Stephen Silas is on the USA Basketball sideline with lessons learned and a ‘standard’ to uphold

WASHINGTON — The team Stephen Silas coaches now won by 42 points on Friday, by 23 on Monday and won’t play another game until February.

When Team Silas retakes the court, there is no guarantee any of the players under his direction the past few days will be in uniform. And yet, toward the end of practice between the two blowouts, Silas stopped play for a short but terse lecture.

“YOU are not playing up to our standard,” Silas said sternly. “And it’s only you who set what our standard is.”

The team Silas coaches, the USA Basketball men’s national qualifying team, gathered more than a week ago in Washington for training camp, followed by games against Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. That day when he stopped practice, held on Georgetown’s campus, he didn’t like the attention to detail he saw during a team scrimmage and was acting on a lesson he learned the last time he was a head coach, for the Houston Rockets.

“I would say I stop practice a lot more (now) — if I see something, I stop it,” Silas said. “Quickly interject, let them know that it’s serious and then back out. I think early on (in Houston) I would kind of like let it go, and then afterward through film or whatever, address it. But I’m much more direct when it comes to, you know, ‘This is how we need to do it, and we need to do it right.’”

Silas’ last two jobs could have gone better. In 2020, he landed his first (and so far only) head-coaching job in the NBA with Houston, where he was to coach a contender. And then, almost immediately, James Harden and Russell Westbrook forced their way off the team through trades and triggered a massive rebuild.

Silas was let go after three losing seasons with the Rockets, and Monty Williams hired him as an assistant in Detroit for last season. At the time, Williams was the highest-paid coach in the NBA with a six-year contract. The last thing Silas expected was for the Pistons to set an NBA record for consecutive losses in a single season, a franchise record for losses in a season and to be dismissed along with Williams and most of the staff after just one year. But that’s what happened.

To understand the role Silas has now, it’s worth explaining what job he doesn’t have. No, Silas is not the successor to Steve Kerr and will not be the head coach when the next roster of American stars goes to the 2027 World Cup or hosts the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

This USA team Silas is coaching is a collection of G League players (including David Stockton, all-time great John Stockton’s son) with three recognizable former NBA players (Robert Covington, Frank Kaminsky, Tony Snell) that played two games at the Washington Wizards’ G League facility in front of a few hundred people. They are in the early stages of trying to qualify for those high-profile tournaments that draw NBA superstars, thousands of fans and expansive TV audiences, doing the dirty work when almost no one is watching.

Players and coaches are there only for the love of country and sport. It’s also an opportunity for everyone involved to prove they deserve a chance (or second chance) in the NBA — and the USA support staff (namely, longtime national team director Sean Ford) will do what it can for these men.

Jim Boylen, who coached the American team that qualified for the 2023 World Cup, is now an assistant for the Indiana Pacers in part because of his USA experience; Matt Ryan played for Boylen and has been in the league for three years now. They are just two examples.

“Yeah, I’d love to be a head coach again — but I don’t know if it’s very much connected to my decision to coach this team,” Silas said. “This opportunity came, and to be the head coach of the U.S. team is a pretty cool thing to do, regardless of what the circumstances are.”

Silas was at his family’s home in Dallas, where he coached as an assistant for two years before coaching the Rockets, decompressing after a tumultuous four years, when Ford called him in September.

The last two people Silas interviewed before he was hired in Houston were Harden and Westbrook. He earned their approval and was hired in late October 2020; before the team played its first game the day after Christmas, Westbrook had already forced a trade to Washington. Harden forced his trade to Brooklyn in January. The Rockets, predictably, lost 177 games in those three seasons after the trades as the franchise sunk quickly into a rebuild. Coaches almost never survive those, and the Rockets declined to pick up the option on Silas’ contract for the 2023-24 season.

Silas makes no excuses and holds few (if any) regrets from his Houston stint. Most of the circumstances — not just Harden and Westbrook leaving, and the rebuild that followed, but also all of it happening while the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging — were mainly out of his control. His father, NBA legend Paul Silas, died just before Christmas during Stephen’s final season with the Rockets. And then, when Williams scooped Stephen up and brought him to Detroit, the Pistons lost 28 consecutive games during a miserable season. When Silas was let go as part of the housecleaning in Detroit, he was looking forward to stepping back from basketball.

