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.<\/p>\n
It is not. Well before it spread across the association, a few coaches were already leaning into it.<\/p>\n
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The late Jack Ramsay was one of them.\u00a0Bob McAdoo<\/a>\u00a0played 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.<\/p>\n Ramsay’s methods<\/p>\n Ramsay’s emphasis on conditioning? It stands out even more when you consider the era in which he was working.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n “To win, you have to prepare yourself to win,”\u00a0the Philadelphia<\/a> native once\u00a0said<\/a>.\u00a0“You have to be ready. You can’t expect a W to just happen. That’s the credo I always expected of my players.”<\/p>\n When Dr. Jack became an NBA head coach in 1968 with the Philadelphia 76ers<\/a>, he put that into practice. What that looked like was later described by McAdoo. He played for Ramsay’s\u00a0Buffalo Braves<\/a>\u00a0from 1972 to 1976.<\/p>\n Doo, for instance, recalled that his coach\u00a0“made you conscious of your conditioning, conscious of what you put in your body.”<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n It wasn’t just conditioning and nutrition, either.<\/p>\n Ramsay \u2014 at a time when it could easily have drawn ridicule \u2014 even brought in a stretching coach, McAdoo said.<\/p>\n In the end, it all came back to the same point: what\u00a0“people do now,”\u00a0the Philadelphia native was already doing in the ’70s, as Doo put it.<\/p>\n Related: “We were naked on the floor” – Carmen Electra recalls Michael Jordan confronting Dennis Rodman in Vegas<\/a><\/p>\n Leading by example<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n 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\u00a0in the mid-’70s<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n “That’s why we were so successful,”\u00a0Doo\u00a0remarked<\/a>, adding it was\u00a0“very fun”\u00a0playing under Dr. Jack.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n That part mattered. Ramsay pushed hard, but players didn’t feel worn down by it. They embraced it.<\/p>\n As former NBA executive Pat Williams once noted, it all started with Ramsay leading by example.<\/p>\n “Jack was a fitness fanatic,”\u00a0Williams said, pointing out that it resonated when players saw their coach in better shape than they were.<\/p>\n Years later, Bill Walton echoed that same idea from his time \u2014 they won a title together \u2014 with Ramsay. He stressed that his former\u00a0Portland Trail Blazers\u00a0coach never asked for something he wasn’t doing or hadn’t already done himself.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Related: Mark Cuban says prop bet gambling obsession is hurting the NBA product: “It creates a lot of perverse incentives”<\/a><\/p>\n This story was originally published by Basketball Network<\/a> on May 30, 2026, where it first appeared in the Old School<\/a> section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We talk a lot about the rhythm of today’s NBA. 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