By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
When thinking of David Blatt’s EuroLeague titles with Maccabi both as an assistant (2004) and head coach (2014), his 7DAYS EuroCup crown with Darussafaka in 2018, three Olympics and EuroBasket medals with the Russian national team, and his reaching the NBA Finals with Cleveland, you can be sure he surely is a well-traveled, well-thought person.
This actually depicts broadly in all of his interviews, and this feature on euroleague.net where he shares how he picked up basketball is no different.
“The first memory I had was a very, very young age, probably six or seven years old, going to a basketball gym where the kids were playing in some type of organized fashion and getting the ball and making my first shot — only it was on the wrong basket! Which taught me the value of many things! Knowing you have to understand what you are doing. It is good to do the right thing, but you have to do the right thing in the right place and the right time. And finally, you cannot allow disappointment to cause you to lose your love for anything. The second thing is that my older sisters were basketball players, and they used to play outside of my house, and I began to practice because I saw them practicing all of the time. Very quickly, I became competitive about it because I wanted to be better than my sisters, and that is what really caused me to begin to commit to improving myself and catch up with them”, Blatt tells EuroLeague.net.
For Blatt, coaching was there almost from day one, during his Maccabi Haifa days, and he decided to turn his focus to this profession full-time after a bad injury.
“The interesting thing is that even when I was first playing professionally at the age of 22 with Maccabi Haifa in Israel, I also coached a youth team, and every year that I played professionally, wherever I was, I always made it a point to ask the club if I could coach a team in their organization, whether it be kids, youth, juniors or whatever the case may be. And I did that throughout my entire career. And then when I was injured at the age of 33 and a half — I had a full rupture of my Achilles and my career ended — I began, of course, to coach professionally, although it wasn’t really something that was in my mind as being my lifelong career. Honestly, I couldn’t have told you at 33 or 34 that it was what I was going to do in my life. I didn’t really have that specific plan. I had other ideas but basketball took over.”