04-04-2025
Who is the Grizzlies' interim head coach trying to save their season? Meet Tuomas Iisalo
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — While growing up in Finland, Tuomas Iisalo found a few ways to expand his knowledge of the English language. One of them doubled as the source that taught him the language of basketball.
'I learned English in a lot of Slam Magazines,' he said.
Iisalo and his younger brother, Joonas, who became an assistant to Tuomas on several stops, were obsessed with the game from a young age. They spent hours pouring through the pages of every Slam they could find. They learned the names of their favorite players, the color schemes associated with each team and the slang that was an essential part of NBA fandom.
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As his love for the game grew, he started watching old VHS tapes of '90s NBA games. He still remembers devouring the tape of Michael Jordan's 55-point game against the Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals.
'We were basketball freaks,' Iisalo said.
His passion for the game was tied to so many of those greats in the '90s, but his personal preference for how the game should be played blossomed as he obsessed over the '07 Seconds or Less' Suns in the early 2000s and the soccer-indebted San Antonio Spurs in the 2010s.
As he became more immersed in the game, his ultimate goal was to cross the Atlantic Ocean and make it to the NBA one day. That journey has unfolded stunningly, as he has become an NBA head coach less than a year after the Memphis Grizzlies hired him as an assistant.
Iisalo, 42, has gone from a relative unknown among most NBA fans to the man tasked with righting the ship for a Grizzlies team that's been shrouded in turmoil the past few weeks.
In a shocking decision, the Grizzlies announced the firing of Taylor Jenkins, the franchise's all-time winningest coach, last Friday and named Iisalo interim head coach with only nine games left in the regular season. It certainly isn't an ideal situation for someone to be thrown into as a first-time head coach, but it was an indication the organization has immense trust in Iisalo's ability to thrive in a tumultuous environment.
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'I think everybody was in shock in the beginning. Then, everybody tried to get their bearings,' Iisalo said earlier in the week. 'I've been extremely pleased and really thankful for the guys and how they've accepted (me) in a tough situation.'
Both Grizzlies management and Iisalo have pushed back on any talk of him using this final stretch of the season as an audition to remain the Grizzlies head coach heading into the 2025-26 season. However, the Grizzlies showed how much they thought of Iisalo by pursuing him as aggressively as they did last summer. As reported by The Athletic last week, Memphis paid a lucrative buyout to lure Iisalo from Paris Basketball of LNB Élite, the club run by ex-Timberwolves general manager David Kahn, to Memphis, offering him an above-market deal for an assistant worth millions to join Jenkins' staff.
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The Grizzlies also forced Jenkins to fire several assistants he worked with for years ahead of the 2024-25 season to make room for Iisalo and several others tasked with reshaping the Grizzlies' offensive attack. Not all of those coaches stayed on after the Jenkins firings.
With the Grizzlies losing eight of their last 11 games, dropping from the No. 2 seed to a potential Play-In spot, Iisalo has been put into a position that no coach before him has been asked to overcome — and that is before getting to the ongoing controversy surrounding Grizzlies star Ja Morant.
It won't be easy. At least it should be familiar.
Iisalo moved from Finland to Germany to begin his journey as a head coach in 2016. His first job there was with Crailshelm Merlins, who had just been relegated to a lower league. In Europe, that is one of the biggest fears any club can face while going through a difficult season. Iisalo referred to it as an 'existential threat to the whole franchise.'
When a club is facing relegation, it puts almost everyone in the organization in danger. The financial implications can be devastating to everyone from players to coaches to supporting staff.
'Being in that situation twice, when you feel responsible for the whole future of the franchise and everybody's jobs … has taught me a lot about how to approach these type of situations,' Iisalo said. 'It's just one day at a time. You control the controllables.'
He helped Crailsheim get promoted back to the Bundesliga, the highest professional league in Germany, after two seasons, before eventually securing the club's first ever playoff berth in 2021. He then left to take over as head coach for Telekom Baskets Bonn in 2021. He led Bonn to a FIBA Champions League title in 2023.
'He's done an unbelievable job as a coach. Everywhere he's gone, he's found success,' said Krisian Palotie, the head coach of Lahti Basketball in Finland and a play-by-play announcer for NBA games on Finnish television.
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Palotie worked with Iisalo in the commentary booth on Finnish TV during the 2014 NBA Finals. He's followed most of Iisalo's coaching career as a result. Palotie said it's been shocking to see how quickly Iisalo has risen in the coaching ranks, but anyone who has spent time with him knows how deep his knowledge is of the game.
'How he breaks things down, how smart he is and how well he is able to explain his thoughts and his ideas — it's helped him his entire career,' Palotie said from Finland. 'I think it's going to play well with the guys he's coaching now.'
