Plumb reflects on back-to-back titles
The joy of six: It was a grind of a season — but a deeply rewarding one, too — for London Lightning head coach Doug Plumb. Here, six championship season reflections from the coach …
(Photo: Matt Hiscox Photography).
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Nothing wrong with a little ‘six appeal’ to make the other teams jealous.
The London Lightning brought home the 2023 NBL Canada championship in record-breaking fashion last month with a 126-88 win over the Windsor Express. The victory capped a 3-2 series win for London, whose 38-point margin of victory in that game was the largest-ever in the Finals.
The win also marked back-to-back championships for the Lightning – the third time the franchise has accomplished that feat.
London was a member of the league’s Original Seven in 2011, with Windsor joining in 2012. Since then, the two iconic franchises have won eight of the 10 NBL Canada championships, with the Lightning now having the edge with six.
Head coach Doug Plumb, who has been part of half of those titles, recently reflected on this championship campaign – a celebration of six in six, if you will.
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1. On what it means to go back-to-back …
“As a competitor, it’s easy to win one – OK, maybe not easy, but it’s easier to win one. Winning back-to-back, however, that shows it’s not just a flash in the pan.
Selfishly, this was my goal. A second title, a second title back-to-back puts you on a different platform as a coach. Over the past three years I’ve been here, the winning percentage is the best in the history of the league. So, I like to think this shows I know what the hell I’m doing. This was, no doubt, my best – and toughest – coaching job ever.
For the team, for the franchise, it’s the same thing. They get a chance to show 2022 wasn’t just a fluke and that they are still winners. We got a little bit lucky last year. But this year was completely the opposite. It was an absolute gauntlet; we had to earn everything. We were two and a half games back with just a couple weeks left in the season and we fought back. It felt like we were in the playoffs forever because of the intensity we had to have down the stretch of the season.”
2. On responsibility of leading a dynasty …
“As long as I’ve been in the league, London has won half of the titles. I have been part of three here and I was in the league when they won another one.
It goes to show that if you have good ownership, you’re going to win. (Lightning owner Vito Frijia) isn’t afraid to spend money. He is committed. He has everything in place to make it successful. With a lot of other organizations, as a coach, you not only have to worry about the infrastructure of your team and what your coaching philosophy is, but you have to worry about the actual organization – the amenities, resources, stuff you need available to you to do the best job you can. You’re fighting a whole other battle, and a whole other realm of things comes into play there. That’s what makes London special.”
3. On challenge of building a champion …
“If you look at the course of the year, and how many guys we had in and out, that was a real challenge. If you give me a new group of guys, I am going to go get the same types of guys all the time. I’ve been around winning situations long enough and I’ve had good mentors who showed me the ropes about what it takes from people to win. That’s not necessarily as much of a challenge because you can galvanize a group over the course of time.
That’s building a team. You have people with the right hearts, intent, and characteristics of a winner, then it’s easy. You just need to make sure you’re putting their talent in certain situations, on a game-to-game basis, and then play-calling appropriately and developing your schemes based on the actual physical characteristics that they have.
The challenge this year was the amount of reshuffling of the deck I had to do over the course of the year, especially with guys out with injury. It was hard to sustain winning so that you could stay close and play for home court advantage.”
(Photo: Matt Hiscox Photography).
4. On what might have been …
“Listen, if we don’t get home court advantage down the stretch, I don’t think we win.
Think about it. If that was the case, we probably would have played Windsor first round. Well, the way Windsor was playing at that time, that series could have gone very differently. In a lot of our games with them, including in the Finals, we only beat them where it was very close at the end kind of thing. Even if we survived that bloodbath of a series with Windsor, we would then go to Sudbury for two games. Man, it would have been a whole different dynamic of a playoffs.”
5. On what changed on the sidelines …
“My staff was much better this year. There was a lot of growth as we figured out how to work with each other. I put a lot more on (lead assistant coach) Mike Provenzano’s plate this year and that was massive because it took things off my plate.
Last year, I was a younger coach, maybe more concerned about separating myself from my peers in terms of the players, because the players were my peers, essentially, right? Then you have to act a certain way; you carry yourself a different way. I thought that I was a lot more like more of a hard ass, for lack of a better term, to a lot of these guys in the past. Whereas this year, I was just myself, so I got more of a personal connection with them. People don’t care how much you know; they care how much you care at the end of the day. You can’t just come down and shit on people all the time.
That really helped, and Mike and the whole staff was a huge part of it.”
6. On dealing with the grind …
“I’m tired right now like I’ve never been tired at the end of the season for sure. Just fog, man. Just exhaustion. It’s not even the basketball, per se. It’s everything. It’s the day-to-day, dealing with the humans and all the variables of injuries and the guys that are out, shuffling the deck, people’s emotional makeup on a given day, their families, agents, the media.
That’s the full-time job aspect of it. That’s not as enjoyable. But the actual coaching of hoops is fun when you have the same lineup, not going into every game thinking, ‘Oh hell, I need to do three days of work here in a day and a half.
I got to really push myself this season. Last year, I don’t feel like I coached much basketball. There was a lot of talent on the team. It wasn’t really gratifying as an individual. It was good to win, sure, as there was a little bit of unfinished business for the team coming out of the pandemic-shortened season from an outsider’s perspective. But this year, it really was that because I had a good group and coaches on the sidelines, and I got to coach basketball. I got to really show everyone, even myself, what I could do, which was fun.”
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