Raptors Task Eric Khoury as New 905 Coach to Discover the NBA's Next Basketball Innovation
Success in basketball comes down to first principles, Eric Khoury says with a smirk as the Raptors 905, Toronto’s G League affiliate, introduces the 33-year-old as the organization’s newest head coach. Take Newton's principal laws, for example, Khoury continues with words that I’m quite certain have never been uttered before during an introductory press conference for a basketball coach.
It’s an analogy that would be lost within most basketball locker rooms or, frankly, most press conference rooms. But Khoury isn’t a typical basketball coach. He hasn’t spent years drawing up plays in dungy gyms, working to pursue a dream in the basketball backwaters. Instead, Khoury learned the game a different way: With analytics.
“If you don’t know the basics of physics, you’re not going to be able to expand on all the amazing equations that will come out of it, and, I think, it’s very similar to basketball,” said Khoury who initially joined the Raptors organization in 2012 while studying his Master of Applied Science in Experimental Fluid Dynamics at the University of Toronto. “You can design all these amazing, intricate plays but nothing good will come out of them if you can't execute the principles.
“So I’m very focused on not having a whole bunch of rules… but having a lot of principles that you can very strongly execute.”
Khoury, however, isn’t some science geek with no basketball know-how. He grew up in Toronto as a huge basketball fan and cut his teeth with the Raptors a decade ago, first in the analytics department before transitioning over to the coaching side in 2017.
Those first few years on the inside weren’t easy, Khoury said. He peppered Toronto’s coaching staff with questions, trying to get up to speed on everything he didn’t know about the game.
“I’m sure at times they were like 'ok that's enough questions for today, let's move on to the next thing,' but they were really generous with their time,” Khoury said.
Dealing with players has never been an issue for Khoury. He doesn’t come off as someone with all the answers. He’s not going to approach players with an Excel spreadsheet full of numbers and some complex equations that they’re supposed to digest and utilize on the basketball court. Instead, he views the analytics as just part of the game, a way to optimize the never-ending tradeoffs basketball presents.
That’s the exciting part about Khoury taking over the 905 for next season. For the Raptors, the G League is both a place to develop players and a science lab for testing out new ideas. It wasn’t all that long ago, for example, that Raptors coach Nick Nurse was at the forefront of the NBA’s offensive revolution, leading the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, Houston’s G League affiliate, and forcing his team to take nearly 80% of its shots either at the rim of behind the three-point line.
“Coach Nurse and I have talked about that a little bit. There are some interesting things we’re thinking about looking at and implementing at the 905 level,” Khoury said, declining to go into specifics to avoid giving away trade secrets. “We do want there to be a similar style of play between the two clubs but there might be one or two things on each end that we’re gonna experiment with a little bit.”
Last season, the Raptors broke one of basketball’s traditional beliefs that teams must decide between crashing the offensive glass for rebounds and getting back on defense to prevent transition opportunities. Somehow, Toronto managed to do both, finishing the year second in offensive rebounds and among the league’s stingiest transition defenses.
“It’s not just that, there's many different areas,” Khoury said. “Shot selection or pick and roll coverages and so on and so forth.”
“You can use analytics to study it and say OK… if we do this, what's going to be the outcome.”
In a copycat league like the NBA, the Raptors want to be leading the way into whatever the next innovation is. With Khoury at the helm, it’s going to be on the 905 to figure that out.
Further Reading
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