“I’ve been enjoying the family time, and it’s important because, like, obviously my dad passed a couple years ago, and now I have a daughter who is a senior in high school, and I can actually go to the parent-teacher conferences and be there when she comes home and be there for homecoming and stuff like that,” Silas said. “It is really cool at a time that I probably needed to have after three years in Houston, one year in Detroit which wasn’t very successful. Kind of like take a step back, enjoy the fam, do the USA thing. It’s really cathartic for me.”

When Ford called Silas to offer him the job with USA Basketball, both men agreed Silas should talk to some people before he made a decision. Silas’ first call was to Jeff Van Gundy, an NBA legend in his own right who has coached American qualifying teams and served as an assistant for American coaches at the Olympics and World Cup. Silas’ dad and Van Gundy were assistants for the New York Knicks in the early 1990s while Patrick Ewing starred there.

Van Gundy’s advice was obvious, given what we’re talking about now — “He was like, ‘Absolutely’,” Silas said — and after asking for a day or two to think about it, Silas called Ford again and accepted the job within a few hours. He also asked to add Ewing, who was dismissed from his head-coaching job at Georgetown in March 2023, to the USA staff. But Silas didn’t know who specifically would be on the team when he said yes. Covington was on the Rockets when Silas was hired there but was traded immediately. Silas was an assistant in Charlotte while Kaminsky played there, and then Kaminsky was traded to Houston during Silas’ last season.

“I thought I was going to have the opportunity to play for him in Houston, but I got traded right away,” Covington said. “It’s been amazing playing for him now. He puts an emphasis on doing things the right way, a stickler for the little things.”

Covington, 33, has played 614 NBA games over 11 NBA seasons. He played just 29 last year between the LA Clippers and Philadelphia 76ers. He was traded to the Sixers as part of the deal that brought Harden to the Clippers but missed most of the season and the playoffs due to a bone bruise on his left knee and didn’t find an NBA opportunity that suited him last summer as a free agent while coming back from injury.

Covington said he had chances to play this season — but didn’t specify where — and said slowly ramping up for this USA training camp and qualifying window was the better option for him.

“This is a great opportunity just to show people that I’m healthy,” Covington said. “I’ve got four or five years left of basketball in me.”

Kaminsky, 31, played for three seasons in Charlotte with Silas as an assistant. He spent last season playing in Serbia after a tough 2022-23 campaign, when injuries limited him to 36 games for Atlanta and Houston. Kaminsky’s Serbian training camp consisted of three practices a day at an empty ski lodge, running up and down the slopes. He was on the Phoenix Suns’ training camp roster this season.

“My main goal right now is to get back to the NBA,” said Kaminsky, who’s played eight NBA seasons. “I went overseas last year so I could prove I was healthy and prove I’m still the player I was. I’m not trying to necessarily catapult myself (into the NBA) with this opportunity by shooting the ball as many times as I can. This is my first opportunity to represent my country.”

When Kaminsky and Silas first worked together, Silas filled in for head coach Steve Clifford in Charlotte when Clifford missed time for health reasons. When the two were reunited in Houston, Kaminsky remembered a fiery Silas after the Rockets were lit up in a game by Damian Lillard, which prompted a rare postgame tirade from Silas.

As far as Silas is concerned, that particular incident might be an example of him waiting too long to address issues as they arise. Kaminsky remembers it as an example of Silas being forceful when he has to.

“When he tells us something and shows us something (for USAB), we need to follow, and there’s no questions,” Kaminsky said. “I saw him in Houston try to communicate to a lot of young players who didn’t really understand the NBA as a whole. And I feel like I kind of helped him with that. But there is a side to him where he is very soft spoken, but he’s not afraid to tell people how it is. And I think a lot of times, especially with the youth movement in the NBA, sometimes these guys come in, don’t really understand the work ethic (and) things that it takes to be successful. You need to have someone like that.

“He’s going to get another chance to be a head coach in the NBA. He’s too good.”

Silas has a certain way he stands on the sideline during games, with his hands on his hips, wrists cocked, head slightly bowed, like he’s looking through the top of his eyes. He stood that way as an assistant in Cleveland for his father, as an assistant to Clifford in Charlotte, as the boss in Houston and now for Team USA.

Thinking about how his career path has gotten him to this point, Silas, moments after stopping practice to make sure his players knew they had a standard to uphold, said to The Athletic: “When I got let go from Detroit, all my Pistons stuff went away. I got let go from Houston, all my Houston stuff went away.

“But this USA stuff, this USA shirt, it stays forever.”

(Photo of Stephen Silas: Alex Bierens de Haan / Getty Images)