NYMBURK (Czechia) - "Relentless basketball is the ultimate goal, and relentlessness is the word that describes the whole soul of what we do."
Head coach Francesco Tabellini said it, when describing the philosophy at ERA Nymburk for the Basketball Champions League website.
It's not often that you will hear a basketball coach, or a coach of any sport for that matter, talking about the soul of their project. Tabellini has an unusual mastery of words and is such a skilled orator that it's not difficult to understand how he's able to get such a laser-focused buy-in from his players to be so relentless every night.
"I think there's a lot of people talking about offense-oriented teams or defense-oriented teams, I would describe our team as an effort-oriented team."
Perhaps that is what is to be expected from a literal master of words, both modern and ancient.
"I got a master's degree in Ancient Philology, like I'm a philologist," he said. "I studied ancient literature, Greek and Latin."
Philology, for those of you like us who weren't instantly familiar with the word, is an academic discipline that studies the structure, historical development, and relationships of languages.
However, despite possessing what is clearly a natural affinity for communication, language alone was not to be the calling for Tabellini.
And, it was whilst taking a job coaching basketball for kids to make his time at University financially more self-sufficient that his true mission in life found him.
"As soon as I started coaching, I felt like a spark, and I felt it was the most empowering thing I'd ever experienced in my life," Tabellini explained.
From that moment, Tabellini's path into coaching seemed like it was deciding his future for him, like Dorothy on the yellow brick road in Oz.
Arrigo Sacchi's influence
From Virtus Bologna's youth system to Treviso's U20's and eventually a maiden chance to become a head coach at the professional level with USK Prague in Czechia.
All whilst receiving influence from mentors like Stefano Pillastrini or Max Menetti, and studying the likes of Tuomas Iisalo, then at Crailsheim Merlins, and Johan Roijakkers at Gottingen and Bamberg.
Whilst we will now steer our glare onto the product of the journey that we see on the floor for ERA Nymburk, if you want to take a deeper dive into Tabellini's road to Nymburk, it was fantastically well documented by Cesare Milanti and Eurohoops here.
Of all the mentors and influences that have shaped Tabellini's view on basketball and sport in general, it was his own fandom as a child that possibly had the most profound impact.
Growing up an AC Milan fan, a young Tabellini was permanently influenced by the years under Arrigo Sacchi in the late 80s and early 90s when that legendary Milan team dominated everyone in their path with high pressing, a strong defensive structure, and an almost Total Football approach.
To this day, Sacchi's ethos provides an aspirational watermark to strive for.
"For me, it was really inspirational because it was not just winning; it was destroying the opponents on the field, and that's where everything is rooted," he explained.
Effort above everything
After coming through the Qualifying Rounds, Nymburk have only lost two games all season in the BCL. The first was against Promitheas Patras BC Vikos Cola on December 17, but only after they had already secured top spot in Group D of the Regular Season.
The second was to Nanterre 92 on March 4, immediately after the FIBA Qualifying Window.
When you watch this team play, it's easy to see that they do things differently in Nymburk.
The shades of Iisalo's Bonn team are there in full view, but it's nothing like an imitation or copycat. Nymburk are their own animal that, if anything, take the intensity and tempo up another level from that Bonn team in 2023.
And it's an animal that is yet to be tamed this season.
"I think there's a lot of people talking about offense-oriented teams and defense-oriented teams, I would describe our team as an effort-oriented team," Tabellini said before clarifying: "We esteem and value effort above everything."
If we look at the #4 play from the Top 5 Plays of the final week in the round of 16, we can get some further insight into exactly what Tabellini means by effort-oriented basketball.
"In our, let's say, up-tempo basketball, transitional offense, we are always saying 'let's win the race,' and we are trying to win the race every single time, for every single possession," Tabellini stated.
If we watch that same clip through his eyes, the value gained from winning individual races becomes clear.
In the video below, you will see the play, but with an arrow on screen to demarcate the key points that Tabellini analyzed when watching the clip.
Arrow #1 - First of all, I see a very good defensive effort to fix a mistake because there's a mistake on ball screen coverage here. This is the foundation of our defense. The faster you play, the more aggressively you play defensively, the chances of making mistakes are increasing, and for us, fixing mistakes is crucial.
Arrow #2 - Then, Ondrej Sehnel is great; we have a no-catch area for the outlet pass. He is catching the ball very high and already running. That's huge!
