Scott Flemming is nearly one year into his second stint as the India National basketball team coach, having previously been at the helm from 2012 to 2015. The American has also had coaching experience in the NBA Development League (G League), travelled to several countries to impart his knowledge and has also been the Technical Director of the NBA Academy in India.
Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the recently-concluded South Asia Basketball Association Club Championship at the Nehru indoor stadium in Chennai, Flemming spoke about India’s Asia Cup qualification and the resultant takeaways, shaping the team’s identity as a great three-point shooting team, the pathway for Indian basketball’s progress and more.
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Excerpts:
In 5×5, India beat Iraq and the higher-ranked Bahrain in the final qualifying tournament to secure a FIBA Asia Cup berth for the 11th consecutive time. In 3×3, it made it as far as the quarterfinals of the Asia Cup. What are your thoughts on that?
March has been a good month for the Indian team, both 5×5 and 3×3. Really proud of our guys. We were missing a few players due to injuries. The guys really played well. We had a good two weeks of training, which we hadn’t had for a while. It was a solid two weeks of putting our system back in and everything.
We got off to a good start against Iraq and didn’t look back and won that by (a margin of) 20 (97-77), and then played a Bahrain team that was 15 spots higher than we were (India 81 and Bahrain 66) in the rankings. After we beat Iraq, we thought we were probably going to get into the Asia Cup and we now are, after beating Bahrain (81-77).
We played pretty good defence. We’re a three-point shooting team and we came out and did it again. It bites you every once in a while when you’re not hitting them but I think we hit 15 and 14 threes in those games. That’s what we do and that’s what we’re good at.
And then, of course, the 3×3, I felt good. I’ve been coaching these boys since they were 14 years old. They had already played a lot of 3×3 together and I really give them a lot of the credit. I’ve seen them growing up through the NBA Academy and then onto the National team. I did a little bit of tweaking, but I will give them most of the credit for what they did.
We beat three teams ranked higher than us (Iraq and Bahrain in 5×5 and Chinese Taipei in 3×3) and I’ll tell you, we really could have beaten China (India lost 19-21 in 3×3). And China ended up losing by two (points) in the final (China lost 19-21 to Australia). We really feel like we belonged with the best teams in Asia.
Where did that two-week training take place and what was the focus in that period?
We trained in Chennai and we had the training camp up in Delhi, which was during the Indian National Basketball League and it was just kind of hectic and hard. We’d been training before that, but we had two straight weeks of just getting our system kind of back in. Because when they leave and they come back, they forget a lot of what we did and they’re in different systems from different coaches. That’s the difficulty with the National team. But I felt like we had two weeks of re-establishing our system: how we play and what we want to do.
What are the major takeaways from the wins against Iraq and Bahrain?
There are a few things we’ve got to do well. One of them is that we’ve got to be a good half-court defensive team. We have to rebound the ball well and we did pretty well in those games.
Palpreet (Singh Brar) had 16 boards in that second game. And then we have got to really move the basketball and look for open men. We can’t just come down and put it up. But if you had noticed, a lot of our baskets were inside out. We’re driving to the basket, we kick it back out.
We can’t just stand out there and shoot threes. We’ve got to be a threat going to the basket. When we become a threat to the basket, then we’re hitting all those threes.
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There are some things that we struggle with but there are some things we do well, we have to make sure that we take care of those things. I felt we played pretty good basketball. We had a few runs against Bahrain where we let them back in the game, but we answered them every time. We weathered the storm and then came right back at them.
What do you think is currently lacking in Indian basketball?
I’ve been asked that for 10 years. We’re behind some other countries, but we’re certainly catching up. This is a country where cricket is the religion. Basketball is coming up, but it’s still nothing like in the country I’m from or in countries like China, Iran, or the Philippines, countries where basketball is the number one sport.
The other thing is that they have Pro Leagues. We’re kind of getting there. We’ve got the INBL and we still need a long way to go. When there’s a good established Pro League here, that’ll make a difference because a lot of these countries have that and these players are going to get to play against better players than just against each other.
Our National team has no one to play here in India. We have to leave the country to get competition because the best players are on the National team and we don’t have as many. The numbers are getting larger and we’re a really young team too. The peak of this team is going to be in three or four years because we’ve got a lot of players in their early twenties on this team.
When these guys get to be in their mid-to-late twenties, that’s when we’re going to be at our best. We’re going to try to get there as quickly as we can and we already have in many ways. But if people are patient, three or four years from now, we’re going to really be a team to be reckoned with.
What sort of realistic goals can we expect the team to achieve in 3-4 years?
There are big goals and there are short-term goals. When I got here, I said my goal was to win one game because they hadn’t won a game against anybody higher-ranked than them for 10 years. The first goal was to win one game (against a higher-ranked team). And if we win one game, then our next goal was to make the Asia Cup. We’ve done that.
