Former Ithaca Assistant: The Man Behind the Numbers
The RGV Vipers have been called the Houston Rockets’ basketball experiment. Meet the man who came from nowhere to run the lab.
Brian Kotloff, NBADLeague.com
Long before Nevada Smith was handed the controls to the Houston Rockets’ new-age basketball machine, he was a three-point shooter trapped in the Princeton offense.
It was the 1999-2000 season. As defensive slugfests took hold of the NBA, Smith, a college sophomore, hoped better days lay ahead for the Bethany (W.V.) Bison, his Division-III team that had lost 20 of 25 games the previous year. The traditional offense and the gunslinging guard were no match. “He hated it,” recalls then-teammate and roommate Todd McGuiness (current Hartwick Head Coach). It crushed the kid inside him that McGuiness knew growing up in the outskirts of Western Pennsylvania -- the fiery, swaggering kid with the automatic jump shot whose stepfather used to get kicked out of their eighth- and ninth-grade games.
And so, during one of their countless basketball discussions, they made a vow. “My team will never play like this,” the future coaches agreed.
It was never intended to be anything more than that: a desire to set the game free rather than cage it. Smith didn’t have the imagination to dream up what would happen to him at the ripe age of 33, when his interpretation of the game attracted the attention of the NBA’s preeminent forward-thinking organization, 1,600 miles away from Pennsylvania and even further in the basketball world.
“Nevada’s an unconnected guy; he didn’t fall from under some big coaching tree,” says Dickinson College head basketball coach Al Seretti, one of a handful of D-III coaches in Smith’s tight-knit circle of friends. “It was 100 percent about how he thought the game should be played and how it matched with what the Rockets do.”
It’s carried him here, to NBA All-Star Weekend in New Orleans, where he’ll patrol the sideline at
the NBA D-League All-Star Game 24 hours before LeBron James, Erik Spoelstra and the big leaguers put on the main event. Smith now coaches minor-league basketball’s best team, the 23-8 RGV Vipers, an offensive juggernaut built in his image. They shoot 45 three-pointers per game. They average 124 points and 108 possessions -- 24 more points and 12 more possessions than the average NBA team.
If the Rockets are treating the NBA D-League as experimental ground, they’ve found the perfect scientist to oversee their lab. “When you’re playing any sport, it signifies the best of who you are,” says Seretti. “How Rio Grande Valley plays is Nevada.”
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