DStv customers who are lovers of Basketball can look forward to thrills and spills from the world’s best basketball league on ESPN 2 (DStv channel 219) the premier venue for coverage of the National Basketball Association (NBA).
On Monday 21 February 2022, the All Star Weekend Pre Show will air at 12am, the All Star Skill Contest will air at 1:30pm and finally, the All Star Game will air at 3am.
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This week sees no Regular Season games being played, but the annual All Star exhibition game will take place on the morning of Monday 21 February. Team LeBron (led by captain LeBron James) will be coached by Monty Williams, who is long overdue for this kind of recognition given the excellence of his Phoenix Suns team in the past two years.
The Suns had registered a 40-9, .816 record (the best in the league this season) at the time that Williams was announced as the coach for Team LeBron. It will be his first appearance at the All Star event makes him the first Suns NBA All Star Game head coach since Mike D’Antoni in the 2006-07 season.
“I was probably the last guy that they would have thought was going to be a head coach,” Williams recently said of his path to being one of the NBA’s leading tacticians. “You could see it on Avery. You could see it on Doc. Vinny had a high basketball IQ… I probably didn’t fit that group.”
This will mark the fifth time in franchise history the Suns coaching staff will work the NBA All-Star Game, joining 1981 (John MacLeod), 1993 (Paul Westphal), 1995 (Westphal) and 2007 (Mike D’Antoni). The game will be the first All-Star coaching experience for all but two of the coaches on the Suns staff, as Randy Ayers (Philadelphia in 2001) and Mark Bryant (Oklahoma City in 2012 and 2014) have served on the staffs in previous All-Star Games.
Williams is in his third season as Phoenix’s head coach. Last season, he guided the Suns to a 51-21 record and their first appearance in the NBA Finals since the 1992-93 season. Williams previously served as head coach of the New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans for five seasons.
“We have a pretty experienced group now and they’ve been through some things so we didn’t want to tell them what to say or tell them what to feel,” Williams said of his Suns teams. “I feel like our program and my leadership style is to produce leaders, not followers. And so in that, you have to let guys sometimes figure it out.”
Williams has also received praise from renowned San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich: “Monty’s been around more than he leads on,” Popovich explained. “He knows what’s going on. He’s been there and he’s been very close friends with Timmy Duncan for a long time. He’s watched a lot. I’m sure he’s right on top of it.”
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