On his way to his first final four appearance, Zach LeDay is “like a sponge”

In his third year in the EuroLeague, Zach LeDay made his playoff debut by scoring the Olimpia’s winner in Game 1 of the quarterfinals. Now he is preparing to debut in the Final Four. In his first season in Milan, he set his personal bests in points and rebounds, but also free-throw shooting and three-point shooting. He converted 91.5 percent from the line, way higher than his career 84.1 percent clip. He also hit 32 threes in one season. He had 23 combined in the first two years. His 48 percent let him finish seventh overall. The three-point shot is the most obvious aspect of his improvement. “Helping him improve is an obligation for me, he has already made a lot of strides since the beginning of the year and will make more. He is only 26 and is much better than I was at his age. As far as understanding the game, his ability to help in so many different ways,” Kyle Hines, who has become somewhat of his mentor, says.

“Kyle has been there and done that – says Zach LeDay – but if you enter our locker room there are so many players you just have to learn from. I listen, I watch how they work every day, their routine, they don’t even know I’m watching them, but it’s the right thing to do to become like them, to win a lot. I’m absorbing it like a sponge.” LeDay has this attitude: take one day at a time, “improve today to be better tomorrow,” he explains. The comparison with Hines has been following him for years because the size is similar, but Hines has always been primarily a center, LeDay is a forward. And Hines has never been the perimeter shooter that LeDay has become this season. “Since I’ve been in Europe I’ve always been compared to Kyle Hines for many different reasons, the way we behave on the court, being undersized for example. To me it’s an honor,” he says.

LeDay came to Europe as soon as he left Virginia Tech where over two years he established himself as the best player on the team despite coming off the bench (“I didn’t ask to come off the bench, but it showed how much I was willing to sacrifice for the team, “he said). In Israel, he found the right conditions to explode, in a system favorable to his skills. From there he moved up to Olympiacos Piraeus and then to Zalgiris Kaunas. He is entering his first Final Four game 34 points away from 1,000 for his career, the threshold of excellence and longevity. But LeDay is only 26, as Kyle Hines says.

In recent months, but this had already happened in Athens, a lot of curiosity has surrounded the backpack that he carries everywhere, even on the bench and from which he sometimes takes out a notepad to read from: “In my backpack there are only small things that can be useful during a game, it is also a matter of superstition, it contains objects that give me a sense of security, for example pictures of loved ones, since when I am here I do not see them for months. It is part of my routine. On the notebook there are notes that I might use, quotes that somebody told me and could help me. It is part of who I am.”