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Bryan Freedman, the prominent celebrity lawyer, is no stranger to receiving panicked calls at odd hours of the day. The attorney has represented some of the highest of high-profile individuals at their lowest of lows. But on an early morning in April 2011, the cry for help on the other end of the line did not come from a movie star or broadcaster in a legal crisis. Rather, it belonged to an AAU basketball coach named Ryan Silver, who had just awoken in a Las Vegas hospital after an all-night bender.
Silver, then in his early 30s, was in Sin City at the time coaching one of the premier squads for Pump-N-Run, the elite grassroots hoops program run by the basketball influence-peddling brothers, David and Dana Pump. Freedman’s son, Spencer, was among the hundreds of young players Silver had coached, and would eventually go on to play at Harvard. Along the way, the elder Freedman struck up a friendship with the much younger coach. “There’s no one I know who’s a better connector of people,” said the litigator, who was particularly taken by Silver’s unflagging compassion for his players and their families, despite how difficult they could sometimes be. “He just goes out of his way to treat people well and to help people.”
Adam Spolane: Rafael Stone said Sheppard was on their radar coming out of HS, but they weren't sure how he would translate to college: "It's very rare that people dominate college basketball as a freshman the same way they dominated high school basketball and AAU basketball, he he did."
Ja Morant will debut AAU basketball team this summer
Ja Morant and his close friends are starting an AAU Basketball program, The Commercial Appeal learned on Monday. Morant and his close friends will be working on establishing the program ahead of its debut this summer. Morant, who was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina, is taking it back to his roots. "We're going to base it out of the South Carolina and Georgia area," Morant's close friend Davonte Pack told The Commercial Appeal. "All the surrounding states around South Carolina."
Spoelstra then compared Jaquez’s ability — and desire — to do more than just score to the way Butler plays. “You wouldn’t do this with Jimmy, but Jimmy literally can just play the entire game without the ball and figure out how to get 20 points without a play called, if you challenge him to do that,” Spoelstra said. “And all of those plays in between, he would just dominate all that. It probably should be part of the NBA (rookie symposium each summer) — let’s talk about what winning basketball is. Here’s what AAU basketball is, it doesn’t necessarily win. And actually show examples of what that actually looks like because there’s a disconnect between what’s out there and what actually wins. And it’s tough for young players because all they’re judged on is that final column on the box score — whether you can put points in the basket. But there’s so much more to this game.”
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Maliika Walker: Steve Kerr's comments about AAU Basketball. “Even if today’s players are incredibly gifted, they grow up in a basketball environment that can only be called counterproductive. AAU basketball has replaced high school ball as the dominant form of development in the teen years. I coached my son’s AAU team for three years; it’s a genuinely weird subculture. Like everywhere else, you have good coaches and bad coaches, or strong programs and weak ones, but what troubled me was how much winning is devalued in the AAU structure. Teams play game after game after game, sometimes winning or losing four times in one day. Very rarely do teams ever hold a practice. Some programs fly in top players from out of state for a single weekend to join their team. Certain players play for one team in the morning and another one in the afternoon. If mom and dad aren’t happy with their son’s playing time, they switch club teams and stick him on a different one the following week. The process of growing as a team basketball player — learning how to become part of a whole, how to fit into something bigger than oneself — becomes completely lost within the AAU fabric.”
Eric Woodyard: Jazz star Donovan Mitchell compares this experience to AAU basketball.
The 10 episodes of On Point offer a look behind the scenes of the high-stakes world of AAU ball and the crop of high schoolers looking to make an impression. AAU alums Romeo Langford, who is now a member of the NBA’s Boston Celtics and Scottie Lewis, now at the University of Florida, are both main characters in the show, which spotlights their lives on and off the court.
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A lot of impressionable boys and girls who worship at the altar of roundball are going to be gobsmacked when Warriors coach Steve Kerr is appointed Grand Potentate of basketball. “If I was the czar of American basketball I would make every player coming through the youth basketball program play football,” Kerr said recently on the Men in Blazers soccer podcast. “Football” meaning soccer for the uninitiated. Kerr had an international upbringing, so we’ll excuse his un-American vernacular.
Kerr’s case for soccer: “It translates directly (to hoops). The problem in basketball today,” he said to podcast host Roger Bennett, “the young players are coming up and they just try to beat everyone one-on-one with the dribble. They’re unbelievably gifted dribbling the ball but they don’t understand how to pass and to move. Which is what football would teach them.”
“I enjoyed it as I kid. What I really like about it now, it is so like basketball. Players who played soccer growing up, they’re better passers. Steve Nash. Unbelievable passer. Toni Kukoc was a beautiful passer. I would watch Toni coming to practice and he was kicking the ball around. He’d juggle the ball on his knees, rest the ball on the back of his neck. And he loved it. And there’s no question in my mind that he was influenced by football. “(Kids) understand the concept of triangles. They understand the concept of passing the ball, and cutting behind the man defending. That’s what football is. Find the angles, creating opportunities, creating scoring chances.”
As someone who came up playing AAU in the midst of the organization’s peak and who also has two sons who are active in today’s AAU sphere, there’s no better player to weigh in on the subject than Lakers superstar LeBron James. “These kids are going into the league already banged up, and I think parents and coaches need to know that … well, AAU coaches don’t give a f---,” James told Yahoo Sports. “AAU coaches couldn’t give a damn about a kid and what his body is going through.”
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