Q&A: Steve Smith – “Basketball in India is moving into a positive direction”

If you followed NBA basketball closely in the 90s, there is little chance that you would’ve missed the great Steve Smith. Boasting a buttery-smooth jump shot, a hunger for racking up points, and a winner’s mentality, Smith enjoyed a successful pro basketball career, highlighted by an NBA championship (2003), a FIBA World Championship (1994), and an Olympic gold medal (2000).

Currently, Smith serves as a studio analyst for NBA TV. He appears on NBA GameTime, a live studio show featuring highlights, analysis, commentary and live look-ins at games being played across the league.

Smith has been in India for the last few days, as a special guest to help inaugurate NBA Jam, which is NBA-India’s ‘travelling basketball festival’, at the Ambiance Mall in Gurgaon on Saturday, September 10. In addition, Smith took part in a different type of interactive basketball programme earlier, as he spent Thursday and Friday morning working with India’s U16 National select teams, who are currently in camp at the Indira Gandhi stadium in New Delhi.

I spoke to Smith on Saturday about his time in India, his experience of working with the Indian youngsters, and the future of the NBA globally:

Hoopistani: Is this your first time in India? How has your experience been so far?

Smith: Yes it is my first time here and I’ve been enjoying it a lot, especially the time that I spent working with the U16 teams.

Hoopistani: Describe your experience with the U16 sides? What drills did you work on? Anything in specific that you shared with them?

Smith: It was great: I worked with the U16 boys side on Thursday and Friday, and with the girls just on Friday. It was a good chance for me to spend time teaching them some drills. The kids are very passionate about the game of basketball.

We did a lot of drills: I even played a game in one of the boys’ teams. For the girls, I helped coach a side for a practice game.

The drills that we practiced included perfecting different kind of shots and jump-shots, and specifically, we worked on getting their balance right. The U16 coaches wanted my help in many other specific situations, for example, in setting up good out-of-bound plays. We touched on several other drills, such as rebounding, defense, and dribbling.

The best part was that the kids were asking me a lot of questions and had a genuine desire to improve their game. I was very impressed by their interest in the game.

Hoopistani: You’ve trained the future players, the under-16s of India: What do you feel about the future of basketball in the country?

Smith: I think the future of the game is in great hands. Basketball in India is moving in a positive direction. I have met some passionate coaches who want to learn and help improve the level of play in the young players here.

Hoopistani: How do you think that programmes like the NBA Jam will help promote the NBA here?

Smith: The NBA Jam is going to be fantastic: I call it a basketball arcade. It will have many interactive events to engage fans of the game and get them enthusiastic about NBA and about basketball. It will be great fun, especially for the kids who attend and learn more about the NBA.

Hoopistani: The NBA has been heavily involved in promoting the game over the past few years. What are its future plans in India?

Smith: Well, I think the NBA is going to continue doing the things it is already doing: bringing in more players here into India, holding more events such as the Mahindra NBA Challenge. We want to see the game succeed here, and so we will keep increasing our efforts of bringing the game into this country.

Hoopistani: The NBA has now become a global league – international players are having starring roles and the league has reached out to fans across the globe. What will be the next step in continuing to grow the league internationally?

Smith: I think the next step will probably be in having an NBA team in another part of the world or in further promoting NBA teams to more places around the world. The NBA has indeed helped in making basketball a global game – and we will keep striving to take it into more and more countries.

Hoopistani: And the golden question of the day: When will the NBA return again? When will the lockout end?

Smith: If I had an answer to that then I’d be a very rich man!

But really, it seems like things are heading in the right steps. The two sides are meeting each other often now and everyone is working on making sure that the season starts on time.

India's Sr. Men's team return to camp in Delhi

The Indian Sr. Men’s basketball team, who qualified for the 2011 FIBA Asia Championship (ABC) last month after winning the Middle Asia Zone Qualifiers, have returned to camp with head coach Kenny Natt at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi from August 6th. In addition to the 12-man roster that participated in the qualifiers last month, six more probables have been invited for the camp, which will last until September 11.

The FIBA Asia Championship for Men will be held in Wuhan, China, from September 15-25, 2011. India have been placed in Group A along with Lebanon, Malaysia, and Korea.

Senior Men’s team probables:

Jagdeep Singh Bains (Punjab)

Satnam Singh Bhamara (IMG Academy/Punjab)

Vishesh Bhriguvanshi (Indian Railways)

Narender Kumar Garewal* (Services)

Sambhaji Kadam (Services)

Hareesh Koroth (Tamil Nadu)

Prakash Mishra (Indian Railways)

Abhilek Paul* (Tamil Nadu)

Eudrick Pereira (Kerala)

Basil Phillip* (Kerala)

Trideep Rai (Uttarakhand)

Riyazuddin (Uttarakhand)

Talwinderjit Singh Sahi* (Punjab)

Dishant Shah* (Gujarat)

Amrit Pal Singh (Punjab)

Amjyot Singh (Punjab)

Kiran Pal Singh* (Indian Railways)

Yadwinder Singh (Indian Railways)

Head Coach: Kenny Natt

Assistant Coach: Rajender Singh

Assistant Coach: Pawan Kumer

Strength & Conditioning Coach: Zak Penwell

Physiotherapist: Anand Dube

The good news is that, in bringing back the same squad into camp that defeated Sri Lanka and Bangladesh by a margin of nearly 68 points a game, Coach Natt has ensured a sense of continuity at the camp. I've marked an (*) against the name of the six new players who have been invited as probables for the next month or so. The most exciting of these names, of course, is Talwinderjit Singh, or TJ Sahi, who is also known as the man who dunked over a Mumbai taxi! In a recent interview with The Mint, Natt conceded that the point guard situation was in limbo: Sambhaji Kadam, India's ageless wonder, had a good run in the MAZ qualifiers, but there are questions about his age/sustainability at the highest level. This is where Sahi could come in and contribute automatically.