Arrow #3 - Now, the other players are basically trying to win the race. Martin Kriz, the four-man on the left wing, is putting the pressure on the defense, attacking with a 28-metre cut.
Arrow #4 - Finally, Nighael Ceaser, the five-man, he's running and he's drawing the attention of Antetokounmpo. Without Nighael Ceaser, Ryland Holt would have never dunked the ball because most likely Antetokounmpo would have been lower and not focused on Nighael Caesar.
What Tabellini is describing for that clip is all about mentality and reward for effort.
Whilst Holt will correctly get the plaudits for his effort to run and express his athleticism for the dunk, as a team, Nymburk attach as much value on the effort the team made on defense to prevent an easy two-pointer or an open three-pointer after a mistake and then the effort from all four players doing their job to win the race down the floor.
Kriz, Ceaser, and Birts won't show up on the boxscore or on the name-credits for a Top 5 highlight reel, but the dunk doesn't happen without them, and Nymburk know they don't win games without making those unseen efforts.
Again, in the sequence below, we see more of what makes Nymburk's up-tempo basketball so tough to play against.
In the first possession of the video, we saw Tylan Birts unable to be as aggressive as they want on the hand-off with Kurucs and Ennis.
As a result, when Nymburk hedged on the pick and roll, there was space for Ennis to make the pass to Birgander on the short-roll.
Nymburk's mentality came up tops again as Ryland Holt read the pass, came up with the steal, and Nymburk were off again into another up-tempo transition.
Even when Stephen Brown missed the layup on that play, J.T. Shumate was the first to fix the mistake with his effort on the offensive glass (more on offensive rebounds later).
The next possession, Murcia countered the hedge coverage on the pick-and-roll by flipping the angle of the screen. And again, the pass to Birgander was open. Nymburk made a mistake on where the help should come from, but the team recovered from the mistake and got up with the steal.
The Kills
Tabellini and his coaching staff track sequences like this. They call them Kills, which means three possessions in a row with a defensive stop.
When each of those stops within the kill usually results in a dunk at the other end, the psychological battle for teams playing against this relentless Nymburk team only gets more intense.
Whereas the Nymburk players are focused on recovering from mistakes, their system allows them to increase the consequences of each mistake for their opponents, only making the pressure to avoid mistakes even higher.
Kills aren't the only stat that shows just how ruthlessly effective Nymburk's up-tempo, effort-oriented basketball has been so far this season.
"It's not the coach being smart, it's the way in which we are together, in which everybody contributes."
They are first in the BCL for fastbreak points at 16.5 per game, first for Pace with 76.8 possessions per 40 minutes, and first for the percentage of their offensive possessions being in transition at 20 percent (per Synergy).
That Pace statistic becomes even more eye-opening when you consider that the way Pace is calculated an offensive rebound doesn't result in a new possession.
So, in effect, whilst an offensive rebound increases the number of opportunities to get up shots, it actually reduces the time in the game for more possessions.
Now factor in that Nymburk lead the BCL for offensive rebounds at 17.4 and also for the percentage of available offensive rebounds they collect at 41.2 percent.
Somehow, Nymburk are managing to be the best in the BCL at pulling offensive rebounds and reducing the number of possessions in the game, but at the same time, also record the most possessions per 40 minutes - entirely thanks to the tempo that they play and the fact that they are winning races down the floor every possession.
So, we have seen the footage that shows us the up-tempo offense in transition, but what is enabling them to pull down all these rebounds?
Well, it's not by accident, and it's not just by pure effort alone. Nymburk are implementing a rebounding system called Tagging Up.
Made popular by Aaron Fearne in the Australian NBL, tagging up consists of all five offensive players matching up with their own defender as soon as a shot goes up. We can see Nymburk tagging up in the video below.
In the first clip, you can clearly see all five Nymburk players matched up and on the basket side of their man as soon as the shot goes up.
This means they are in position to defend in transition, but also able to compete for rebounds from behind and attempt to tip the missed shot back to a teammate or off the opponent and out of bounds.
In that second clip, you can also see the relentlessness that Tabellini espouses. Even in transition, all five Nymburk players are winning the race down the floor and ready to tag up on a miss. Nymburk lead the league in second-chance points at 18.1 per game, and this clip shows you exactly why.
The overall picture results in a team that has the best Defensive Rating in the BCL, allowing just 98.4 points per 100 possessions and also first for points allowed in the paint at just 27 per game.