As he was wrapping up his final season with Bonn, Paris Basketball started reaching out to Iisalo in March 2023 with hopes of making him the club's next head coach. Alex Requena, a former executive with Paris Basketball, was part of the team looking into potential coaching candidates.
'I remember talking to one of our scouts and I was like, 'Who the hell is this guy?'' Requena recalled.
But as he grew familiar with Iisalo's coaching tactics and his approach to running a team, he became enamored with the Finnish phenom. He took note of the up-tempo, aggressive style Iisalo's teams played with and his ability to get the most out of his players.
'We were shocked about the way (Bonn) was playing basketball,' Requena told The Athletic in a phone conversation this week. 'I'm a basketball guy and I didn't really know many players on that roster. But the way that team played under him was amazing.'
Iisalo became a hot commodity in coaching circles after Bonn's Champions League victory, but Paris Basketball continued its aggressive pursuit and eventually convinced him to take over as head coach ahead of the 2023-24 season. Upon arrival, he requested Paris Basketball bring over some of the Bonn assistants he previously worked with along with a few players from that roster.
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Once he had all the pieces in place, Iisalo had a clear vision for what would come next.
'He's a perfectionist and he likes to keep things in control in a good way,' Requena said. 'When he joined us, he said, 'I'm going to make you win.''
In his season with Paris Basketball, Iisalo had historic success. He guided the team to a EuroCup championship and was named EuroCup coach of the year. He was also named coach of the year in LNB Pro A after leading Paris to a record-setting 25 consecutive victories. No team had won that many games since 1990.
While the performance from his team on the court was impressive enough, those within the organization were even more impressed by his understanding of how to get the most out of his team daily.
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'I've never seen that pace, that intensity, that passion that he was projecting into the players at practice,' Requena said. 'That was his way of winning games. Everything started from practice.'
With Paris, Iisalo installed an all-encompassing half-court offensive scheme predicated on spacing, movement and pace. Neither the ball nor the players should ever be stagnant. He wanted his players to hunt mismatches with ball screens
To help his players learn, Iisalo often leaned on principles from professional soccer. He used clips of central midfielders to highlight the importance of understanding the space around a player, whether the ball was in their possession or not. He also used soccer footage to teach transition defending, with the knowledge of angles and the necessity of keeping the opponent from getting behind you crucial in both sports.
'Everything has a purpose,' said Tyson Ward, a current Paris forward who played under Iisalo for three seasons, including the 2023-24 season in France. 'Staying connected, which means if the ball goes one way, everyone else is on a string. Constant pressure on and off the ball, making sure you crash the glass and force the defense to collapse in. We wouldn't do anything outside of what we worked on. Everything we worked on (during practice) is what we did in the game.'
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According to Ward, the crux of Iisalo's scheme was 'the (opposing) defense is always wrong,' which meant repetition of drills until players understood how to create mismatches and take advantage of them. Iisalo also drove home the significance of taking the best shot available that all five players agreed on for any given possession. Any hesitation would produce a negative trickle-down result. Defensively, he sought to protect his players from disadvantageous situations off switches, hoping to limit the same mismatches he yearned for at the other end of the floor. Effort, energy and understanding personnel were mandatory.
'The level of intensity of practice and the level of focus that the games require is like nothing I've ever experienced before,' Ward said. 'The guys that have been part of it would also say the same thing.'
With his success and the standard he set for work ethic around the organization, Iisalo left an indelible impact on Paris Basketball, despite only being there for one season.
'He's a genius in every single way,' Requena said. 'He's capable of carving his own path, and that's what's so inspiring about him.'
Very few expected Iisalo's time with Paris Basketball to be so short-lived. When an NBA team comes calling, it's hard to ignore.
The Grizzlies went after Iisalo so he could oversee the team's offense under Jenkins. Once the 42-year-old was given interim coach tag, he became the first Finnish-born head coach in NBA history, and just the fourth raised in Europe. He earned his first win on Thursday night in Miami.
Before last week's stunning turn, he spent most of the season making his mark in Memphis with coaches and players by showing off his high IQ for the game and his tremendous focus on the task at hand.
'He's a really smart guy. No bulls—. It's all about winning and how you get there. Nothing else really matters,' Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane said. 'He's not a man of many words if you ain't talking about basketball.'
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For Iisalo, showing the players that his commitment is to getting the most out of them and doing whatever it takes to win matters most, chaos be damned. Once he shows he can block everything else out and establish that belief, it's much easier to earn buy-in.
'Trust is like a three-way street,' Iisalo said. 'You've got to have trust that you can do the job. You've got to have trust that your teammates will do the job. And you've got to have trust in the coaching staff and the system that when we do these things, that will be enough to produce the win. We are looking to build the collective confidence.'
— The Athletic's Kelly Iko contributed to this story.
