"It was crazy": Guy Molloy on the Flames' injury-ravaged and overachieving season

The veteran coach - who recently passed 350 WNBL games - says a growth mindset is behind his remarkable longevity.

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In his 36 years of coaching, Guy Molloy has never seen a season quite like the snake-bitten WNBL25 campaign his Sydney Flames just went through.

Shaneice Swain, Celeste Taylor, Yemiyah Morris, Mikaela Ruef, Cayla George, Emma Clarke and Bonnie Deas all missed time with various injuries. Even McKenna Dale, signed as an injury replacement player, spent time in the casualty ward herself.

While the team suffered some heavy losses, they showed remarkable resilience to finish fourth and turn in a credible effort against the juggernaut Bendigo Spirit in the semi-finals.

“It was crazy how depleted the team became,” Molloy tells The Pick and Roll. “But then the team made the finals for the first time in seven years. Normally, if you’re under .500, you’re not saying it’s an overachievement, but with what happened, it did feel that way. It was strange.”

The die was perhaps cast early for the Flames, who lost both Lauren Nicholson (who took time out to have a child) and DiDi Richards (achilles injury) in the weeks leading up to the season.

“They were probably our two best players the previous season. They’d been energy drivers with a great work rate, and were both elite defenders. Loz [Nicholson] is such a gun performer in the WNBL, and that’s irreplaceable. You just can’t find another Australian at that level; at least with an import you’ve got the chance to go back to market. I felt terrible going into the pre-season having lost them both.”

Finding himself with a much less experienced squad, Molloy faced a new challenge in working on his team’s court awareness and decision-making and they recorded the highest number of turnovers per game of any team. Openly acknowledging the turnovers were a “bugbear” for the Flames for most of the season, he gives an insight into how he tackled the problem.

“I’d always pride myself and the teams I coach on looking after the ball well, having a high assist count, and our ball movement being exemplary. So, when we started to cough the ball up at a pretty unacceptable rate, it becomes a coaching problem. You want to fix that because it's going to directly tie into losing. We hit a point where I was coaching in a way that started to make people so mistake-conscious that it wasn't helping. We were playing negatively and still turning the ball over. We just had to go back to training and work very, very hard on our execution and our ball security. As the year went on, it became that we could outwork some teams and overcome all the loss of the basketball, but we probably only showed improvement in the last month or so.”

The upside of all the injuries was that young players could fast-track their development. Local junior Carla Pitman earned five starts in her first season as a fully contracted player, while Centre of Excellence graduate Bonnie Deas confirmed her star quality.

“The difference maker for Bonnie is that she's an incredibly strong athlete, so while she was giving up the mental part of the game and the experience part of the game to other players, she was physically stronger than some of them, which is pretty impressive as an 18-year-old. She was able to give us some really good match-ups at times, and she handled herself quite well.”

Molloy also got good minutes out of the tenacious Isabella Brancatisano. Her efforts convinced Molloy that teams at this level are sometimes too ready to overlook players in their late twenties in favour of younger prospects. “It had been her dream to play WNBL again, and when she came in, it was clear that we were dealing with someone who had looked after their body pretty well, had some maturity physically and about the mental aspects of the game, and who knew her game well. It shows you that the domestic leagues need to be watched closely to see if there are some diamonds in the rough.”

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WNBL25 was Molloy’s sixteenth season as a coach in the league, in a career that also spans assistant and lead roles in the NBL, NZNBL, junior state and Australian teams and at the Tall Ferns. It would be easy to assume that Molloy – who had his first WNBL head coach job at just 23 back in 1989 – is a natural coach. Yet he describes himself as an introverted character who has needed to learn how to communicate with a group.

“That’s been a journey for me across my coaching career, learning to have concise language and how to get my points across better.

“I don't think it's possible for anyone to change their personality. You have to work with what you've got. There are certain things that I do really well in coaching and certain things that I battle with internally.

“I suppose having that insularity about my personality meant I had to find different ways to remain an effective communicator. But at the heart of it, I've always wanted to have a program where the players understand that we care for them very much. Hopefully, if that doesn’t always come out in words, it does come out in the power of example.”

The game has changed massively across Molloy’s career, and he says it’s crucial to change with the game. One major trend has been for teams to shoot more and more threes, and this year, his Flames side shot more than anyone.

Yet he says it’s not the case that a coach should blindly follow every trend.

“I remember back in 2017 when I was with the Melbourne Boomers, I was having a discussion with one of my coaches, and I said we want to get in front of the curve a little bit, shoot more threes and spread the floor a lot more. So, we did some things with our skill development work and our style of play in that period to try and be more aggressive.

“I talked to one of my coaches earlier today, and we'd watched a game going back in the ‘90s, where every player after the entry pass was playing inside the three-point line. Because of that lack of spacing in comparative terms, the majority of shots were mid-distance. That seems really weird to go back and watch now.

“You can't not be impacted by these things, but I also feel you have to search for ways that your program can maintain some separation and a little bit of an edge. With my national team coaching for Australia or and New Zealand, we've always wanted to be a square peg in a round hole and be a little bit different. That’s the challenge. We're all influenced by the global trends, but how can you make that your own?”

During the past season, Molloy became only the sixth person to coach 350 WNBL games, but he wasn’t aware of the looming landmark until former Flames and Opals captain Tess Madgen rang to toast the milestone.

“God love her. She called me right before my 349^th because she had the game wrong. She wanted to congratulate me; that’s a typical Tess story.”

He credits his longevity to a sheer love of the game and a commitment to evolving his craft.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as balance in coaching. It’s a very consuming profession, and the burnout rate is enormous.

“I'm proud of [the longevity]; it stems from a lot of great people I've been able to work with, but also the fact that I haven't been stuck. I’ve always looked to find ways to learn, grow and improve.”