Now we have a goal to do well in the Asia Cup. I won’t give you a certain number right now, but we need to win some games and make some noise in the Asia Cup. I think we’ll try to win the Asia Cup but I think it’ll probably be more doable as time goes on.
You have to be realistic and be patient with the team as well. There wasn’t a lot of winning for a long time. We’ve now won three games in less than six months against quality opponents (Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Bahrain), with two of them (Kazakhstan and Bahrain) ranked higher than we are.
People should be encouraged by the direction in which it’s going, but we have a long way to go. I talk to our guys a lot about narrowing the gap with the Chinas and the Koreas and the Irans.
It’s been close to a year now in your second stint as the India coach. What improvements do you see in the team?
You have to have a system of play when you have a team like this, a National team. We’re not going to just roll the balls out with just talent, height and athleticism and beat people. We’ve got good players but we need to put a system in place to really emphasize their strengths and try to hide their weaknesses.
It doesn’t always work but I think overall the guys have bought into it. It really helps to have some steady training and it helps also to play some other people. We played a couple of times in Dubai (by the end of last year) and we had some trips planned but they didn’t work out. Hopefully in this next stretch, we’ll get to play some more exposure games too.
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When you say there should be a system of play, what do you mean by that?
The first thing we have to do is teach defence. If you don’t have defensive stoppers, you can teach good team defence. We spent a lot of time on that. We’re trying to be a great half-court defensive team. We want to be an up-tempo offensive team. One of the goals is to get at least 10 transition baskets a game and not give up more than three. That doesn’t always work out, but that’s the goal. We call it pressure offence, where we’re pushing it.
I tell them that even if you’re not scoring in the fast break, you’re still getting the ball up the floor quickly and you’re leaving more time on the clock for you to run half-court. A lot of the times when teams just walk it up and, by the time they start their offence, it’s down to 12 or 13 seconds and so you’re desperate then. You break fast and you get it up there, then you’ve got 20 seconds to run your half-court. So that’s part of it.
We want to be a fast breaking team. Defensively we want to be a great half-court team. We’ll do a little bit of pressing and a little bit of trapping, but that’s not our MO (Modus Operandi). Our MO is (being) a really good half-court team.
What worked for us really well against Bahrain was that we put in our matchup zone. That’s kind of our secondary defence. We want to have that just as a mixer. When I came in here, I looked at our team and I said, ‘What is the one thing we could be better at than anybody else in this (Asian) pool?’ I mean, we weren’t as big, as quick, and as athletic, but I felt like we had a few really good shooters. And so, I thought we could be the best three-point shooting team in this pool.
We had guys like Gurbaz (Sandhu) and Muin (Bek Hafeez) who were already really good three-point shooters. But we had some other guys too. At times we had five guys on the floor that could shoot threes. We have about seven guys that can make them – they may not shoot their own high percentage. I know as a coach that playing against teams like that is a nightmare. When everybody can shoot threes and you can’t help as much and you have to close out. We shoot a lot of threes in practice. I mean, a lot.
We don’t shoot a lot of mid-range. We shoot some, but I wanted us to be the best three-point shooting team in this pool. And you can’t just only shoot threes, but in the games we’ve won, we’ve hit 17, we’ve hit 15, and we’ve hit 14. That doesn’t just happen. We put up a lot of threes in practice. You’ve still got to play great defence.
You’ve got to rebound the basketball. We want to try to get some easy baskets because you can’t depend on your half-court to do all your scoring. You’ve got to get a few transition baskets. That’s kind of the system – being a great three-point shooting team. But we work hard at how you get those threes, not just shooting them. We work hard on driving and kicking and swinging it and all those kinds of things, so we can get open threes.
How optimistic are you about India’s chances of winning the Asia Cup?
I’ve coached before (2012-15) and that was just a walk in the park to get there (to the Asian Cup). The last two times, especially this one, we really had to earn it. When they talk about eleven straight (qualifications), I almost say really two straight.
They’ve changed the whole format. Now you have to really work to get there. So when I hear eleven in a row, I’m really thinking more like, ‘Well, two in a row.’
But I’m optimistic. If we get all of our players healthy and everybody back, I think we can do some damage. We have to make sure we get them all back healthy and for the training. If we have our full squad, I’m optimistic about how we can do it. We’ve already surprised a few people. I hope we have more surprises in us.
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What are your preparatory plans for the Asia Cup?
We’ve got about three or four camps. Basically, there’s going to be a camp starting this month, and we’re going to take it all the way through to July with some breaks in there. My goal is to get at least two exposure trips. Maybe, one to Dubai, where we were before. And then, maybe, a bigger one. We’re going to play some really tough teams. We’re not sure where that’s going to be, but we’re going to really investigate and see if we can play some teams better than we are.
Published – April 16, 2025 10:27 pm IST