Former WNBA players will square off as coaches in the Finals for the first time. But Sandy Brondello and Becky Hammon won't be the last to do it.
tip off the WNBA Finals on Sunday , the coaching matchup between Becky Hammon and Sandy Brondello will be 26 years in the making.
Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon, left, played in the WNBA for 16 seasons, splitting her time between the New York Liberty and San Antonio Stars. New York coach Sandy Brondello played for five seasons, with stints in Detroit, Seattle and Miami. in 2014 and Hammon last season with Las Vegas -- previously saw their careers overlap in San Antonio. Brondello was an assistant during Hammon's first three years with the Silver Stars, and then her head coach in 2010.
In 2013, Hammon suffered an ACL tear in her first game and spent the remainder of the season watching from the sidelines. She told Hughes at season's end she wanted to coach and asked whether he could help connect her with the NBA's"I went over the next day to Gregg Popovich," Hughes said."They were in the gym, him and [Spurs CEO] R.C. Buford. I said, 'How do you feel about Becky coming over?' 'Oh, we'd love to have her.
"Becky and Sandy both have incredible offensive minds," Hughes said."I like putting people like that around me, to be honest with you, because I come at it defensively. That's my starting point. Players, a lot of times, are like that. There were times -- and Becky wouldn't necessarily have been privy to some of these, because she was on the floor -- Sandy would interpret what Becky was going to do to me on the bench before Becky did it.
When WNBA teams sought professional playing experience in the league's first decade, they often turned instead to former NBA players. Five of the league's 13 coaches to start the 2004 campaign were NBA veterans after Bill Laimbeer's Detroit Shock beat Michael Cooper's Los Angeles Sparks in the 2003 Finals.
Because teams would prefer to have larger coaching staffs, they quickly responded by hiring more former WNBA players. In 2019, seven of the league's 12 teams had a former player on staff. By 2021, that was 11 of 12, and this year, for the first time, every team has one. The total number of assistant coaches with playing experience has skyrocketed from nine in 2019 to 22 this season.
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