How the Rip City Remix is Becoming the Trail Blazers' Research-and-Development Lab
With assistant GM Sergi Oliva serving as head coach this season, the Blazers are using their G League team to build a handbook for developing talent.
The Trail Blazers were one of the last NBA teams to get their own G League affiliate. But in its second season, they’re attempting to build the Rip City Remix into a first-of-its-kind basketball research and development lab.
Since it launched under a different name in the early 2000s, the G League’s primary purpose has been to serve as the NBA’s minor league, giving players a chance to develop and prove themselves to get on teams’ radars for a call-up. At the league level, the NBA has used it to try out rule changes they were considering. And now that he’s had an in-house G League team for a whole season, Blazers general manager Joe Cronin wants to use it as a testing ground to rethink every aspect of how a basketball team is supposed to be run.
Are we conducting practices in a way that will get our players as game-ready as possible?
What drills are we running? What is the purpose of those drills, and are they getting the most out of our players or are they just things we do because we've always done them?
Is there a way a team can better utilize its staff to develop players than simply keeping them in their previously defined roles?
These are some of the questions Cronin wants to answer for the Blazers long-term. But immediately changing the team’s entire way of doing things, and forcing head coach Chauncey Billups to try things he's never done before that nobody knows if it will work, is risky. That's where the Remix is coming in.
“One of our big arguments when we were establishing the Remix was, the Remix needs to teach the Blazers things,” Cronin says. “We want to make this to where the Blazers don’t necessarily have to do this during a game. Let the Remix do it, and let’s see what the Blazers can learn from it. The Remix doing some of these experiments allows us to collect data, learn and then implement or choose not to implement, depending on how it goes. So for us, it’s just a free look at a lot of different areas.”
To begin this mission, Cronin tapped one of his three assistant GMs, Sergi Oliva, to replace Jim Moran as head coach for this season. It’s only going to be a one-year stint—Oliva is too integral to Cronin's front-office staff to be “loaned out” to the Remix for more than the five months of the G League season.
Oliva has filled many roles within the Blazers in just over two years with the organization. He travels the country and the world to scout, just like the rest of Cronin’s staff. He has an analytics background but has also coached. He’s a big believer in the concept behind the popular David Epstein book Range, which advocates for developing a wider array of skills rather than specializing. And he’s constantly trying to figure out the next frontier of the evolution of basketball.
“I think teaching methodologies are evolving in the NBA, particularly in the last four or five years,” Oliva says. “That’s something that personally I’ve been very interested in. Why do we have the same drills and we’re teaching the same way that we used to 20 years ago, when everything else in the world is evolving?”
The 40-year-old Oliva doesn’t fit the typical profile of a professional basketball coach. It’s a safe bet that no other coach in the NBA or G League holds a PhD in computational complexity, which he earned in 2013 from Polytechnic University of Catalonia, in his home country of Spain. He uses words like “context” and “methodology” a lot when talking about his basketball beliefs. He worked in the Philadelphia 76ers’ analytics department during the infamous “Process” years in the mid-2010s.
Oliva is deliberate and detail-oriented when he speaks, no matter the topic. At the Remix's media day earlier this month, he responded to a lighthearted question about Hand Fruit Nation with a mini-dissertation on which hand fruits he likes more than others, laying out in great detail why oranges and bananas aren’t high on the list of options to eat in public because of the need to be respectful of peeling them with others around.
If all of this makes him seem like a robotic data wonk who might run into trouble connecting with the players he's supposed to be coaching in his new role, that hasn’t been the case at all. As the Blazers look to experiment with different styles of play that are unfamiliar to everyone, players I’ve talked to appreciate how forgiving Oliva is of mistakes and how he encourages them to test the limits of what they can do on the court. His intimidating background and credentials belie a friendly, approachable demeanor and an uncommon understanding that when it comes to explaining why analytics say players should take certain shots and not others, he doesn’t need to bore them with the numbers behind it as long as they get the underlying message.
Not that he isn’t happy to show them that stuff if they're interested. And some of them are.
“Serg is one of a kind,” says Blazers guard Taze Moore, who’s spent training camp and most of the season with the Remix on a two-way contract. “He’s actually a genius, the more I meet with him. I’m an X’s and O’s guy. I like to watch film. I like the details. I think Sergi is probably the best I’ve been around so far in terms of that. He’s a good guy. He wants us to come in every day and give our hardest, and he teaches."
Oliva was a head coach at the youth and amateur levels in Europe for over a decade, but he didn’t make the transition from the front office to coaching in the NBA until 2020, when he left the Sixers to join Quin Snyder’s staff with the Utah Jazz. Snyder brought him in because of his analytical background, but Oliva quickly found himself pushed more towards working directly with players. He was able to build trust with them more readily than you’d expect an “analytics guy” to be.
"Sergi is great at seeing the big picture and figuring out how we can gain advantages," says Snyder, now the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. "Players respect you when you know what you’re talking about. Players want to get better. Anything you can give them to help them improve is valuable. In Serg’s case, the initial opportunity for him to form relationships was more what we’d consider ‘analytics,’ but that line gets blurred quickly. Those analytics point you to something on the court that you need to do better.”
