Micah Shrewsberry decided to leave one team that was among the last eight standing at its level of basketball for another and to leave one of the the two coaches he has spent the last decade working with for the other.
Shrewsberry, who has spent the past six seasons as an assistant with the Boston Celtics under Brad Stevens, quickly became the focus of Purdue coach Matt Painter’s search as a replacement for Greg Gary, who departed to become the coach at Mercer after Purdue’s Elite Eight run.
Advertisem*nt
The Boilermakers made the hiring official on Friday, two days after the Celtics’ season reached a disappointing end with a 4-1 series loss to the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA Eastern Conference semifinals. Shrewsberry spent two seasons at Purdue working under Painter from 2011-13, and he returns with the title of associate head coach next to his name. Like Gary, Shrewsberry will focus on the offense while fellow assistant Steve Lutz handles the defense. Assistant Brandon Brantley will continue to work on both ends of the floor and specifically with the Boilermakers’ big men.
Shrewsberry, a 42-year-old Indianapolis native, had been pursuing college jobs for several seasons, but he had been hoping for a Division I head coaching position. He declined an interview with Georgia State in April and had been considered for positions at Massachusetts and Saint Joseph’s. His only head coaching experience came from 2005-07 at Indiana University-South Bend, a branch campus that plays in the NAIA.
Shrewsberry spoke to The Athletic on Friday about why he decided to leave the NBA’s most storied franchise to return to the college game and what he believes he’ll be able to bring back to a Purdue team that loses three starters, including All-American Carsen Edwards, claimed a share of the Big Ten title and narrowly missed out on a trip to the Final Four for the first time since 1980.
You’re taking a job that’s considered very desirable in college coaching, but you’re also leaving a pretty desirable NBA job. What went into your decision?
I’ve had a lot of different experiences at a lot of different places. It’s reinforced to me college basketball is probably the place where I want to be and what fits me the most. The timing of it all just worked out great. Coach Painter had an opening. I know what he’s about. I know who he is. I know how he goes about things with his players and with recruits. It made it an easy transition for me and an easy “yes” to say, “I’d love to come back and join you.”
Advertisem*nt
What was the timeline? Greg Gary took the Mercer job before Purdue’s season ended, and it seemed like you were the only name anyone heard as a candidate. The news became official shortly after the end of your season. How long ago did you decide to make this move?
It has been a while. (Painter) reached out to me pretty early on and let me know what he was looking for and what his expectations were going to be. He also knew we were in the middle of our season. He allowed me to really think about it and talk about it with my family and a bunch of other people while we were both playing. I had an opportunity to sit back and think about it and see what it would be without holding him back from being able to talk to other people. But I had known. I had given him the word that, “Yeah I’m going to come and join you.” I don’t know if it’s been a month, I don’t know if it’s been three weeks, but it’s been a while that this has been the plan.
What about your experience in the NBA told you that college basketball is where you belong?
My personality is more geared toward the college side. I’m a relationships guy. If you would ask anybody that’s run across me, I value relationships, continuing and maintaining and having those. That’s something you get in college. You recruit a guy from the time he’s 16 years old. You see them through college and then after college. Seeing the guys you’ve coached and seeing them come back and have their families and watch them grow from who they were in high school to men, it’s just a different deal than you get in the NBA. You get a chance to build relationships in the NBA. The guys I had a chance to spend time with in Boston, I’m always going to value the guys that we had on our team, but we had a lot of guys on our team. There could be guys that are there with you for 10 days. They could be with you for a month. They could be with you for six months, a year, six years. But you never know. That’s hard.
I saw in an interview that Brad Stevens said you took to the NBA game faster than he did. What are you going to miss about the NBA, and what aren’t you going to miss?
He was just being nice saying that. I think it was a learning experience for both of us. Having great people around us made it easier to go in and learn and get on solid footing pretty quickly. When I first got there, we had Ron Adams on our staff, who is one of the best assistant coaches in all of basketball, and he’s with the Warriors now. I learned from him, and Danny Ainge and his staff helped us get acquainted pretty quickly. The NBA game, for me, how much I learned in the six years is astronomical. I feel like I got a Ph.D. in coaching in these six years. There are 30 head coaches in this league. Every single one of them is really good. Some of the things you pick up from each coach and how they tailor it to their team to make them good is what makes the NBA great. It’s a players’ league, and the players in the league are so good that you have to come up with different ways to do things or they’re going to exploit you. To be able to think on the fly, to be able to change from one thing to the next, to be able to adapt to the team or to be able to adapt the system to fit one group to the next is something that has really been helpful, something I’m going to bring back with me. That’s probably the greatest thing about the NBA as a coach. There’s not a whole lot that I’m not going to miss, but like I said, the relationship part of it and just not knowing. The really good teams know from one year to the next who they are. But just having the constant movement with guys, different players, moving pieces. I don’t really miss that part. I know in college that’s what it’s becoming now with so many transfers, but just the moving pieces of one guy to the next. I won’t miss that. The other thing, it’s not really dealing with the NBA, but the relationships that I built here in Boston with the guys in our front office and the guys on our coaching staff and working for Brad Stevens.