On the offensive end, the overall picture of relentless basketball also results in league-leading numbers for Nymburk.
The tempo they play at and the number of offensive rebounds they secure have sent their number of shooting opportunities through the roof.
They put up a genuinely remarkable 72 shots per game, which not only ranks top this season, but is also the most shot attempts per game of any team in BCL history.
Credit Where It's Due
"I think also the players are proud of these numbers," said Tabellini when discussing the buy in and execution of his team when it comes to executing such a selfless style of play.
He described the long walk to the press conference room in Murcia with Vojtech Hruban when the two of them were perusing the stat sheet, looking for smart things to say in front of the Spanish media.
"He (Hruban) looked at me and asked 'how many shots did I take?' I think he'd taken 14 shots in 18 minutes," Tabellini recalled with a smile on his face.
And it is with the players that Nymburk's coach seeks to attach the lion's share of the credit.
"It's not the coach being smart, it's the way in which we are together, in which everybody contributes," he said.
In particular, Tabellini wants to credit his Czech players. Not because the recruitment of their import players hasn't been impeccable.
The likes of the incredibly underrated Stephen Brown and Tylan Birts, or Nighael Ceaser and Christian Bishop, or JT Shumate and Ryland Holt have all fit the system like a glove.
But that is the point Tabellini is so keen to make: These players were scouted and recruited to play this way, their Czech teammates, however, were not.
"These Czech guys, not all of them were built for this kind of basketball, and not all of them are used to playing basketball this way, but there's a lot of their effort in developing the system and developing the kind of basketball we are playing," he said.
"They really pushed it to the limits."
The final place that Tabellini wants to apportion credit is for his coaching staff.
"I think they are the youngest coaching staff in BCL history," he stated.
We can't corroborate nor refute this claim, but a team consisting of 2005-born Serbian scout Mihajlo Markovic, 25-year-old Giovanni Spessotto - whom Tabellini used to coach in Treviso’s youth system - and recently retired 1998-born Eduard Kotasek is surely one of, if not the youngest coaching teams we have seen.
What is also clear is that Tabellini's motivation behind constructing a team of young coaches was not to seek inexperienced people who wouldn't challenge him and his ideas but to find hungry, ambitious coaches who would.
"I believe they're doing a great job of pushing me and proving me wrong," he said.
"They're making me a better coach and a better person on a daily basis."
Spessotto is given primary responsibility for offense, Kotasek for defense and Markovic handed the responsibility for monitoring and tracking the team's efforts on the glass.
A special mention and perhaps the strongest reaction of the whole interview was elicited by Strength and Conditioning coach Ricardas Reimaris.
Tabellini's face lit up when discussing the Lithunian former sprinter.
"He's amazing, I found him here, and I would say he's the one in the office most in love with up-tempo basketball. He's constantly pushing us to be not only the best version of ourselves but also the fastest version of ourselves."
Favorites
And so we come to it, maybe the biggest series of games in the history of ERA Nymburk. Starting this Wednesday, Tabellini and the crew take on a familiar foe in the shape of the Turkish giants Galatasaray.
The two sides met twice already in the Regular Season, with Nymburk winning both.
As a result, Nymburk somehow find themselves as the consensus favorites for pretty much everyone outside of Türkiye.
Gala are a very different team now than the one that fell to Nymburk earlier in the season, really without even putting up much of a fight.
"I think they are most likely the most talented players and the best team amongst all the second-placed teams that qualified for the Quarter-Finals," said Tabellini.
And he's almost certainly right, Gala's roster has changed, and they recently proved their threat by ending Unicaja's record-breaking 18-game win streak.
Tabellini and Nymburk are not looking to release any pressure, though.
"I'm not escaping from the favorite thing," he said.
His team has, after all, been specializing in creating psychological pressure to handle mistakes all season. Pressure is a huge part of what they do.
"Really, we feel privileged to be here in the Quarter-Finals after starting in the Qualifying Rounds," reflected Tabellini.
And an outstanding achievement to reach this far it truly is for ERA Nymburk. They have never gone further in this competition and almost certainly have never had a better opportunity to do so.
The Final Four awaits at the other end of a best-of-three series with one of European basketball's biggest names. If that isn't a privilege then what is?
No doubt they will approach this test in exactly the same way as they have faced every other this season: Relentlessly.