Much of Oliva’s work right now is built on not reinventing what to teach players, but how to teach it to them. Both he and Cronin declined to get into too much specific detail about what they’re doing—that would defeat the purpose of looking for competitive advantages—but they’re trying to figure out how to teach concepts to players where they don’t need to be micromanaged.
“A lot of the things that we’re doing in practice are not what they are used to,” Oliva says. “Can you create environments where the feedback loop is strong enough and short enough that the player understands and learns through that rather than through direct instruction? Because in-game, they're not gonna have direct instruction as they are playing. I'm not gonna be able to tell them, ‘Do a crossover!’”
The Blazers didn’t go into the offseason planning to make a coaching change in the G League. Moran was well-liked by Remix players and staff and coached the team to a 26-24 record in its inaugural season while two of their players, Moore and Ashton Hagans, earned call-ups to the Blazers. But the nature of the G League is that these jobs are supposed to be short-term stepping stones to bigger opportunities, so when Sacramento Kings head coach Mike Brown offered Moran a spot on his staff, Cronin knew there was no way he could let him turn it down.
The Remix also lost another crucial staffer from their first season, one that laid the foundation for the outside-the-box approach to development that the Blazers are trying now. Alex Sarama, a native of England with years of experience coaching high-level youth basketball in Europe, is the author of the book Transforming Basketball, which outlines a new approach to coaching and development. The Blazers hired him before last season to serve as director of player development with the Remix; this summer, after drawing interest from several NBA teams, he left to take the same job with the Cleveland Cavaliers, who currently have the best record in the NBA.
Some of Sarama’s concepts and philosophies formed the basis of what the Blazers decided they wanted to do with the Remix going into its second season.
Over the course of three weeks in the summer, Cronin and his staff interviewed roughly a dozen candidates for a replacement head coach. At one point in the process, Oliva threw out the idea that, if none of their finalists were the right fit, he’d be open to coaching the team for a year, so the front office could have a direct watch over some of the new developmental techniques they wanted to try.
“It became an option that honestly, we kind of joked about,” Oliva says. “And then eventually it became, ‘Alright, this could make sense.’”
“Sergi is someone who is intimately familiar with our roster,” Cronin says. “I think that’s important as we look to find ways to get better in all these different ways. Him understanding what our roster is and what our needs are, what we succeeded with, and what we struggle with, being able to work on things with the Remix gives the Blazers a lot of benefits.”
Under Oliva, the basketball the Remix are playing through their first four games is very different from the tough, defense-focused approach of the big club. The Remix are flying up and down the floor (leading the G League in pace by nearly four possessions per game over the second-fastest team) and shooting the second-most three-pointers per game in the league. Over half of their shot attempts are threes.
The Blazers don’t yet have the personnel to play that way effectively, so Billups isn’t going to have them take as many threes as a team like the Celtics does. But they know that eventually, when they’re ready to start competing for the playoffs again, they’re going to have to be able to play that way. One of Oliva’s challenges is figuring out how to get a team to generate not just threes but good threes, regardless of personnel.
“We're getting up a ton of threes,” he says. “What we're trying to find out is, what are the causes that have led to the best of those attempts, and how can those causes be implemented within the Blazers’ system? How can things be adjusted so that it’s a clear net gain, where it’s not, ‘We’re gaining this but we’re losing that’? That takes a lot more time to settle and needs more certainty.”
The other puzzle Oliva is trying to solve is how to build a defense that can keep up with that type of offense, and that goes much deeper than just coming up with a new scheme. His vision of defense is less defined by players playing specific roles than by teaching players new tendencies they can use to react intuitively to any situation they're in on that side of the ball. It’s a completely different kind of teaching that’s still in the early stages of trying out.
“There’s a reality in the NBA right now, which is that every single year, offenses get better and better,” he says. “You look at offensive efficiencies across the league and for the last 15 years, they’ve only gotten better every year, which means offense is beating defense. Obviously, there’s rules that have been put in place that probably are contributing to that, but it’s a challenge for all of us. Whatever we’re doing defensively, not just with the Blazers but across the NBA, is constantly being surpassed by the offense. That’s just a reality. So at some point, we need to try things to reverse the trend defensively. And sometimes that takes a while."
It may be years before the Blazers see results from these experiments. But they’re hoping to use the Remix to ultimately build an organization-wide blueprint for their next winning team.
“Some of the stuff we’re doing from a developmental standpoint is expected to take time,” Oliva says. “But just the process of having to think through how to do certain of those things at the player development level or the team level, like having to go through drills or contexts or environments that were new for the players, but also new for us because some of the stuff that we’ve been doing we haven’t done before. I think neither us or anybody else have before. Maybe somebody has. But it was new for us and having to try new things and see what works, see what doesn't and see what we will invest in long-term has been both challenging but exciting.”