans the next time, but also thinks about some properties or at the end of a quarter or how a game will end up, not just to live and die through a single property or property before.
GCM: So how do you prioritize and deal with all of this at the moment?
TJ: Well, obviously, this existing moment, this existing resolution that you have to make, is the most important thing, but it will lead to the next resolution that you will have to make, one after the other. So, by adopting this global mindset of knowing that the game continues, there will be more opportunities, more difficult times, more smart moments, more resolutions to take; you have to succeed over that as head coach.
It’s a long game, it’s a long season, not a moment of solitude will dictate your destiny. At the end of a game, at the end of the season, you have the ultimate effects for sure, but if you can focus on all those decisions you have to make or sometimes more positive than negative, it leads to more victories. and more wins and smart things. Then… That’s interesting. Sometimes you can’t just ask someone to sit down and teach you that lesson.
GCM: You put the representatives. You have to.
TJ: You just have to delight and witness it, and then go back to your philosophy and the way you teach and communicate. The most vital thing is to know how you train, the words you use, and how you handle certain moments in a game. One of the other lines of maximum productivity I have had was never to be too high and never fall too low in a few moments. The simplest case is that you win a game and you think you’re the most productive, you lose a game and you think you’re the worst. This will not be the case next time if you do what you should do to yourself.
GCM: I asked you about it before this season in an unofficial way, but speaking of having a broader mindset, that also goes into your philosophy of employing the coach’s challenges, right? I think you’ve been using three all season. Because for you, this isn’t really the time: a piece, a call. Here’s an overview. You look to stay waiting for later instead of getting angry with a call.
TJ: You know, I even have the idea of getting out of the bubble. There were a few moments when I wanted to use it and I just wasn’t in a position to make the call, but it’s a domain where I know I want to improve it and examine it more and improve my procedure a little more. and maybe take a little more risk. I’m definitely more conservative, more about the broader image and understanding. Is there a challenge in the first quarter, in the quarter at the moment, in the third quarter that in the grand scheme of things can simply be a decisive factor? When do I want this deadline? Or if I lose that downtime, is it possible that we’ll have trouble towards the end of the game in a tight game?
A few times I think about it in the bubble and I think: well, we used two of the deadlines when I needed this last delay. I think the times I challenged this year, I almost 100 percent convinced myself that I thought the call would pass in our direction, but in fact there are many other tactics to meet this challenge. Are you going to override a resolution? Is it to help a player in an instant? You’re looking to find out, is this property value? I know I can actually take a little more risks, and that’s something I’ll be running on during the summer.
GCM: Well, you played two against three in them this season, so you were fine!
TJ: (Laughter) Well, that’s not smart enough, I have to have 3 by 3. That will be my purpose next year when I get them.
GCM: Hey, you miss all the shots you don’t make, don’t you?
TJ: Exactly.
GCM: When do you think things fit together for this team? The start was slow, and then, suddenly, in January, I felt as if the throttle pedal hit the ground.
TJ: I don’t think there’s any compostrical game. I’m a company that believes in the procedure to get to that point. Obviously we took our Ls at the beginning of the season, but we don’t avoid running and I’ve said it all season: when we win, when we lose, when we have a healthy team or when we’re dealing with injuries, you just have to keep running. Check what you can control every day. I think it was just a matter of trust in his paintings this first component of the season, even if we didn’t get the effects we wanted.
Come each and every day, do the individual work, watch the movie, have dialogues to know that we have a young team, we have a new team, we have a new formula. How will they feel comfortable in their role in the formula they’ve been playing in lately? I think in mid-December we went west on this 4-game road. Array We start with two losses and can scream that you are passing to pass to 0, you are passing to lose 3 in a row and now you ‘Passing to lose 4 in a row in a difficult to the West Coast.