What are you going to take from this year specifically? It’s not that you guys didn’t have a successful year, but a lot of people expected the Celtics to win the East or at least reach the conference finals.
We really took it as it had to be a learning experience for us. You want every season to go to the standards that you have or the expectations that you set. Sometimes it’s not going to happen. How you bounce back, how you handle the tough times. How you try to rally together a group through those tough times are learning experiences for all of us. Even though it was tough, I think every guy that went through it on our staff or on our team is going to be better for this experience down the line. You want it to be rainbows and lollipops at all times, but it’s not going to be and there’s going to be times that you don’t meet those expectations. How do you respond to them? Do you stay down or do you get up off the mat and look forward to a new year? That’s what everybody is looking forward to it. You have a sour taste in your mouth, and you’re ready to change it to the positive.
You talked about being ready to bring stuff back. What did you learn in the NBA in terms of X’s and O’s? What translates to the college game, and what doesn’t?
There are a lot of things. I did a lot of stuff on the defensive side in Boston. Now I’m going to be moving to the offensive side. But like I said, the most important part would be how to adapt, which I think Coach Painter is great at. I think I’ve learned that here in the NBA. You can’t be stuck in your ways in how you do things. Your team has to fit how you play. You can’t just put a square peg in a round hole. It’s not gonna work. I think Coach Painter has shown a willingness to adjust his team to fit his personnel. That’s what you do in the NBA. To be able to adjust our system next year to fit the guys we have on the team and put them in the best spots possible to be successful. Being able to do that and then quickly making adjustments and making reads on the fly with our group. The NBA guys are so skilled. That gets overlooked at how good they really are. Not all of the college guys are at that level yet. For me, tempering expectations of what guys can do and what they can’t do is obviously going to be a little bit of an adjustment. You get new guys coming in each year. We had really good players at Purdue. They’re not quite Al Horford yet. They’re not Kyrie Irving. They’re not Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown. Things I may want them to do, they may not be able to do it yet. But how do I help them be successful, and how do I get their games up to level?
Advertisem*nt
Like you said, you worked on defense with the Celtics. Was it determined from the beginning that you’d be moving back to offense at Purdue, and was that something you were comfortable with?
That was something we had talked about and I had known going in. I did offensive stuff with (Painter) when I was there the last time. I’m pretty comfortable in how he likes to do things. What he wants to do, how he wants to play. I feel good about how we’re gonna be. Then Steve (Lutz) has done a great job with the guys on defense the last few years. It helps to be able to move in seamlessly. You know the good things they’re doing, that he and Brandon (Brantley) have done since they’ve been there. I can slide in and do my role and try and replace Greg as well as possible. Greg did an unbelievable job with those guys. The sets he was calling and the sequences and the series they ran, he knew that group inside out. If I can do half of what Greg did, then hopefully we’ll be pretty good.
Do you consider your style to be similar to Gary’s?
It’s definitely similar. There are some things we did when I was here the first time that they just added to. That will make it seamless in terms of picking up on the things that they’d been doing. I’m not coming in to reinvent the wheel. They’re having success. I just want to help add to what they’re doing and then be able to fit it. Maybe there are things they were doing last year for Carsen and for (graduating guard) Ryan Cline. Maybe they don’t fit with (guards) Nojel Eastern or Eric Hunter or Sasha Stefanovic. There might be tweaks here or there, but it’s all about putting those guys in position to be successful.
How much have you had a chance to watch this group, and what is your sense for this team in terms of what it can do well?
That’s the one thing for me that is beneficial. Even with not being there for a long time, I’ve still been a fan, so I’ve probably watched about every game on TV or on my computer. I’ve seen all of these guys with (High Point grad transfer) Jahaad (Proctor) being the exception and (freshmen) Isaiah Thompson and Brandon Newman and Mason Gillis coming in. Those are the guys I have to get more up to speed with. My first couple of weeks are going to be spent on really, really learning everyone. Not just what they like, but now as they go from a supportive role to more of a starring role, what are they best at? How do you manipulate things to gear them toward the strengths? I’m a big fan of these guys. They’re unselfish. Watching those guys grow, they were stars in their roles. That’s what you need to be as a team. I think you can do a lot of things with this group. They each have strengths that can be utilized, and if they keep playing in those selfless roles, nothing but positives are going to happen.
You’ve worked with Painter before, and you’ve worked for Stevens for a long time. What’s it like to be with each of those guys? How are they the same, and how are they different?
They’re really similar in how they go about things on the court, and off the court they’re pretty similar to work for and as coaches. They both start with a defensive mindset. Their teams are tough, they play hard and they play together. Those two similarities stick out. That’s how it’s been seamless for me to go from one coach to the other twice. It hasn’t been a hard transition for me. Brad is more even-keeled on the sideline where Paint is a little fierier. People from the outside see Paint on the sideline and they think that’s who he is at all times, but he’s the most quick-witted and one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. With Brad, what you see is what you get. He’s that cool, calm and collected whether we’re in the Eastern Conference finals or he’s at his daughter’s play. The biggest difference is their in-game emotions. Who they are as coaches and who they are as people is about as similar as you can get.
(Photo of Micah Shrewsberry: Isaiah J. Downing/USA Today Sports)
