San Antonio Spurs, Becky Hammon win the Las Vegas Summer League
The first female coach to ever be in charge of a Summer League team, Becky Hammon and her San Antonio Spurs won the Las Vegas Summer League championship .
By
Sam Vecenie
•
3 min read
Well, that is one heck of an opening act for first-time head coach Becky Hammon.
The first female coach to ever be in charge of a Summer League team, Hammon and her San Antonio Spurs won the Las Vegas Summer League championship over the Phoenix Suns 93-90.
The team won behind terrific performances from Jonathon Simmons and Treveon Graham, who put in 23 and 22 respectively. Las Vegas Summer League MVP Kyle Anderson also added 15 of his own.
"It's just a credit to (the players)," Hammon said after the game. "They found a little bit of a groove with each other and they got it done on the defensive end. Our last two or three games came down to getting defensive stops, so that's the thing I'm most proud of."
Players are the ones most responsible for winning championships, and tonight's performance was no different. Without the stellar shooting of those three players and the defensive contributions of everyone, the Spurs wouldn't have won this game. However, there's something to be said for the way this team won its Summer title tonight, and that has to do with the way it was coached.
Typically, summer league championships often aren't really indicative of anything and don't mean much in the grand scheme of things. But this team just felt different than most teams you see in Vegas. Simply put, this San Antonio team has looked and felt like the Spurs' big team. They were running the same plays, using the same actions offensively, and executing them with devastating efficiency. For instance, it wasn't uncommon to see something like the "Hammer" play that has become commonplace with the big Spurs team, and more often than not it was successful.
That's a credit to Hammon and this staff (including Will Hardy, whom Hammon went out of her way to praise post-game), regardless of her gender and her role as something of a pioneer in this event. It's hard to get a group of players who have only been together for a short period of time to run plays. Just look at the team they faced in the championship game. The Suns were a free-wheeling team based around the kinetic energy of point guard Mike James and the chucking tendencies of T.J. Warren.
"Down in San Antonio we just try to do things the right way," Hammon said. "We value character. They got me a good group of character guys in there. Even the guys that weren't playing as much, they stayed involved."
But rightly or wrongly -- and largely due to the fact that Summer League winners and losers aren't regarded with nearly the same importance as their regular season counterparts -- the story here is that a female coach won a championship in her first opportunity. For her part, she had no idea what kind of deal this would be and tried to downplay the gender-based importance of her accomplishment.
"I honestly didn't know this would be a big deal until my phone started blowing up," Hammon said. "I'm just thankful for my opportunities and I'll just keep doing my best and that's all I have control over."
Even with a championship in her hands, it looks like the best is yet to come for Hammon, and that's great news for the league as a whole. The more sucess she has, the more that events like this will become less newsworthy and more commonplace. There's no reason that a woman can't coach men, and hopefully Hammon's success inspires more women to attempt to get jobs in the NBA and more organizations to give them chances. Hopefully, Gregg Popovich's faith in her will become the norm.
Speaking of Pop, Hammon has a sneaking suspicion what his advice will be to her after this win.
"He'll tell me to go get a nice glass of wine somewhere," Hammon laughed.
That's something she certainly deserves after this week.
