Chris Finch kept looking at his watch as the bus carrying his Euphony Bree basketball team crawled through the gridlocked streets of Belgium on its way to a key game in the Belgian Basketball League. The minutes kept ticking and the bus was barely moving, game time getting closer and closer.
Finch looked around the bus and saw his players changing into their uniforms and getting their ankles taped. They were cutting it close. At one point it became clear the team was going to be so late that they would not have any time to warmup or meet before starting the game, so Finch’s assistant asked if they should pull out a white board and go over coverages and other finer points of the game plan.
“At this point I thought, here’s what the game is going to come down to, the game is going to come down to whether the players really want to play and win tonight,” Finch said. “So I said, ‘You already have an excuse to lose the game tonight.
