Golden State Warriors assistant coach Stephen Silas wasn’t at Justin-Siena High School’s Clark Gym to discuss only basketball on Thursday.
During his half-hour talk to a throng of about 50 participants at one of the Warriors’ 12 basketball camps held throughout the Bay Area, the Ivy Leaguer frequently compared basketball to education.
Constantly asking questions of his co-ed audience of 8- through 15-year-olds throughout, he began by having them shout out the skills they had worked on during the week-long camp, which ends today.
Shooting, rebounding, stealing, passing, dribbling, screening, layups and free throws came out of the group. When he asked if the group thought NBA players needed help with layups, many said no. He then corrected them.
“Guys who have been in the NBA nine, 10, 11 years can’t make layups,”
he said. “We work on them every single day.”
Silas, who graduated from Brown University in 1996 with bachelor’s degrees in sociology and management, then asked the group what skills help them in school, reminding that subjects such as math and science are not skills.
The campers replied with organization, listening, reading, writing, spelling, studying and communication.
“And how do you get good at listening?”
he asked.
“Listen,”
the audience replied.
“What?”
Silas shot back.
“Listen!”
his listeners roared.
“Oh, OK,”
Silas replied, getting more chuckles from the adults than the kids.
The 34-year-old Silas, who coaches guards, will return for his third season on the Warriors staff. When he was 27, he was the youngest assistant coach in the NBA during the first of three seasons with the Charlotte Hornets.
He was a Cleveland Cavaliers assistant in 2003-04 and 2004-05, taking then-rookie LeBron James under his wing while his father, Paul Silas, was the head coach.
Before becoming an NBA assistant, the younger Silas served as a coach of the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camp in Beijing, China, and worked at the Dirk Nowitzki Basketball Academy in Berlin, Germany.
“School and basketball can take you wherever you want to go,”
he told the campers. “But you can’t do it if you don’t have an education.”
Silas fielded questions at the end of his talk.
The best player he ever coached?
“LeBron James,”
he replied. “He’s an unbelievable talent.”
Easiest player to coach?
“Stephen Jackson, probably because he’d been around in the league a long time before I met him.”
Asked before the talk who his favorite speaker was, Silas said his father, who won NBA championships playing for the Boston Celtics in 1974 and 1976 and the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979.
“I’ve heard him speak so many times, but it never gets old,”
Stephen Silas said of his father, who also starred at Creighton University. “He played in the NBA 17 years and coached for almost 20, so he has a lot of experience. But he was an Academic All-American in college, so the academic thing is really big with him — and me also.”
