The Olimpia Milano head coach is in the twilight of his career and things look miserable. Ettore Messina’s side are off to a dreadful start in Euroleague and look lost. Emmet Ryan on how this could be a sad end to a magnificent career in basketball.
He’s one of the most decorated coaches in the history of basketball. More than that, he’s one of the game’s most respected minds. Yet Ettore Messina is enduring a miserable time of things. His Olimpia Milano side lacks focus and cohesion.
Good grief
If it weren’t so tragic it would be laughable. Olimpia Milano weren’t exactly a top pick to do well before the season started. Still, what we’ve seen through five games from them in Euroleague has been just eye gougingly awful to watch.
The nadir that’s easiest to point to is the 50-20 comeback by Zalgiris Kaunas earlier this month. While a miracle for the Lithuanian side, and a credit to Andrea Trinchieri, it’s frankly bizarre that it happened. The utter loss of control by the Italian side was just out of the norm for top tier basketball.
Yet that arguably wasn’t the worst moment of the campaign so far. No, for Ettore Messina that must surely have been on Thursday night. After lapsing so hard in that game, the natural thought would be that his side would come out and be clinical in their next Euroleague outing. Yet, at home to Anadolu Efes, they were 46-25 down at halftime. The final score was more respectable but it did nothing to hide the underlying issues.
The mind is magnificent
No matter how Ettore Messina’s career finishes in basketball, his legacy is secure. It’s just genuinely sad to see him unable to work his magic with what looks like a reasonable roster. This is a man who everyone wants to listen to when he talks about basketball. Look up the videos of him talking about it on YouTube to back that up.
It’s more than the titles that gives him his credentials, though they help a lot. Messina has proven his mettle in many ways. With his one season as a consultant with the LA Lakers, Messina managed to heavily impress Kobe Bryant. Mamba didn’t suffer fools gladly. If Kobe thought a man was a good coach, that was a high honour.
It was the ability to hone whatever he had into the best version of itself that made Messina. Yes, he won four Euroleague titles with two different clubs. It’s more than that. It was his ability to always put teams in the best position to win that made him stand out. That’s what is so frustrating with these past few seasons of Olimpia Milano.
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He can adapt and he has adapted
The easy argument to make with Ettore Messina is that this is a by-product of age. At 65, we can all say the game has passed him by. It’s a polite way to brush off this wretched run of Olimpia Milano in recent times. It’s also wrong.
Messina has been coaching for close to 40 years. Naturally, some habits get picked up along the way. The thing is, his main habit has been learning all he can about basketball to make his teams better.
At EuroBasket 2017, over three decades into his career Messina demonstrated his flexibility well. He led probably the least intimidating Italy roster to play in a tournament this century.
After getting through the group stage, they were against a Finland side in the last 16 that everyone seemed to believe in. So, of course, Messina’s men utterly battered the Finns. It was a bullying display of sheer beauty.
For the quarter finals, Messina managed to start smart. His tactics aimed at limiting Serbia, while smart, weren’t enough to deal with the quality deficit. Still, he had swung his approach wildly in just 48 hours and had gotten buy-in. The players executed, it just wasn’t enough. That’s not a sign of rigidity that can’t keep up with modern basketball.
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An excess of self-belief
The second smartest thing anyone ever said was “I don’t know.” The smartest was “duck” but that’s less relevant. Ettore Messina has valued the words “I don’t know” throughout his basketball career. One of the sport’s greatest teachers is so because he has refused to stop learning.
Yet he is but one man. An exceptional man but limited by biological reality. He has no clone and only has 24 hours in the day. The same as you or I. Yet he is not only head coach of Olimpia Milano but also president of basketball operations. On the one hand, it gives him full control to lay out his vision and philosophy in basketball. On the other hand, it gives him no time to think about it.
This need to be both makes it impossible for Messina to give everything to the one role. Right now in Euroleague, that’s what his team needs. I joked about this on Twitter last night, that Messina (the executive) would need to have harsh words with Messina (the coach) after the game. It was funny and I don’t regret posting it. I am annoyed that the opportunity was there to post it. This shouldn’t be where Messina is at right now.
There is another way
In Milano, during a break between games, I remember walking by the side of the Forum. It was EuroBasket 2022 and Ettore Messina wasn’t coaching. He was part of the the federation set-up but the big job was with Gianmarco Pozzecco. Messina, strolling out, looked relaxed and at ease. It was just a stroll but it was a man in comfort at work, he was composed and had an air of confidence to him.
That’s what we’re not seeing on the sideline for Olimpia Milano right now. The dual-role approach simply isn’t working. How could it? It’s too easy to say Messina is washed. If the game passes him by it’s only because he’s not putting himself in the right position to walk with it.
This experiment, a five year one, in Milan seems only capable of ending in failure at the Euroleague level. That need not be the end of Messina’s story. For a man committed to lifelong learning he’s forgotten an important lesson. The rest you take is as important as the work you put in. What he needs is time to think at peace.
Then, probably somewhere else, he can focus on what he does best. His chief skill is putting players and teams in the best place to win. Messina needs to get back to that. I hope he gets the chance to do so.
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