Sahi missed the earlier cut of 12 because of personal reasons, and now the pressure will be surely on him to integrate himself in this team if he wants to go to China with them.

Of course, the rest of the usual suspects are back and will be looking to continue their confident run: Vishesh Bhriguvanshi, Jagdeep Singh Bains, and Yadwinder Singh. As I had noted after the qualifiers, what makes this team special is the balance of youth, experience, and prime. The youth quota looks especially interesting as the team as three under-20 players who are all 6 foot 9 and above: Amrit Pal Singh, Amjyot Singh, and 15-year-old, 7 foot 1 wonder, Satnam Singh Bhamara. I also like the addition of another talented young big - Dishant Shah of Gujarat - to the team.

The tournament in China is a little over a month away, and Natt will cut his roster down to 12 again for the championship. Malaysia, Korea, and Lebanon are obviously going to present competition of a much higher order than our South Asian neighbours. Let's hope that, between now and then, Team India continue to improve enough to at least give the superior teams a run for their money.

India U16s qualify for U16 FIBA Asia Championship

93 points per game. That was the average margin of victory for India's U16 Boys basketball team, as they faced U16 teams from Nepal and Sri Lanka on August 2-3, at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi. The purpose of this slaughter? The three teams were brought together to fight for a spot at the 2nd U16 FIBA Asia Championship, which will be held at Nha Trang City in Vietnam from October 18-28th. India's qualification was never in question, but the full destructive force by which the young stars went about their business was remarkable, indeed.

Here is a complete dissection.

India prepared the best possible team for this competition: The U16 probables had already been in camp in Delhi, preparing for the qualifiers and for the FIBA Asia event later this year, for one and a half months. What this side truly boasted of was experience: in players such as Chhattisgarh's Ajay Pratap Singh, Punjab's Kushmeet Singh and Love Neet Singh, MP's Syed Anam Ali, and Delhi's Narender, India had players who had been superstars in their own right of their age level. Added to this group were two players who are currently on scholarship at the IMG Academy in the USA: Chhattisgarh's guard Sanjeev Kumar, and the biggest name of them all, Punjab's 7-foot-1, 15-year-old giant, Satnam Singh Bhamara.

So when this group, along with several others, took the court to play our hapless neighbours, the results were expectedly lopsided. India defeated Nepal by 98 points in the first game, running and gunning behind seven players who scored in double digits. Ajay Pratap Singh and Love Neet Singh led the scoring with 19 and 18 points respectively. One of the true eye-popping numbers in this game was the score at the end of three quarters: 100-20. The final score, no less impressive: 134-36.

Leading the players from the sidelines were Delhi-based coaches JP Singh, J Nehra, and former Indian Women's superstar Divya Singh. I overheard something interesting from one of the probables that didn't make the squad about Coach Singh: "He said that 'When you're in my team, I have no feeders, no forwards, and no pivot players. You must be ready to play whatever position I ask you to play'." And true to this, most of the players, except for perhaps the bigs Satnam and Rakesh Sangwan, played as fluidly as they possibly could.

In the final against Sri Lanka on Wednesday, India fielded a big starting lineup, where our small forward, Ajay, was perhaps as tall as our opponent's Center (6'4"). On PF was 6'6" Sangwan, and Satnam held on to the Center position.

This was the kind of game that would have basketball scouts salivating on Satnam's potential. Let me make a note here that this was the first time really that I was watching Satnam play competitively against guys of his own age group. Despite the fact that he has represented Punjab at the U18 and India at the Senior level over the past month, he is still only a 15-year-old, and qualified to play for the U16 level, too. After a relatively easy first game (13 points, 3-4 blocks), Satnam EXPLODED against Sri Lanka. His teammates did a good job in getting him the ball, and he rewarded them with aggressive inside offense. Satnam was near-automatic against the hapless defenders once he got the ball inside. In roughly 26 minutes of action, he scored 28 points (barely missing any shots), brought down 8 rebounds, and got three highlight-reel blocks.

The rest of the team, meanwhile, continued dominating like they did a day before. The smaller players like Narender, Kushmeet, and Love Neet were too fast for Sri Lanka, as they caused dozens of turnovers with their full-court press, and on the other end, scored with ease on tireless fast-breaks. India cruised to an 88 point victory in the final, 122-34.

Entry into the U16 FIBA Asia Championship secure, this team now has a lot more time before October to continue improving. If they can keep this core together and motivated, they may well spring a surprise or two against Asia's powerhouses. And even if they don't yet, their play over these two games, albeit against weak competition, has proved that Indian basketball fans can rest assured: the future of the game is bright, indeed!

Here are the scores from the two games:

India vs. Nepal: India (Ajay Pratap Singh 19, Love Neet Singh 18, Satnam Singh Bhamara 13, Akash Bhasin 11, Kushmeet Singh 10, S. Karthickeyan 10, Rakesh Sangwan 10) bt. Nepal 134-36 (33-9, 31-4, 36-7, 34-16).

India vs. Sri Lanka: India (Satnam Singh Bhamara 28, Kushmeet Singh 26, Love Neet Singh 12, Ajay Pratap Singh 11) bt. Sri Lanka (Kenneth W 12, Praveen Ganlath 10) 122-34 (35-11, 29-8, 35-11, 23-4).