Nearly 20 years ago, a general manager at a basketball club in Finland was sitting in his office when the team’s coach poked his head in.
Kouvat’s coach, Jukka Toijala, needed help getting a player to leave.
The problem, Toijala told GM Jukka Kyöstilä, was that Tuomas Iisalo had pushed his body so hard between club and Finnish national team practices that his nervous system was on the brink of shutting down and he barely knew where he was. But when Toijala asked him to rest, Iisalo refused.
“So he came into my office and said, ‘Jukka, you have to help me. Tuomas doesn’t understand that he has to rest,” Kyöstilä said.
Kyöstilä went down to the practice court.
“Tuomas, you don’t have a right to practice for the next two weeks,” Kyöstilä told him. “You have to rest.”
Kyöstilä finally got through to him.
That kind of rugged determination powered Iisalo through his playing career, but more so set the stage for a far more successful coaching career, one that started with failure in his native Finland but eventually led to remarkable success in Europe. Iisalo joined the Memphis Grizzlies as lead assistant before the 2024-25 season, and is poised to lead them into the postseason after Taylor Jenkins was fired last month.
His coaching career started inauspiciously at Tapiolan Honka in 2014. The club was dealing with major financial problems and was relegated. Iisalo took a job as an assistant for the club’s under-16 team.
A decade later, he’s preparing to coach against Steph Curry in an NBA postseason game.
“That’s pretty unbelievable,” said Antti Viitanen, the general manager of Honka who hired Iisalo in 2014.
Tuomas Iisalo the player
As a player, Iisalo was known as a three-and-D guy, impressing coaches with his shooting and attention to detail on the defensive side of the floor.
Iisalo made plenty of appearances for the national team, but he was the last player cut before the 2011 EuroBasket tournament. He decided to go anyway, serving as a de facto extra coach for the team.
“Not a lot of professional players would do that,” said Hanno Möttölä, who served as Finland’s captain for the tournament and was the first Finnish NBA player. “If you’re the last guy who’s dropped out of the team when the team goes to the European Championships, they’d probably be a little bitter, a little mad, and I’m sure Tuomas felt that, too. And they’d definitely stay home. But that just speaks volumes for who he is.”
The seeds of Iisalo’s future career were already there. He coached a youth team during one of his stints at Kouvot, then served as strength and conditioning coach during his final season as a player with Honka.
Tuomas Iisalo goes to Germany
In early 2016, Crailsheim Merlins GM Martin Romig needed a new coach.
Romig had a tough task. The team almost certainly was headed for relegation to the second division of German basketball and had the lowest budget in the league.
He called Kyöstilä, an old friend. Kyöstilä knew Iisalo wasn’t afraid of walking into a difficult situation, and he’d just come from Honka, which was relegated because of financial problems. He called Iisalo, who was on a plane to the German city a few days later.
Romig hired him with 10 games left in the season. Crailsheim lost all of them.
“He didn’t even have an assistant coach in the beginning,” Romig said. “That’s how it goes. That’s how diamonds are developed. Under pressure.”
The goal was to revamp the club and get it back to Basketball Bundesliga (BBL), the top league in Germany. He did that in his second full season with the club.
But it wasn’t smooth sailing. Crailsheim started 2-13 in 2018-19, and Romig was getting pressure from sponsors to make a coaching change. He didn’t.
“He was like manic, in a positive way, to find a solution,” Romig said. “To find the next puzzle piece to get into a better position or to make the team better. There was no hesitation. After every game, you could go to the gym at 5 o’clock in the morning and you knew your coach was there and your assistant was there. And they were working, analyzing and trying to figure out how to reduce mistakes and try to find a way to get out of the situation. And somehow we found it.”
That team recovered and ultimately avoided relegation in dramatic fashion, upsetting Oldenburg in a must-win game that had to be moved 65 miles from Crailsheim because the gym was unavailable due to a previously scheduled tattoo show.
The next season, things started to turn.
A rising star
The survival in 2019 laid the groundwork for one of the best periods in Crailsheim Merlins history. There was a first-ever win over league giant Alba Berlin, then a first-ever playoff berth the next season.
That kind of success leads to plenty of opportunities, and other clubs came calling. Iisalo left in 2021 for Telekom Baskets Bonn, a bigger club in the BBL but still one that typically finished in the middle of the 18-team league.
By then, Iisalo had developed a reputation for his style of play. It hinged mostly on speed and quick decision-making. It also put the point guard at the center of everything, and it needed a certain type of point guard — a speedy one.
For his first Bonn team, Iisalo brought in former Arizona guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright. He averaged 19.3 points, 7.4 assists and 2.0 steals per game, winning Bundesliga MVP as Bonn finished second and took Bayern Munich to a decisive Game 5 in the playoffs.
“I owe a lot of my career to him,” Jackson-Cartwright said.
But he left after that season, so Iisalo needed a new point guard.
Iisalo’s best success story? T.J. Shorts
The player most closely associated with Iisalo’s success in Europe is T.J. Shorts, an aptly named 5-foot-9 guard from Tustin, California.
Shorts had always been up against it as a basketball player. He had zero Division I offers out of high school, so he went to junior college before transferring to UC Davis. He had zero professional offers after that, so he joined a traveling team in China that played preseason games against Chinese League teams. That earned him a spot on a team in Latvia, and later ended up in Germany.
