2023-12-14 19:41:28
The position has been vacant for two months. Vincent Collet, the coach of the French basketball team, has two assistants still in office: Pascal Donnadieu and Ruddy Nelhomme. But since Laurent Foirest, who joined Boulogne-Levallois before being ousted, left, there was a void. This one is filled. To replace the Olympic vice-champion with the Blues in 2000, the French Basketball Federation chose the American Kenny Atkinson.
Aged 56, the American, born in New York State, already speaks French perfectly. He played as a leader in France for a long time – between 1998 and 2002, he played for Montpellier in Pro A, Épinal, Mulhouse, Nantes and Évreux in Pro B – before coaching in France. Francophone and Francophile, he knows small-town French basketball well. He returned to finish his playing career in Nantes in 2005. “He was assistant to Michel Gomez at Paris Basket Racing from 2004 to 2006, where he won the Coupe de France in 2005,” specifies the FFBB.
He is the Warriors assistant to Steve Kerr, coach of Team USA in Paris.
A rather modest player, it was mainly as a coach that Kenny Atkinson made a big reputation for himself. After France, the NBA immediately looked up to him. He joined the prestigious American league in 2008 as an assistant to Mike D’Antoni at the New York Knicks then to Mike Budenholzer at the Atlanta Hawks. He was named head coach of the Brooklyn Nets in 2016 and led the franchise to a playoff qualification in 2019. He then served as assistant coach of the Los Angeles Clippers in 2020-2021, then the Golden State Warriors in 2021-2022, team with which he won the NBA title in 2022. At the end of 2023, Kenny Atkinson is still an assistant for the San Francisco franchise and rubs shoulders with Steph Curry’s gang every day.
There is no question of him leaving his post by joining the staff of the France team. This is also why he is chosen. The players, and in particular the NBA players, demanded reinforcement around Vincent Collet with a man who knows everything about the NBA, its mode of operation, its systems, the men. At the Games, Team USA will bring its superstars and to have a chance of beating them, you need someone in management who knows their tricks. Kenny Atkinson has this profile without taking into account that, if we have to go through a match against the United States, no one knows the American coach and his game better than him since it is Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors who Atkinson works with every day. On this point, the choice seems rather smart.
At the same time, the management of the Blues was also strengthened with the arrival as assistant manager in place of Yann Barbitch of Frédéric Sarre (62 years old), crowned 7 times champion of France as main coach or deputy in Bourg, Gravelines, Nancy, Pau, Strasbourg or Limoges.
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