Chris Finch starred at Franklin & Marshall, the former site of Sixers training camp, before starting a widespread coaching journey to the NBA with the Timberwolves.
It would be a bit of a stretch to believe that Chris Finch’s NBA coaching career took root 30-some years ago, during his brief, tenuous association with the Sixers — that a straight line can be drawn from the time he was leaning on a mop, watching Charles Barkley in training camp, to today, when he finds himself perched on the sideline, watching Anthony Edwards every game night.
But then again, it couldn’t have hurt.
Finch, 55, is nearing the end of his fourth full season coaching the Minnesota Timberwolves, who visit Philadelphia on Saturday. Western Conference finalists a year ago, the T-wolves had won 13 of 16 games through Thursday, leaving them 45-32 and part of a four-team scramble for the final two non-play-in spots in the rugged Western Conference. Edwards, the explosive fifth-year guard, is enjoying another big season, and the recent return of Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo from injury has enabled the Wolves to get where they are.
Finch, who grew up outside Reading, got where he is via Europe, the G-League and various NBA assistantships. Also via Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, where he was a two-time Division III All-American, part of a D3 finalist in ‘90-91 and remains, 33 years after graduation, high on several of the school’s all-time statistical lists.
While there he crossed paths with the Sixers, who held training camp at F&M from 1978-94. He and his teammates served as attendants during the Sixers’ week in town, rebounding for the players, picking up towels and yes, mopping up after them when somebody took a tumble during a scrimmage. Not a bad gig for him, since he had grown up a Sixers fan, and had vivid memories of their ‘82-83 championship run.
He was reminded of his collegiate years in early March, when the T-wolves streamed an NCAA first-round game between the current F&M squad and Catholic University in the visiting locker room at the Kaseya Center in Miami, before Minnesota beat the Heat. Amid Catholic’s 84-50 thrashing, somebody asked him about his alma mater’s cozy home gym, the Mayser Center — or the “Diplodome,” as he calls it, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the team’s nickname, the Diplomats. And it was then that he mentioned the Sixers training there.
He remembers little about that chapter of his life, other than the fact that it was interesting to watch guys that big and that good, up close — especially in the public scrimmages the team staged every afternoon.
There was this, though: One day Finch was walking past the trainer’s room when he overheard Barkley and his running mate, Rick Mahorn, holding court.
“Put it this way — I’m not sure they stayed in Lancaster,” Finch said with a laugh during a recent phone interview. “I don’t think they had their evening fun in Lancaster. That’s the only memory I have.”
Jim Lynam coached the Sixers during Finch’s time at F&M, using camp as a springboard to an Atlantic Division title in 1989-90. Lynam never met Finch then, and hasn’t made his acquaintance in the years since. Lynam can nonetheless appreciate the irony of a future NBA head coach hovering around a pro team during his formative years.
“I guess if you’re around basketball, the chance of one’s paths crossing in some fashion obviously increases,” he said.
Were he blessed with a crystal ball showing Finch’s career path all those years ago, Lynam said he would have offered him a single piece of advice.
“On any level, it’s about being able to quote, ‘deal with the group,’” he said.
Lynam, 83, began his 46-year coaching odyssey at Lansdale Catholic in 1964, then advanced to college ball and the NBA. He has remained in touch with many of the guys he coached way back then. Sadly, he has also attended some of their funerals.
“Coaching that team my first time out of the gate and coaching the Sixers at the Boston Garden, there’s way, way more similarities than differences,” he said. “Because the foundation of success is how you deal with the people, in either instance I just used.”
So that would have been a wonderful bit of wisdom to share with Finch back in the day, had they known each other. And if Finch knew he was going to get into coaching.
But he didn’t.
A government/religious studies major, he had only a vague notion of what he might do after graduation. Maybe, he figured, he would scratch his competitive itch by signing on with a political campaign. Maybe he would become a college professor.
An F&M assistant coach named Mike McKonly suggested coaching, and it resonated. Finch, who played his high school ball at Wilson, started out as an assistant at another Berks County school, Conrad Weiser, in 1992, though his career didn’t really begin in earnest until a few years later.
By then he had played four seasons for a team in Sheffield, England, only to be asked to transition to the bench — to coach many of the same guys who had been his teammates.
“It was quite remarkable, looking back,” he once told me. “I wouldn’t have hired me at the age of 27.”
He spent six years in that position, where one of his rivals was Nick Nurse, the coach at Manchester. If they regarded each other warily at first, they eventually grew close. They would intersect years later on the staff of Great Britain’s national team, where Finch was the head coach and Nurse an assistant (notably at the 2012 Olympics), and in Toronto, where Finch assisted Nurse in ‘20-21.
In between Finch headed teams in Germany and Belgium before assuming the same position for the Houston Rockets’ G-League affiliate. In time the Rockets made him an assistant for the parent club, and Nurse succeeded him in the G-League. After five years in Houston, Finch moved on to assistant’s jobs in Denver, followed by New Orleans and Toronto.
The T-wolves hired him in February 2021, and they are bidding to make the playoffs for the fourth straight year. The mix has changed, seeing as five-time All-Star center Karl-Anthony Towns was traded to the Knicks in October as part of a three-team deal that netted Randle and DiVincenzo.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Finch said the T-wolves were “stuck in the mud” at the offensive end early in the season. Their defense was fine, but their scoring lulls were frequent, and depressingly long.
“It was brutal,” he said.
Then the injuries hit, leaving them in a position where they “kind of tried to tread water,” as he put it.
They’re positively buoyant now. Included in their current hot streak was a March 16 victory over Utah that was Finch’s 200th as a head coach. He joined the late Flip Saunders as the only coaches in Minnesota’s woebegone history to achieve that milestone, and Finch did it in his 356th game. It took Saunders 393.
Heckuva journey. And maybe, just maybe, he took the smallest of steps while holding a mop in the Mayser Center, all those years ago. No reason to rule it out completely.