Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2014
Michael Olson first came to Japan as a basketball player. Today, he’s showing teams how to win as a coach. The 34-year-old Portland, Oregon native was a team assistant to Link Tochigi Brex and began coaching the team in 2010, the year they won the Japan Basketball League (JBL) playoffs. Last year, he moved up a notch but down a league—to the JBL’s second division—becoming head coach of Renova Kagoshima.
After eight years in Japan as a player and coach, he’s back in the city he loves, Tokyo, and doing an excellent job coaching the irrepressible Tokyo Excellence in the National Basketball Development League (NBDL). The team ended 2013 with an almost perfect record—15 wins to one loss. Excellence plays in what is the de facto second division of the National Basketball League, the successor to the JBL, which is not to be confused with the rival Basketball Japan League (BJL). The leagues are complicated because the politics of the sport are very Japanese. Olson tries not to lose too much sleep over such matters—he’s having too much fun coaching the team that’s already knocking on the door of the NBL.
“At the start of the season, the president of the NBL wanted us, but our president, Dr. Shuichi Tsuji, [a well-known sports doctor and motivational trainer] wanted us to be in the Development League first,” Olson explains. “The plan was to stay two years and then move up, but we might have to the next year. I know we could play in the NBL right now.”
Olson plans to have his team back up his claim in the All-Japan tournament—in which teams from the NBL, NBDL and universities compete. That tourney started on New Year’s Day and will run through January 13. The team’s 2013 record gave Olson confidence. “We’ve only lost one game and we’ve had some big blowouts, while other games have been close,” he says. “It’s been exciting and I’ve really seen my team improve over the last few months.”
The Excellence lineup includes the talented and tall (215 cm) Joe Wolfinger, as well as Markhuri Sanders-Frison, who at 201 cm is, according to the coach, “265 pounds of muscle.” However, Olson can’t just add as many foreign players as he wants, as each league has different rules. The NBDL allows a team to have two on the court in the first and third quarters, and one in the second and fourth quarters. The BJ League allows more because, Olson says, “they’re looking more for entertainment. The NBL is real basketball.”
The coach, along with many Japanese basketball fans, would like to see the politics ironed out. “For Japan to be great at the sport, it needs one league with a second division,” he states. “In the long run, that would be best for Japanese basketball.”
In Tochigi, Olson worked with Yuta Tabuse, who went on to five years of trying to make it in the NBA. “It was a great experience and the people in Tochigi really love basketball because of that,” Olson recalls. “Every game was sold out. It was like being with The Beatles. People would wait for two or three hours to see Tabuse after games.”
However, Olson feels the momentum Tabuse created is starting to slow down. He sees the national team as still struggling, and believes the greater TV exposure that’s in the pipeline will help drive the sport to the next level.
Olson owes his success in Japan to his efforts to understand the country. “I’ve learned a bit about Japanese culture and can focus on how Japanese players react to certain things,” he explains. “Some coaches come to Japan and aren’t successful because they don’t understand the culture. The best thing is to stay positive. Too many Japanese coaches are aggressive and not positive. Japanese players need to stay confident in their game or they will fall apart. If you give them too much pressure, you probably won’t get the response you want.”
Olson is learning his stuff as a coach and looking to improve himself, his team and Japanese basketball in general. “I have a dream of becoming a national team coach one day—perhaps even for the Olympics in 2020,” Olson says. “For now, I just want to help build up Japanese basketball.”
Tokyo Excellence is playing their first four games of 2014 in Tokyo, starting with a match against Kuroda Electric Bullet Spirits on January 18 in Osaki.
