Dave who?

For some coaches, it’s about the headlines, the recognition, the limelight.

For others, like Dave, it’s hard to find the faint pulse of ego.

Dave who?

Dave Joerger is in his third season as the head coach of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. He is a quiet, unassuming gentleman with a keen coaching eye and the ability to get buy in from players, staff and fans. He currently has the third best record in the entire NBA and his team is poised to challenge for an NBA championship this year.

Joerger walked into the Phoenix Suns press room where pre game meals are provided for visiting teams and press in the bowels of the US Airways arena before a January game. The attendant at the table asked his name. Wearing a “Property of Memphis Grizzlies” t shirt, he told her Dave Joerger. She looked up and asked him who he was. He smiled and said he was the Memphis coach. She looked up again at him. “Are you new?”

Joerger is used to this. He is a coach who came up the ranks, literally. After graduating college in 1997, He took on a front office position in the IBA, basketball’s equivalent of baseball’s Durham Bulls. He got onto the bench as an assistant coach that year and three years later the head coach. For the next 7 years he succeeded in different teams and minor leagues, winning five league championships, until he was called up to the NBA as an assistant with the Memphis Grizzlies. Those early years grinding out a coaching career helped lay the foundation for Joerger’s humble nature.

“My upbringing professionally in coaching lends itself to never taking anything for granted.” He says. “A lot of van rides, a lot of bus rides, having to fight and scrap for every win for every player that you’re trying to help in their career and helping them get called up to the NBA. Nothing was ever given, you had to try and earn everything. I appreciate every single day that I get to be a head coach in this league and every person that I meet and media sessions and players meetings and games and travel. I have a deep level of appreciation for it.”

One thing you notice about the Grizzlies is how much they all tend to really like each other. Players, staff, broadcasters, they all seem to be in tune with what needs to happen and how to make that a reality. It all starts with Joerger. “I try to be very inclusive. Our community really cares about our team and certainly everybody that is with us either on the plane or if we have a game at home, you just try to be nice to everybody and make sure everybody feels included because everybody is working hard. I just try to be nice to people.”

One of Joerger’s strengths is putting players in a position where their individual tools can best help the team. For the team he coaches now, he has implemented a stingy defense that helps ignite an efficient offense. “My favorite style of play is to get up and down the floor, move the basketball and be hard to guard.” He points out. “We’ve tried to get up and down the floor a little bit faster, as far as there won’t be more possessions in our game just by the way we are built, but just for us to get in our offense a little bit quicker and use the entire 24 seconds of the shot clock.”

Two hundred games into his NBA coaching career, he sports a gaudy .675 winning percentage and with this season, will be three for three in playoff appearances. Yet Joerger’s coaching philosophy might surprise. “I don’t really have a coaching philosophy other than, again coming from the minor leagues, you might have one kind of team start the year and players come and go and then you have a different kind of team, so the philosophy of whatever’s best for the team however the team is built or whatever their strengths are, that what I try to play to or coach to.”

Dave was asked if there was a secret sauce to the kind of success he’s achieved and falling back on his own 10 year climb up the ladder, he gives this advice. “Work for free! Go work and try to get as much exposure as you can to as many different people and formulate your own collection of thoughts from as many different people as you can. I think sometimes guys get under one coach or follow one coach and then they don’t make up their own mind about how they want the game to be played. Blend as many different thoughts from great coaches as possible. That would be my advice.”

Joerger’s under-the-radar mentality doesn’t work for some coaches who crave the limelight and the attention. He just does his job; grateful for the opportunities given and taken along the way and most importantly, doesn’t plan on wasting his shot in the big leagues. When asked what his goals were for his NBA career, in typical Dave Joerger fashion, he was eloquent and understated.

“Just to keep my job as long as I can.”