CHICAGO — The primary calling card for new Chicago Sky coach Tyler Marsh is a depth of experience learning from the best in the business.
Before landing the job in Chicago, Marsh was best known as an integral part of Becky Hammon’s two-time WNBA champion staff in Las Vegas. Before that, Marsh learned under two of the most respected coaches in the NBA: Philadelphia 76ers coach Nick Nurse and Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle.
And when both coaches visited Chicago last weekend to face the Bulls, they voiced confidence in Marsh’s ability to transform the Sky in his debut as a head coach.
“Tyler’s got more rings than anybody sitting in this room right now, including me,” Nurse said jokingly, using his fingers to count out Marsh’s four championship titles — one in the D-League, one in the NBA and two in the WNBA. “He’s almost got a full handful.”
Nurse hired Marsh for his first job out of college with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the D-League (now known as the G League). Marsh was an all-access player development coach, assigned to answer his phone any time of day or night to shuttle a player to the training facility and spend hours in the gym working on handles and rebounding shots.
The Vipers won the D-League title that year, a victory that immediately earned Nurse an assistant role with the Toronto Raptors. They spent the next five years apart — Marsh working in assistant roles throughout the D-League, Nurse working his way to the front bench — until Nurse took over the Raptors as head coach in 2018. He immediately hired Marsh onto his staff, and the pair went on to win another ring.
During those three years working together, Nurse became accustomed to one constant: the presence of Marsh’s father, Donnie, a lifelong college coach. Donnie Marsh tagged along whenever he could, sitting in an empty row of bleachers with a pen in hand, taking notes through training camp practices and off-day workouts. Nurse quickly learned this was a shared trait among the Marsh family — a hunger to learn matched with an intense attention to detail.
Carlisle echoed this praise. But something else stuck out to him when he first met Tyler Marsh, who had been an assistant with the Pacers for a year when Carlisle took over in 2021. Coaches rarely retain assistants from the old guard, but Marsh was a clear exception. Carlisle saw the potential in Marsh as a coach, but he equally valued Marsh’s ability to command attention despite a reserved manner.
“He’s a man of few words, but when he speaks, people listen,” Carlisle said. “He gains respect very quickly.”
Marsh wants to be his own man in Chicago. But he also hopes to pull inspiration from his mentors — emulating Hammon’s communication, Carlisle’s savvy play schemes and Nurse’s fearlessness.
Nurse couldn’t help laughing at the praise. He knew exactly what Marsh meant by “fearlessness.” Sometimes it looked gutsy. Sometimes it just looked downright crazy — like in Game 2 of the 2019 NBA Finals, when Nurse and his coaching staff (Marsh included) decided to throw a box-and-one at Steph Curry.
A box-and-one defense is an unconventional tactic that utilizes a four-man zone with one player guarding the opponent’s offensive star man-to-man. In this case, that was Curry, whom the Raptors desperately needed to slow down in the fourth quarter of Game 2.
The Raptors never had utilized this defense. In fact, it’s unclear if any team had ever used a box-and-one in the Finals before that moment. Selling the concept quickly was as important as the scheme itself, but Nurse knew how to thread the needle. He introduced the idea to Kyle Lowry, the heartbeat of the locker room, who then presented the scheme to teammates and urged them to buy in.
It didn’t work. The Warriors won Game 2. But the Raptors went on to win a franchise-first NBA championship in six games — a result that Nurse credits to his team’s willingness to take risks and make mistakes. And Nurse hopes Marsh will carry this trait into his tenure with the Sky.
“I hope he gets some of it,” Nurse said. “Most of that comes — for me — out of necessity. You just kind of look out there and say, ‘We don’t have any choice but to try this right now.’ And you go for it. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. You don’t have to be afraid to try something a little different, to try things on the fly and throw things in the game that your team’s never practiced before if you can get them to buy in.”
Marsh is the latest in a series of longtime NBA assistant coaches who made the jump to a head coaching position in the WNBA, following in the path of Hammon and Nate Tibbetts of the Phoenix Mercury.
The trend makes sense to Nurse, who believes no experience is better than head coaching — at any level. For Nurse, WNBA head coach positions have joined the “top-level” echelon of coaching acumen, making them an ultimate goal for assistants working their way up the ranks, regardless of gender.
Carlisle agreed. He was swept up in the excitement of the Fever over the summer, but he already had been closely following the Aces and the New York Liberty.
One separating factor between the two leagues will always be the same: money. The median salary for an NBA head coach is $7 million per year. Only two coaches in the WNBA — notably, Tibbetts and Hammon — make more than $1 million per year. Many NBA lead assistant jobs are compensated better than WNBA head coaching positions. And this chasm in pay will continue to define the WNBA’s ability to lure top assistants away from the NBA.
But the basketball isn’t the problem. And as revenue continues to soar in the WNBA, Nurse and Carlisle believe coaching trees will continue to overlap more frequently between the leagues.
“There are differences between the WNBA game and the NBA game, but it’s very compelling to watch,” Carlisle said. “The coaching is at a very high level. The WNBA head jobs, to me, would be jobs that would be coveted by anyone.”
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