Jon Cooper, seen here addressing Team Canada after its semi-final win over Finland on Friday, learned a valuable coaching lesson years ago from Bobby Knight. The former Indiana Hoosiers coach told Cooper that buy-in trumps the X's and O's that every coach will deploy.Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press
Around 2009, when Jon Cooper was still a junior hockey coach trying to climb the ranks, basketball coach Bobby Knight came to town to give a speech.
Cooper, now the bench boss for Team Canada at the Milan Cortina Olympics, knew he had to be there.
Knight was “The General,” the legendary strategist for the Indiana Hoosiers who won three Div. I NCAA championships in the 1970s and ’80s and a gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics before his retirement in 2008.
Cooper, who will helm Team Canada in Sunday’s gold medal game, was coaching the Green Bay Gamblers back then, a junior hockey outfit based in Wisconsin.
The speech was great, Cooper recalls. What happened after was better.
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The two chit-chatted for a while about coaching and Knight shared some old stories from the hardwood. But after a while, Cooper needed to know: Was there any advice Knight had for a junior hockey coach?
“Any piece of advice, whatever, anything,” Cooper recalls asking.
“And he goes, ‘Don’t ever worry about what the other team’s doing.’”
Knight was famously blunt, so there was also an expletive in there.
Cooper has been a stoic presence on the bench for Team Canada's dramatic ride to Sunday's gold medal game against the United States.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Cooper asked what he meant.
“He goes, ‘It doesn’t matter.’”
Knight elaborated: the systems Cooper used were probably fine. The systems the opposing coaches deployed against him were also probably fine. But that’s not the point. Systems work. It’s not the systems.
“Do you put in game plans to beat a certain team? You do. But really, in the end, he’s like ‘Every system works, everybody’s system will work,’” Cooper said.
“It’s who really gets their team to play,” Cooper recalls Knight saying. “Who buys in the most, and plays their system most, and doesn’t go change it.”
It was less about the X’s and O’s than people think. Those still mattered, of course. But they were nothing if the players didn’t believe wholesale in the strategy, and stick with it.
Sitting in his Tampa Bay Lightning office a few months before the Olympics, Cooper could still recount the conversation with Knight word for word.
“It just matters what you guys are doing,” Cooper said. “Let them have to chase what you are doing.”
Twice Team Canada has been on the brink of elimination at the Olympics; once to Czechia, which took them to overtime in the quarter-final, and once to Finland, which had them down late in the third period of the semi-final.
Both times the cameras panned to Team Canada’s bench and Cooper coach looked calm, seemingly unbothered by the threat of a national crisis unfolding on the ice.
The systems are fine, they work. On paper. So do Czechia’s and so do Finland’s. The art of coaching is whether Cooper can get his players to trust that the power play as drawn up will score, the penalty kill as devised will prevent, and the breakouts as concocted will lead to offensive rushes.
And when they don’t, stay the course. Panic is not the way. Make adjustments, make tactical revisions, juggle the lines. But don’t go and change who you are.
The message bestowed on him by one of basketball’s most revered coaches, who died in 2023, is not unlike what Cooper has been preaching in Milan.
“I’ve always taken that from Bobby Knight,” Cooper said. “So the teams I coach, we focus on ourselves.”