We talk a lot about the rhythm of today’s NBA. The pace. The constant five-man movement. It does not work without preparation, yet it often gets framed as something new.
It is not. Well before it spread across the association, a few coaches were already leaning into it.
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The late Jack Ramsay was one of them. Bob McAdoo played for him and has said as much over the years. It even went beyond that. In McAdoo’s view, the Hall of Famer’s approach played a big part in the team’s success.
Ramsay’s methods
Ramsay’s emphasis on conditioning? It stands out even more when you consider the era in which he was working.
The NBA of the early ’70s was far less professionalized than today, and that applied to nearly everything that went into being a player. Ramsay had been one himself. He was also an avid triathlete. It was enough for him to know how much preparation mattered.
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“To win, you have to prepare yourself to win,” the Philadelphia native once said. “You have to be ready. You can’t expect a W to just happen. That’s the credo I always expected of my players.”
When Dr. Jack became an NBA head coach in 1968 with the Philadelphia 76ers, he put that into practice. What that looked like was later described by McAdoo. He played for Ramsay’s Buffalo Braves from 1972 to 1976.
Doo, for instance, recalled that his coach “made you conscious of your conditioning, conscious of what you put in your body.”
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It wasn’t just conditioning and nutrition, either.
Ramsay — at a time when it could easily have drawn ridicule — even brought in a stretching coach, McAdoo said.
In the end, it all came back to the same point: what “people do now,” the Philadelphia native was already doing in the ’70s, as Doo put it.
Leading by example
A head coach can go a lot of different directions. Conventional, unconventional, whatever. None of it means anything if it doesn’t show up on the floor. With Ramsay in Buffalo, it did.
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When he arrived in 1972, the Braves were still finding their footing as a young franchise. Within a few years, they had become one of the more dangerous offensive teams in the league. Built around McAdoo’s scoring but driven by tempo, movement and conditioning, they reached the playoffs three straight times in the mid-’70s.
McAdoo, who won his MVP during that stretch, always tied that success back to one thing, namely that Ramsay was so focused on “physical fitness.”
“That’s why we were so successful,” Doo remarked, adding it was “very fun” playing under Dr. Jack.
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That part mattered. Ramsay pushed hard, but players didn’t feel worn down by it. They embraced it.
As former NBA executive Pat Williams once noted, it all started with Ramsay leading by example.
“Jack was a fitness fanatic,” Williams said, pointing out that it resonated when players saw their coach in better shape than they were.
Years later, Bill Walton echoed that same idea from his time — they won a title together — with Ramsay. He stressed that his former Portland Trail Blazers coach never asked for something he wasn’t doing or hadn’t already done himself.
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This story was originally published by Basketball Network on May 30, 2026, where it first appeared in the Old School section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.