Shorts — who wears No. 0 to represent the number of scholarship offers he had — had the same mentality as Iisalo. Ringo Bossenmeyer, who coached Shorts at Tustin High School, remembers driving to the gym at 6:15 a.m. and finding Shorts sitting in the dark, waiting on the steps for Bossenmeyer to unlock the doors.
Iisalo didn’t have to work hard to sell Shorts on joining Bonn. Shorts had seen what Jackson-Cartwright had done in Iisalo’s system, and he wanted to be a part of it.
It worked right away. Shorts won MVP and led Bonn to the No. 1 seed and the finals of the BBL. They also won the Basketball Champions League for the first time in club history, with Shorts taking MVP honors.
When Iisalo left Bonn for Paris Basketball after that season, Shorts went with him.
‘Murderball’
Since the Grizzlies fired Jenkins and installed Iisalo as interim coach, the biggest question has been: What’s his coaching philosophy?
“The main thing that stood out was the speed he wanted us to play at,” Shorts said. “His biggest thing was he wanted us to be three seconds to the 3-point line. Whether it was a made shot, whether it was a missed shot, whether it was a free throw, out of a timeout, he wanted us to push the ball to the opposite 3-point line within three seconds. Just to see if we had some kind of an advantage.”
Iisalo wanted to play fast, and that made practices critical for establishing specific habits. His famous drill was called “murderball,” which Jackson-Cartwright thinks of as “just three minutes of hell.”
It’s also used in other sports, most notably in soccer under Uruguay national team manager Marcelo Bielsa. The rules for basketball are relatively simple. It’s 5-on-5, and each team has to get the ball to the opposing 3-point line within three seconds. There’s no inbounding, either — if one team scores, the other team just grabs the ball and goes in the other direction. Assistant coaches are waiting on the sidelines, so if there’s a steal or even a deflection and the ball goes out of bounds, the other team immediately gets the ball from an assistant and starts going the other way.
Jackson-Cartwright saw the benefits — eventually.
“It just became second nature,” he said. “At the beginning, it’s like, ‘This guy’s crazy.’ You work yourself up. You’re not going to get it in the first month, maybe not the second month, but it just becomes, ‘We do this s— every day.’ That style really fits his teams.”
For Shorts, the benefits weren’t just the conditioning but also the ability to play among havoc. “Murderball” tried to put players in the most chaotic situation possible and see how they’d react, but then everything would seem to slow down in the actual games.
There were other unique drills. Iisalo wanted his teams to take the ball out of the basket on a made shot in less than a second. The goal was to create habits that eventually became quick decisions in games, but that only made practices more intense.
“If those wing players don’t run to the corner, you’re on the line,” Jackson-Cartwright said. “His biggest thing was, ‘You’ve got to run to the corner. You’ve got to occupy that space.’ His ability to teach spacing, I think, is second to none.”
There was the attention to detail. Shorts remembers when someone would miss a layup during practice, and Iisalo would restart the entire drill.
Then there was the time Bonn lost a road game, and Iisalo told the team it was because one of the players sat in the wrong seat on the train to the game.
From Paris to Memphis . . . and then?
Iisalo and Shorts went to Paris with a specific goal: Get the team promoted from the EuroCup to the EuroLeague, the highest level of basketball outside the NBA.
Year 1 was a rousing success. Paris won the EuroCup and Shorts won MVP, but that only made Iisalo a hotter commodity in coaching circles. He ultimately signed on to be Jenkins’ lead assistant with the Grizzlies, leaving Paris after only one season.
It was bittersweet for Shorts, who had come to Paris to play in the EuroLeague with Iisalo but was now going to do it without him. Even without Iisalo, he has been one of the best players in the EuroLeague this season and has played himself on to NBA team radars.
In coaching circles, everyone who knew Iisalo and his system knew how much success he’d had with speedy point guards.
Because if you strip away everything the Grizzlies have, all the drama and questions about roster fit and long-term viability, if there was only one thing left — it would be a speedy point guard.
In the first few games since Iisalo became interim head coach, Ja Morant’s usage rate has skyrocketed.
“When I heard the deal, my first thoughts were maybe that’s the reason he got signed in the first place,” said Vesa Vertio, who coached with Iisalo in Honka and Crailsheim and is now the head coach of the Helsinki Seagulls.
Shorts agreed.
“I definitely believe that it could be very beneficial for Ja,” he said. “I know what he did for me, I know what he did for previous point guards and Ja Morant is on a whole other level.”
Iisalo is only the interim coach, so his tenure could be over very soon. But he’s also viewed as a legitimate candidate for the full-time job. And it’s probably fair to say that even if he doesn’t get it, he’ll be an NBA head coaching candidate in the future.
Could he play the same style that worked so well in Europe with NBA players? Will he unlock Morant and get the Grizzlies back on track? It’s way too early to tell, but Finland’s first NBA coach has every opportunity to be here for the long haul.
When the Grizzlies face the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday (9 p.m. CT, TNT) in an NBA play-in game, Iisalo will be coaching only his 11th game as an NBA head coach (including the one in November where he served as acting head coach when Jenkins was away for a family matter).
And he’s only looking forward.
“I’m sure at some point I’ll look back at this at the end of the season, this whole process and be very proud of it,” Iisalo said last week. “But now’s not the time. All of us have our hands full.”
Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on X @thejonahdylan.