We played against the Golden State team, a hungry team that played hard. Obviously, they lack some of the most productive players in the league, but they are still just as competitive. And then Phoenix, some other competitive team, a difficult position to play and they gave us both victories and I think, when we got back from that trip, our boys continued to have confidence and work. Now we start to perceive that this is how we have to play basketball every day. It just took us a while. We’ve just discovered a little more consistency in the way we play and naturally takes time in your first season, and especially with a young team. Then we postponed it with a pretty clever ending to December, and then to a very smart January.
Victories are obviously a smart result. Prove that you do things right and that you have that consistency, but it’s also the everyday things that go beyond games. That’s what they did in practice and what they did in their sessions and in their nutrient and film studies and everything. The boys have simply become more comfortable and are attributed to the players, our coaches, our functionality team because they all make it possible. He’s not just a player, he’s not just the head coach. That’s what we got there and it’s just that vintage line, just clicked. And that clicked only because he tried to activate the transfer enough times and, in spite of everything, the soft one is activated.
GCM: Was there an express game or a time this season when you learned that Ja Morant is not your typical rookie game creator?
TJ: Oh man, there were so many moments before we started playing gambling that I knew it was going to be special, how smart I was on the basketball court. But everyone remembers the Brooklyn Nets home game, which took over the last quarter and overtime and was evidently the biggest defensive at this level of the season. One of the biggest defensive stands of the entire season, with the shot blocked opposite Kyrie Irving. And then, in overtime, jae Crowder’s release.
This one leaves me aside because I already had a very clever feeling, but you still have to see it. Ha is a matter of victory. It’s about doing the right thing for your team, whether he comes in and plays, he’s placing a teammate, playing with a defender, not everything is an attack. Make that little pitch in the middle of the crowd in Jae and let Jae take the winning chance of the match, then he does. It was great.
GCM: Obviously, there’s no way to know, but when they put you in the bubble, do you think that if you knew the injuries were going to happen and you’d run out of 3 of your rotational boys, you would have approached the game differently? or otherwise ready?
TJ: I don’t think so. If we had known that we were going to get boys out of injury, I think we would have approached it the same way knowing that we were in a wonderful position to play significant matches, to give that push to the playoffs, to give a great fight every day, to set the course for a very smart first season. If the boys were healthy and able to play, it would be an invaluable delight for them in the future.
GCM: One thing I saw from the team and especially you, the Bubble, is that you were talking a lot more about social justice issues, dressed in other T-shirts, making statements, things like that. Turns out you’re taking the opportunity to lead and play that role a little bit.
TJ: It’s a motion in time that I think we’ve all tried to adopt in other ways. We all come from other backgrounds, we have had other reports and we are looking to confront the country’s harsh and unhappy truth and the history of racial injustice. I believe that by bringing the whole organization in combination they were all given to take the next step in this motion and perceive that some of us do not know what happened in our country.
We think we know, and I’m a wonderful example. I feel like I am aware of the racial injustices that have occurred in our country – economically, socially – but I don’t have all the answers. And being able to build on others: players who depend on coaches, coaches who depend on players and share our minds and open our hearts and minds, I think it was a big step forward when communicating about growth.
It is unfortunate that tragic occasions have to create this moment for you, however, I think we have all taken it on knowing that we can all make a difference to other people in this world, and especially in other people in our communities. How can we use these combined reports in close proximity to raise awareness, to have continuing education about racial injustice in our country, and how can we get out of it then? This is now the next major challenge of our growth. You have this perfect platform; How do they make a difference in their own communities now? We all come from other backgrounds, other cities, other places of origin, but Memphis is our home.
GCM: Finally, what’s the next step?
TJ: Well, I’m going to spend lunch with Dillon Brooks right now. I have meals with players, end-of-season conversations, discussions about summer, the next few months, and then I’ll probably take a week or two to enjoy my family. The kids start school, so I’ll spend time with my wife, then I’ll go back to work. Find tactics for yourself, watch a movie, how can I help the players? How can I be a better head coach? Obviously, we have a commission and a firm loose in a few months. Whenever we know we’re betting basketball games, we’re moving on to being in a position for that.