Sam Mitchell is a late bloomer as an NBA coach, much as it took time for him to become an NBA player.
Sports Illustrated magazine, in a poll of 428 players, rated Mitchell the worst coach last season after the Toronto Raptors got off to a 1-15 start. Then the Raptors began this season 2-8.
Now Atlantic Division leaders,
the Raptors (36-31) are on track to make their first playoff appearance in five seasons. Mitchell is cast in a different light.
"You never look at yourself as the best and you never look at yourself as being the worst. That's the way I've always looked at my life," says Mitchell, 43. "I'm somewhere in the middle striving to be the best."
Mitchell, in the final year of his contract, has the Raptors playing team basketball. They are 10th in the NBA in assists (22.0), which leads to good shots. They are ninth in three-point field goal percentage (36.2 percent), three-point attempts a game (18.0) and three-pointers made a game (6.5) entering Monday.
"We may not be the most talented group of individuals, but teams win. ... What we lack in individual talent we compensate for in team play," Mitchell says.
"Put them out there one-on-one, they're going to struggle. But when you put them out there in a team concept and give them some rules and principles to play by, they can get it done. That's been the strength of our team."
When the Raptors were struggling midway through last season, newly hired general manager Bryan Colangelo took a wait-and-see approach in his evaluation of Mitchell.
"The one thing that stood out more than anything else was he had the team ready to play every night," Colangelo says. "They wanted to go out and play hard. For a large part of that period, (star forward) Chris Bosh was out, yet the effort displayed was impressive. ... Sam has a unique way of dealing with these guys. Call it tough love, and it's equally distributed. That gains respect among players."...
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Mitchell finally has Raptors playing in his image
the team is currently playing like anything but the way they're projected by that article.
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