Giant job for Andrej

MELBOURNE (Paulo Kennedy's View from Downunder) - Well it's finally done. After what seemed like an eternity of speculation Andrej Lemanis has been named Australian national team coach.

For those not familiar with Andrej's work, he has been assistant coach of the Boomers under Brett Brown for the past four years and has led the New Zealand Breakers to the past three NBL championships.

Not bad, hey? Looking at those credentials, it's hard to believe there was any doubt. But from the outside at least this race seemed like a close and strangely run thing.

After the indifferent results of chasing an NBA-based coach in Brown to replace Brian Goorjian after a seventh-placed finish at the 2008 Olympics, it seems we almost went through the same thing again.

It took Goorjian a number of years to figure out what international basketball was all about and not surprisingly Brown experienced the same understandable issues.

The Boomers initially endured two poor years under his watch followed by two inconsistent years and ended the process back in the same respectable seventh place at the 2012 Olympics!

In all that time, they did not claim a single big name scalp in a truly meaningful game.

But come 2013, when a new coach needed to be chosen, feelers were again being put out into NBA ranks! This is despite Brown having missed the early part of the Boomers' preparation for London while the San Antonio Spurs were still in the playoffs.

On top of that, the selection panel was reportedly chasing Goorjian to see if he is interested in the job again!

It left me shaking my head, and I guess the point I'm making is in a quiet moment Basketball Australia should sit down and assess the recruitment process.

Is there some 'headless chicken' action going on, rather than a thorough and methodical assessment of what the national team needs and who can deliver it?

That aside, I think a good choice has eventually been made. Lemanis has done a remarkable job building the Breakers from a laughing stock in New Zealand to arguably the country's best sporting franchise. You can read more about his efforts here.

His main local competitor was Perth Wildcats coach Rob Beveridge, who despite some cruel luck with injuries the past few seasons has maintained Perth as clearly the second best team in the NBL.

Beveridge was the coach of the 2003 FIBA U19 World Championship gold-medal winning Australian team and has a huge impact on the NBL with his superb defensive schemes. You can read more about that here.

Beveridge would have been a good choice too, but the job belongs to Lemanis and no one can argue with that.

He now faces the task of building on a number of good pieces put in place by Brown and correcting some glaring holes that badly hurt the team over recent years.

How much Lemanis takes from his up-tempo Breakers style and how much he maintains Brown’s predominantly dour half-court style could have a big say in how successful he is.

Defensively the Boomers mostly tried to shut up shop in the half-court, but they weren't good enough to win that way against good teams and they robbed themselves of easy baskets created by aggressive D.

The Breakers have built their recent success off of aggressive and unpredictable defensive pressure across 96 feet.

That revolved around unique Kiwi power forwards in Mika Vukona and Dillon Boucher though - can Lemanis find Aussie players to fill those roles? And if not, does he have a defensive system that can join the Boomers and Breakers style somewhere in the middle?

Offensively, the Boomers seemed to play very much like Brown’s Spurs, with the offence revolving around Patty Mills, Joe Ingles and David Andersen.

This was not successful. The focus on this trio left an athletic dynamic penetrating wingman like Brad Newley standing on the wing waiting for spot up threes.

It meant Aleks Maric, one of European basketball's better pick-and-roll bigs, was rarely used in an on-ball screen.

It also asked the 'big three' to do more than they were capable.

Mills, Ingles and Andersen took the highest percentage of their teams' shot attempts of any three leading scorers in the top eight, and they hit those shots at the lowest percentage! That’s a bad combination.

So the challenge for Lemanis is to find a system that uses players’ strengths, rather than pigeon-holing players into roles.

The reality is that Australia’s top players are all very even when it comes to offensive talent. None of them are elite scorers - Mills can be but you pay for it when he is having an off night - but they are all capable of having big games or even hot streaks that surprise the defence.

An equal-opportunity system that allows Lemanis - and importantly the players on the court - to pull the leavers depending on who is hot and what the opposition is giving them seems well suited to this squad.

At both ends of the court Lemanis faces big challenges. What gives me confidence in him is that after each championship at the Breakers he has lost star players and has had to adjust on the run.

He has proven more than capable of doing so - he is a 'solutions man' who listens to his players and adjusts as the need arises.

Further on Lemanis' side is the continuity of the group. Of the 2012 team, 11 of them had played in at least three international seasons with the Boomers, eight of them dating back to before 2008.

Some of those players have said they didn’t know what the Boomers' identity was under Brown. Lemanis has established clear identities for his club team, now we get to see if he can do it at the highest level.

Good luck Andrej, you've certainly earned this opportunity.

Paulo Kennedy

FIBA

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