Ettore Messina, Milan ‘You have to take care of your players’

During three decades working within some of the world’s most iconic basketball clubs, head coach Ettore Messina of AX Armani Exchange Milan has witnessed a revolution in preparing players to perform at their best and extend their careers.

From tipoff to final buzzer is when the games are played, but what happens after the final buzzer and before the next tipoff in the burgeoning field of player recovery can greatly influence a team’s competitiveness.

Messina’s approach to that crucial time between games has evolved with the times.

“When I grew up as a young coach in the 70s and the 80s, we were especially following the Yugoslavian school, let’s call it,” Messina explains. “We all grew up assuming that practice had to be hard, demanding, more demanding than the game itself. And you know, two-a-day [practice] was something normal.”

In recent years, as schedules are fuller and the physical demands on players greater, the recovery process between games – everything from physical therapy to sleep, diet, load-monitoring and mental rest – has become integral to pushing individual and team performance to a higher level.

Messina learned through his work with San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovic that teams need days off, with the gym locked and no one allowed in, to balance their home lives with their work lives.

“We spend so much time together that at some point, you need a day off when we don’t see each other and they just see their families and they don’t see the teammates, they don’t listen to the coaches,” he explains. “Too many meetings. Too many practices. Too many recoveries. Too many games. Sometimes you need to back off. I learned that, at my expense. Sometimes, you need to back off and just give them a little mental free time.”

Lest anyone think all this amounts to coddling players who are not as tough as in the old days, think again.

“It’s not that people, because you do all this recovery, will be fresh all the time. But you limit the situations where they played very tired,” Messina says. “At some level, players have to learn to play when they are fatigued. You have to push yourself through that. You will never play fresh once the season is in full mode. But if there is a chance to give a better quality of basketball, I think this subject is huge. The attention to the recovery and the protection, the prevention, and everything else. Everything that has been done, all the money that as an organization you invest, will come back to you. And that for sure increases the quality of the game. There’s no doubt about that.”

Not to mention the fact that when their time between games is optimized, players and teams gain a competitive edge, particularly when so close EuroLeague games are decided by mental and physical freshness at the end.

“We’re talking about small, small details,” Messina says. “It gives us – those who can have that, because you have a practice facility, because your owner is willing to spend money on that, because maybe you invest in having one extra physiotherapist for example, or you buy a machine that can help you more with recovery, or you have one more assistant coach or one more strength coach who can individualize better the workloads for the players – all these things will surely give you an edge compared to those who don’t have that.”