Earlier this week, Portland Fire general manager Vanja Cernivec had a pretty good idea how people might react when she announced the WNBA expansion franchise’s first head coach.
“Probably we’re going to look a little crazy at the start,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’m ready for it.”
She was talking about hiring a 30-year-old British disciple of a training method known as the constraints-led approach. A guy who has never coached in the WNBA, to boot.
But after the team prematurely announced it had hired Cleveland Cavaliers’ assistant Alex Sarama on Tuesday, deleted the post from LinkedIn, and a source told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the negotiations had hit a roadblock, it was less clear that Sarama would, in fact, get the job.
On Friday, the Fire introduced Sarama as the expansion franchise’s first head coach.
Sarama described the job as “an incredible opportunity to build something from the ground up.”
“Just being able to set the tone, set the culture from Day 1, that is so unique,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive on an interview via video conference. “I think the vision of ownership, the vision of Vanja and then you combine that with a franchise who is willing to go all in with the evidence-based methods and everything I’ve been living my whole life for the last eight years, that’s just an incredible opportunity.”
Both Cernivec and Sarama spoke to The Oregonian/OregonLive this week under embargo, a common practice when teams and companies want to roll out a major announcement.
Last year, the Cavaliers won an Eastern Conference-best 64 games while leading the NBA in points per game and offensive rating.
Sarama will continue to work with the Cavs while filling out his staff with the Fire, they said, and will transition fully to Portland before the WNBA’s expansion draft, which remains unscheduled due to uncertainty around the league’s collective bargaining agreement with players.
It’s an unexpected jump. Sarama is leaving his position as a key assistant on an NBA team with legitimate championship aspirations to take on a head role with a team with no track record in a league he hasn’t coached in.
But he has significant history and a shared philosophy with Cernivec.
They worked together on the NBA’s programs abroad and later with the London Lions, where Cernivec was the general manager and Sarama was the team’s director of methodology.
While Sarama is coming from the NBA and much of his experience is in the men’s game, he said he helped start one of the top junior girls’ clubs in the United Kingdom, the Guildford Goldhawks.
“That was my whole start with coaching,” he said. “I don’t actually think there’s much on Google about this.”
He also coached girls’ camps for Basketball Without Borders in Africa.
His previous head coaching experience was with a men’s elite junior academy in Italy from 2020-23.
“Even though I haven’t coached (women) on the professional side,” Sarama said, “I think I’m very well prepared for this job and can’t wait to start.
The core of Sarama’s philosophy is CLA, which he described as “an evidence-based framework.”
Sarama is not just an adherent to CLA, which has slowly grown in popularity in the NBA. He literally wrote the book on it: “Transforming Basketball: Changing how we think about basketball performance.”
Numerous stars train using CLA individually while some teams, including Sarama’s Cavs and the Memphis Grizzlies, worked it into their entire program. It can be seen by organizations that use the method, Cernivec said, as a secret weapon.
“It’s not just how you practice, but it’s how you go about the weight room,” Sarama said. “It’s how you go about a (doctor) using return-to-play to get a player back from an injury. It’s even things like how you use film in the video room. So it’s an all-encompassing framework that I think when you apply in all these areas, it gives you a very unique competitive advantage.
“And I really believe it’s the future of sport.”
Sarama does not consider himself a player development coach and, in fact, rejects the term entirely.
“It’s too siloed,” he said. “For me to be an effective basketball coach, that requires a knowledge of offensive and defensive schemes, player development, the weight room, analytics. This to me is the future of the modern-day coach.”
With the Cavaliers, head coach Kenny Atkinson empowered Sarama to design and run practices and, Sarama said, he is responsible for drawing up the team’s out of bounds plays — considered to be among the more tactical aspects of coaching.
While CLA has grown in visibility, it is still not widely used at the team level in the NBA and no WNBA has built their entire operation around the concept.
Asked how league observers would respond to the outside-the-box hire, Cernivec laughed and said, “I would say, ‘Vanja’s a little bit insane.’”
The basic idea of CLA is to replace the traditional rote, repetitive drill-based learning with more game-like scenarios that make players more instinctive. It personalizes training to age, height, skill, strengths, weaknesses, and on and on, all different “constraints.”
The simplest explanation?
“As a kid, you learn your native language, you’re just thrown into the chaos,” Cernivec said. “You just learn as you grow and your parents talk to you. Versus when you try to learn your second language and the school tells you, first read the alphabet and learn all the letters. Then you’re going to add the vocabulary, then the grammar. And now we’re going to put everything together.”
In essence, she said, it’s the difference between immersion language program and classroom learning.
Cernivec, who is from Slovenia, became a disciple of the method when she suffered a torn ACL and opted against surgery and instead trained using CLA.
“Having this chaotic learning will help you learn much faster,” she said.
So that was, perhaps, the clever genius behind tabbing Sarama for the job. Which sits in contrast to the clunky rollout with Tuesday’s misfire.
The frustrating thing for the Fire is that they had largely seemed to be outgrowing their growing pains. Cernivec is widely respected throughout the sport and, like Sarama, has worked on multiple continents and in numerous leagues.
She is one of multiple hires the Fire have made from the Golden State Valkyries, which have been credited for raising the bar for what an expansion team can do.
So there is every reason to give Cernivec the benefit of the doubt in making her first coaching hire.
This was not a strategy that she suddenly adopted.
CLA was at the center of her pitch to the Fire when, while still an assistant GM with the expansion Golden State Valkyries, she applied for the job with a team that has said it wants to be on the cutting-edge of the sport.
Cernivec said on Monday that leaning on CLA would give the Fire a competitive advantage in recruiting if players believe their system can help extend their careers. And while other teams can hire coaches or development specialists who preach the ideals of CLA, the Fire have the advantage of being an expansion team building from the ground up.
With Sarama, she said, the Fire wouldn’t be trying to reinvent something, they are trying to invent something entirely new.
So while others across the sport wondered if Cernivec might target a seasoned WNBA leader like Sandy Brondello, who led the New York Liberty to a championship last year and was seen as a possible recruiting link to former Oregon Duck Sabrina Ionescu, Cernivec had other plans.
Two seasons ago, Sarama worked as an assistant coach with the Portland Trail Blazers’ G League affiliate, the Rip City Remix in their inaugural campaign.
Last year, he joined Atkinson’s staff in Cleveland as director player development for what became the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed. He was promoted to assistant coach in July.
Atkinson became a CLA convert and in his first year with the Cavs won the NBA’s Coach of the Year honor.
It is not unusual for NBA coaches to transition to the WNBA. This year’s finals featured two head coaches who spent many years as NBA assistants: Las Vegas Aces’ coach Becky Hammon and the Phoenix Mercury’s Nate Tibbetts, who worked for the Trail Blazers from 2013 to 2021.
“I’ve worked in so many places around the world,” Sarama said. “I watch a lot of basketball … You name it, I’ve seen it.”
Sarama said he is also looking to soak up offensive and defensive principles from games around the globe.
“I think fans will be able to look forward to something that isn’t generic copy-paste, but something very, very intentional. And I can’t wait to see that brought to life and just, really, this culture of joy I want to create around the team.”