Basketball: Blues team with Kenny Atkinson to acquire American spy for Paris 2024 Olympics

The position has been vacant for two months. Vincent Collet, coach of the French national basketball team, has two assistants left: Pascal Donnadier and Raddy Nelomme. But since Laurent Foiret, who joined Boulogne-Levallois before his suspension, left, a void has been left. This one is full. In 2000, the French Basketball Federation chose American Kenny Atkinson to replace the Olympic vice-champion in the Blues.

At 56 years old, the New York-born American already speaks excellent French. He had a long career as a leader in France – from 1998 to 2002 he played for Montpellier in Pro A, Epinal, Mulhouse, Nantes and Evreux in Pro B – before coaching in France. A Francophone and Francophile, he knows small-town French basketball well. He returned to finish his playing career in Nantes in 2005. “From 2004 to 2006, he was an assistant to Michel Gomez at Paris Basket Racing, where he won the French Cup in 2005,” the FFBB clarifies.

He is an assistant to Steve Kerr with the Warriors, the coach of the U.S. team in Paris.

A rather modest player, Kenny Atkinson’s reputation has largely been as a coach. After France, the NBA immediately looked at him. He joined the prestigious American League in 2008 as an assistant to Mike D’Antoni with the New York Knicks and then Mike Budenholzer with the Atlanta Hawks. In 2016, he was named head coach of the Brooklyn Nets and led the team to playoff qualification in 2019. He then served as an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2020-21, followed by the Golden State Warriors in 2021-22, the team with which he won the NBA title in 2022. At the end of 2023, Kenny Atkinson is still an assistant for the San Francisco franchise and interacts with Steph Curry’s gang every day.

There can be no question of him leaving his post to join the headquarters of the French national team. That’s why he was chosen. The players, and especially the NBA players, demanded a reinforcement around Vincent Collet with a man who knows everything about the NBA, its methods of work, its systems, its people. Team USA is bringing its own superstars to the Games, and to have a chance of beating them, you need someone in charge who knows their tricks. Kenny Atkinson has this profile without taking into account the fact that if we have to live through a match against the USA, no one knows the American coach and his game better than him, since it is Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, Atkinson works every day. In this regard, the choice seems very reasonable.

At the same time, the leadership of the Blues was also strengthened with the arrival of Frederic Sarr (62), a seven-time French champion, as assistant coach in place of Jan Barbic as head coach or deputy at Bourg, Gravelines, Nancy. , Pau, Strasbourg or Limoges.