"One of The Best I've Ever Had": Why Shamir Loves Abercrombie

New Zealand Breakers coach Dan Shamir has heaped praise on club captain Tom Abercrombie, labelling him as one of the best players he has ever coached.

Shamir has coached across Europe and Israel over the last two decades and has a very specific goal when joining a new team, telling NBL Overtime he wants to identify the “forces” and “owners” amongst the playing group.

It didn’t take long for Shamir to realise Abercrombie was that leader for the Breakers and it was a strong sentiment shared by his teammates.

“I’ll just cut to the end of the season. Scotty Hopson told me, and he is an experienced guy who has been around the NBA and EuroLeague teams, Scotty said at the end of the season, Tom is the best captain I’ve ever had,” Shamir said.

“I had another player tell me something where we had an incident during the season and he said, the way Tom looked at me, I understood he doesn’t accept this kind of stuff on his team.

“In all honestly, I have never heard stuff like that from players about another player.

“We all knew he was a great guy, and everybody wants a friend like that, but it’s great to see a guy like that having such great influence on the people around him by example, he is not a big talker.”

Shamir added he believes Abercrombie would have had a long and successful career in Europe if he had been connected with him earlier in his career.

“I think if I had met him, not being arrogant, but if we were working when he was younger in a situation like that, in a place like that, when he was like 26-27, he would have moved from here to a very good situation in a top European team,” Shamir said.

“I have coached in clubs that pay two million dollars to players and every team is looking for a player like Tom Abercrombie. A 6’6 athlete who can defend everybody, who makes shots, who doesn’t make a lot of mistakes…he belongs as one of the best I’ve ever had.”

Abercrombie had a bounce back season in NBL20, averaging 12.1 points per game, his highest scoring average since the 2015/16 season. Shamir says Abercrombie’s role with the team grew as the season progressed and he is looking forward to him making another big contribution in NBL21.

“I didn’t know how good he was as a player,” Shamir said.

“The evolution of his role on the team was enormous. I will admit I was worried when I started him before I came.

“I saw him in the previous year and he had a pretty average World Cup campaign and I thought to myself, what are we going to do with this important player who is the captain of the team and the face of the team, is he just going to wait in the corner and wait for people to pass him the ball to make a shot here and there?

“He moved from that into being a guy who we want the ball in his hands a lot. We run plays for him, and he ended up having one of the best seasons he has had.”

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