The NBA 2019-20 season was suspended on March 11 after Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid-19. It has been more than five weeks and no decision has been taken on resumption of play. Two days ago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver held a call with franchise owners and executives, and ESPN sources suggested that later the owners and execs were feeling increasingly positive about the league's momentum toward a resumption of play this season. A final verdict is still awaited.
Roy Rana, assistant coach at the Sacramento Kings, is one of those who await the announcement. He isn't getting too worked up, though. Right now, he says, "you focus on what you can control." Once the decision is made, "you get your players back, get them fit, you get them ready, you prepare them like you would always prepare them and hopefully we will be ready to perform at a high level and the chemistry that we've built throughout the year continues to express itself when we come back," he says. "It's unprecedented for everyone, not just for the Kings.
"It has been a crazy year. A roller-coaster ride." Currently eleventh in the Western Conference, the Kings shook off a five-game losing streak at the start to recover and close with seven wins out of 10 before the suspension. They remain an outside shot for the playoffs if the NBA resumes with the regular season.
"[Getting in the playoff hunt] took us a little longer and it took us little twists and turns, but that's the reality of the long season, right?" Rana says. "Success is never linear in anybody's career, forget about a professional sports team. We've had our ups and our downs but we found a good place and our players are in a good place. As far as my role is concerned, I'm just a very, very small part of a big wheel and I make my contributions in every opportunity that I can, whether that's through my work with [head] coach [Luke] Walton or whether that's work with our players or whether that's as a scout."
Rana -- one of a select few Indian-origin coaches in the world's biggest basketball league -- is loving his first season in the NBA. "I'm getting a PhD in basketball at the highest level," he declares.
The Indo-Canadian is a pioneer of sorts. "I can tell you that I am a complete anomaly," he laughs. "Canada was [an ice] hockey country and [Indian expatriates] tried to adopt [the] hockey culture because that was our easiest way to assimilate. [But in my family] it was all about academics, it was all about school, which I was okay with, but I wasn't destined to become a doctor like everybody dreams their kids are going to become."
What he did become was one of the most successful basketball coaches in Canadian history. He started with a quite remarkable 86.7% win record over nine years at Toronto's Eastern Commerce high school, before turning Ryerson University into a college basketball powerhouse over a decade of coaching, where he had a 69% win record. Rana also led Canada to their first-ever World Championship in FIBA competition at the 2017 U19 Basketball World Cup.
Now, he is in the NBA.
"Probably the biggest 'aha!' moment for me was just the sheer size of the operation in the NBA," Rana says. "Even when I was with our Canadian national team and when I was with Canadian university ball, the operation was fairly small. Here, the scale of everything is just so much bigger -- the group, the amount of travel. So there's just more pieces to manage and there are more people. I try to help Luke [Walton] in my role to do the best as I can."
He says he's enjoying the challenge and the change but surely larger the scale, greater the pressure? He dismisses the thought. "Pressure is such an interesting word," he says. "Probably the most pressure I felt was when I was a high school coach because, to be honest, I felt like I was trying to prove myself. So for me, it was life or death. It was a mark on my career. If I won this game then I was good and if I lost this game then... it's a difficult situation to be in. That's a young coach trying to prove himself, putting in a lot of pressure on himself."
Rana does concede, though, that expectations are higher at this level. He wouldn't have it any other way. "The pressure is a privilege," he says. "You want to be in a situation where there are expectations, that's important. It is more about how you manage that pressure and not to allow it to become a distraction."
Rana has travelled to India extensively (his parents are from Punjab and Uttar Pradesh), most recently with the Kings during the inaugural NBA India Games, and has some advice on how to build the game in a community where basketball isn't the most dominant sport.
With the caveat that this was about how he saw (and helped) the game develop in Canada and that his knowledge of ground realities in India was limited, he says, "We found talent identification is going to become usually critical and that has to happen probably at an earlier age. I don't know when it starts in India but I think we should look at 13- and 14-year-old kids and try to see who has potential." India, of course, has been holding age-group national championships for decades (the sub-junior category caters to the U14 group) while private players like the NBA India Academy have programmes specifically designed to scout potential at such age groups.
But talent identification is just one aspect. "I also think there needs to be a coordinated designed effort that there's alignment in teaching the game across the country," he says.
Both these factors, then, come down to one main thing -- coaching. "All of this is really about coaching -- the better you develop your coaches, the better you develop your talent," Rana says.
He offers up the success of Canada -- and the Indian diaspora within -- as proof of this simple approach. "In the diaspora community, there's a lot of talent, there's a lot of Indians that are playing basketball outside of India, that are doing well," he says. "So, if we look at what's being done internationally by Indians, I think that way we can be confident that it can be done domestically as well."
Rana, meanwhile, hopes that his story can inspire people.
"It's okay to aspire to be a coach," he says. "Coaching is a profession and it is an incredible profession. It is something that people can take pride in. So hopefully I can leave a small little mark on those who follow. In my time coming up, people used to be like, 'Why do you want to become a coach?' It wasn't viewed as an opportunity to better yourself or to make a life for yourself. That has changed."