| 23 September 2011
Update: Andrei Kirilenko is finally back home again to play basketball in Russia, and this time for the next three years.
While an NBA out is part of the contract, Kirilenko signed with CSKA Moscow on Monday - the team where he spent two seasons before making the jump to the NBA with the Utah Jazz in 2001. He will begin practicing with the team on Tuesday and will make his Euroleague debut when CSKA faces Zalgiris (Ty Lawson, Sonny Weems) on Monday, October 17.
"I am glad to be back to the team where I spent the years of adolescence." Kirilenko said in a release by CSKA Moscow and the Euroleague.
"It’s a pleasure to have a chance to play for Russian fans, my friends, relatives. CSKA has a very strong team, great coach, excellent players. It’s great when the highest goals are ahead of you. It’s especially interesting to play under the load of responsibility. I am sure that we are able to solve any task together. I’d like to mention also that all the money earned in Russia I will send to Kirilenko’s Kids charity foundation. The foundation will help the children hospitals and charity-schools, sport schools, sport veterans and the basketball players who became the disabled persons."
My contribution to AK's arrival in Moscow now running in full here at the Deseret News.
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Spend any amount of time with David Blatt and you might find yourself wondering how this man isn’t filling up 140 characters on Twitter regularly.
After everywhere Blatt has been – from growing up in Framingham, Mass., to playing at Princeton under Pete Carril, to coaching overseas in Israel, Italy and Russia and currently with Maccabi Tel Aviv, while pulling double-duty as head coach of the Russia National Team since 2006 – and the one-liners he drops throughout his postgame press conference and casual conversations, Blatt and the social media outlet are a marriage made in Moscow.
On-court coaching insight. Off-court and overseas opinion -- @CoachDBlatt would be an instant must follow.
“Have you ever met a horse trainer before,” Blatt opened one press conference when asked to describe how he handles Andrei Kirilenko within Russia’s offensive game plan.
“Andrei runs around out there like a beautiful wild horse roaming free.”
During the 9-day stint covering EuroBasket 2011 in Lithuania the task became a short-lived goal: get Blatt on Twitter. Leave it to Jonathan Givony of Draft Express and a man of international basketball affairs to shoot down the dream.
“No way it’s going to happen. He can barely get the old cell phone he uses to work.”
Another person commented: “Forget Twitter. Blatt would make the perfect politician.”
For 15-minutes straight Blatt fiddled with his “old cell phone” after Russia beat Serbia to advance to face France in Kaunas, Lithuania. Russian-based and international media alike listening on as Blatt used an interpreter to jockey between questions as he texted back and forth during the presser. He wasn’t being rude. He was maximizing his time between another EuroBasket win and catching up with friends and family who passed along their well-wishes.
The plan to get Blatt on Twitter was aborted. It was replaced by the curiousness of how he was able to get Andrei Kirilenko to commit to play for Team Russia this summer.
Was it the lockout? Was it AK’s free-agency? Was it simply time for him to redeem himself in some fans’ eyes after neglecting to play for Russia over the past summers?
“He played this summer because he said last summer he was going to. And Andrei always tells me the truth,” said Blatt. “Normally what happens is I will let him go through his (NBA) season – we’ll talk before the season and after the season, but rarely during the season do I bother him. He either tells me, ‘Coach, I’m going to play for this reason…or Coach, I’m not going to play for this reason.’ And when he says it I don’t try to convince him one way or the other because if he can play, he will. And if he won’t, he won’t. It’s that simple. He didn’t play last summer for a very noble reason.”
The “noble reason” Blatt referred to was Andrei and his wife, Masha, adopting a little baby girl in Russia in 2009.
“I wish more people would do that. I wish my wife would let me do that,” Blatt said with a smile.
Last summer Kirilenko was nursing a strained calf muscle. And he caught flack for missing the time too.
But what a difference a summer made for Kirilenko and Team Russia. At one point the looked poised to knock off Spain and France for the gold and/or silver. They came at opposing teams from all angles – Timofey Mosgov regaining some swagger down low, Sergey Monya and Viktor Khryapa doing work on the wings, and then mix in some Kirilenko. If nothing else, Blatt’s squad was certainly a fun team to watch run the floor at EuroBasket.
“The guys just love him – he’s a good friend to them and he gives you elements that you don’t have to coach too much. You kind of have to show him his way, and he knows where to find his place,” Blatt continued about Kirilenko. “The lucky thing is he’s not a selfish man or greedy player. He plays for the team. I talk to him all the time about books and a lot of things, but I try to tell him very little about how to play because it seems that I just bother him when I do that,” Blatt continued about Kirilenko.
When asked if Blatt and Kirilenko’s affinity for books was a page out of Phil Jackson’s coaching philosophy, Blatt said the two, “discuss the ideas why to read” and not so much “about books themselves”.
You could feel a Blatt Twitter moment coming on. But it would be a story not even 140 characters could hold.
“I lecture a lot to young coaches and players – guys if you want to be basketball players, you need to stop listening to all that junk on your iPhones and iPads. You need to stop watching MTV and stop playing PlayStation and just go out and play. Then I tell the story about why basketball is going the wrong way in the States for example. I tell the Kirilenko story.”
Blatt paused before flashing back to the 2009 season with the Utah Jazz.
“There were players on his team that were upset with him because they saw him reading a book before a game and said he wasn’t properly preparing for a game. Andrei said there are these guys in the locker rooms with these huge headphones on – the music is blasting, and then guys get even bigger headphones so they aren’t bothered by the music from someone else.
“Hey, whatever turns them on. But why is that better to prepare yourself for a game than reading a book?"
To be fair to that time in Utah, players like Deron Williams and Kyle Korver were less questioning Kirilenko’s game preparation and more explaining how Kirilenko is his own person -- usually the first to shower and leave after a game with the hint of avoiding media. He’s also the first inclined to grab a book instead of some beats before the game.
No beef. Just reality. Less of a knock on AK, and more of a nod for who is as an individual and how that someone approaches the game
“I tell guys, if you want to be basketball players, read books. Now I have guys with their iPads reading before games,” explained Blatt.
“Now half our locker room is reading before a game, you’d think it was a library.”
He slowly shut his ancient cell phone for the last time.
Forget Twitter. David Blatt always has a good story to tell.
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