FC Bayern Basketball: Gordon Herbert and the Little Rotation

Pat Riley, 79, is considered one of the ten best coaches in NBA history. With the Los Angeles Lakers he won the North American professional league four times, once with the Miami Heat. Riley coached NBA games in his career in 1904, 282 of them in the playoffs. And he had a belief that is always rummaged out when the playoffs are pending in any basketball league in the world: “Use Eight, Rotate Seven, Play Six, Trust Five.” So to be successful in the playoffs, according to Riley, you should use eight players as a coach, have seven in the fixed rotation, really have six players playing (so about 30 minutes per game). And only five players trust fully, in the crucial minutes the game, the series to win the season.

Gordon Herbert, 66, at least one of the best coaches in Europe, should not only know Rileysche Mantra, but even understand it as a natural law. Since your (very successful) time as a coach of the German national team, you have known that Herbert rely on very few, just around five to eight players in crucial games. When the world championship coach was introduced to the basketball players of FC Bayern Munich before the season, some really noticed that one season in the club basketball was first not an Olympic tournament and secondly. Just think of the double load and all the double match day weeks in the Euroleague. Herbert, according to the unanimous opinion, could impossible to stick to his coaching principle that the risk of injury or at least the risk of no one can even start with the sprint from April.

But Gordon Herbert has remained loyal to the entire Euroleague season. And even in the Bundesliga, he sometimes preferred to have a small rotation played than to use some supplementary players. So far, Herbert had played as if always playoffs. And so even now it does not seem to be excessive that, first of all, the playoffs in the Euroleague will soon be pending and that secondly, he currently has to do without two of his most important big players for reasons of injury.

There are still six games up to the playoffs that seem to be within reach

Devin Booker, 2.05 meters, sample athlete and second best scorer of FC Bayern in the Euroleague, has been missing with a knee injury for a month after he had slipped on a advertising ticker in a league game against Alba Berlin. At the moment, however, he is already in building training, it says from the club side. Oscar da Silva, 2.06 meters, fails with a similar injury “in the coming weeks” after being operated on the knee last week. And Kevin Yebo, 2.02 meters, who was at least used homeopathically in one of the two large positions, now plays again for his ex-club, the Niners Chemnitz. His contract, which was originally valid by 2027, was terminated.

As in the past few weeks, on Sunday evening at the 87:78 home win in the Bundesliga against the MLP Academics Heidelberg Danko Brankovic (2.16), as a temporary worker for the injured Booker and Da Silva. With 14 points and six rebounds in 25 minutes of play, he justifies the praise that Herbert had spoken to him at the press conference after the Euroleague victory against Red Star Belgrade last Thursday: “Brankovic took advantage of the opportunity to him. He gave us really good minutes today. “

When asked about the possible concern of soon hardly having any big players in the squad, Herbert also said: “We can count ourselves lucky that we have two players with Giffey and Lucic who can also play on the position of the Power Forward.” So in a position in which something more physical players are used than Niels Giffey (2.00) and Vladimir Lucic (2.04). Giffey and Lucic, however, are not only two very experienced players, but also two of the eight players that Herbert will continue to rely in the Euroleague with his small rotation (in two words). There are still six games up to the playoffs that seem to be within reach, Bayern are currently in fifth place in a feasible remaining program.