When Nagasaki Velca head basketball coach Mody Maor’s cell phone rang in March and an American number showed up, he ignored it, figuring it was some random agent from the United States who wanted something.
Then the number followed up with a text message. It was Michigan coach Dusty May, letting Maor know that he had an opening on his staff and wanted to talk.
The message caught Maor off guard. The head coach of a team that was about to win the national championship was interested in hiring an Israeli coach currently working in Japan who had never coached in the United States — and who he’d never even met.
“I wanted to go hire a coach who’s better than me,” May told The Athletic recently.
May’s curiosity has led him to many different places, and he stumbled upon this find two years ago when Maor was on Slappin’ Glass, a basketball coaching podcast that brings on coaches from around the world, and of which May is an avid listener. May jotted down an idea at the time — rules Maor had for screening angles in transition — and he moved about his day.
Then in March, after Justin Joyner was hired off May’s staff to be the head coach at Oregon State, someone brought up Maor’s name to May, and he started digging. He always has a floating list of coaches he’d consider if one of his assistants left him, and many who occupy that list aren’t among the favorites in his contacts.
“I’ve never met most of the guys that I’ve hired,” he said. The thought of someone this far outside his network piqued May’s interest.
“I think sometimes whenever you win, like we did this year, you think you have the secret sauce or the formula,” May says. “We’re never going to be a program that’s playing the same way 30 years from now as we do today, just because that’s what we know.”
May wanted someone who saw the game through a different lens, but this was so far outside the box that Maor wasn’t sure he should even consider it. Maor, after all, was coaching the best team in Japan and would eventually learn the pay would be about half of what he would have made next season if he had stayed in Japan. But then he started calling around.
First, Arkansas State coach Ryan Pannone, who had coached alongside Maor in Israel 10 years ago and had already talked to May about the possibility of adding Maor to his staff. “I was shocked,” Pannone says.
Once that wore off, Pannone loved the idea. He told them both they were perfect for each other. He told May that Maor is the smartest guy in any room, and he told Maor that May has no ego.
Then, Maor called Egor Koulechov, an Israeli player he knew who had played at Florida when May was an assistant. “Five-star human,” Maor recalls Koulechov telling him, adding that May found a way to connect with Koulechov but also challenge him.
Maor kept calling around. Kept getting the same messages. He couldn’t find anyone who said anything negative about May.
“In this business, that is damn near impossible,” Maor says. “That says a lot. It’s always around the same things. Genuine.”
Before May called, Maor had been nearing a decision on his future. He could return to his current team, or he had interest from some other teams in Japan, plus a few Euro Cup teams and teams in the NBL, where he’d spent five years with the New Zealand Breakers.
But there was something about May that kept pulling him in that direction, even though he’d no longer be a head coach. He told his wife, Liat, that he felt like he had to consider it.
Liat gave him a look. “Oh, you’re basically throwing a fourth continent into the equation.”
And one where she and their two girls had never lived.
It seemed crazy … but Moar decided to accept.
So how do two basketball guys form a relationship when they’ve never shaken hands?
For May and Maor, the relationship really took off once they started watching each other’s teams play. “That’s probably a little bit more intimate than talking,” Maor says.
“That was the ultimate kicker, watching his team play,” May says. “I love to watch them play.”
Their conversations shifted from theoretical to practical. What were you thinking in (fill-in-the-blank) scenario?
May loved how Maor thought about the game. His team always had a plan. He liked how Maor used former NBA lottery pick Stanley Johnson, who looked like a center in the Japanese league, as a point guard. Maor’s teams run a lot of inverted ball screens, a concept May played with two years ago with Danny Wolf.
“He’s obsessed with getting better,” May says. “He is obsessed with finding the best way, and he’s very blunt and honest. I appreciate that.”
Mody Maor spent five seasons coaching the New Zealand Breakers. (Anthony Au-Yeung / Getty Images)
That obsession helped Maor climb the ranks quickly after getting a somewhat late start to his career.
At 18, Maor joined the Israel Defense Forces and served for five years as an officer. When he finished serving, he had no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, so he went backpacking through India for six or seven months to “discover” himself. On that soul-searching journey, he decided he wanted to be a school teacher.
As Moar neared the completion of his education degree, that’s when he found coaching. He needed some practical hours working with children, and one option was to help coach a youth basketball team. After two practices with 8-year-olds, he was hooked. He no longer wanted to be a teacher; he wanted to coach.
Maor says he coached every youth age group those first few years, even as young as kindergarteners. Maor also coached part-time as an assistant for Israel’s under-21 national team, which led to his first break when he volunteered with Hapoel Holon in the top division of Israel’s professional league. Maor did video and scouting for Hapoel Holon, eventually moving from an unpaid volunteer to assistant coach.
His career took off from there, bouncing around Israel’s top professional league as an assistant and then landing with the Breakers to work for Dan Shamir, whom he first worked under with Hapoel Holon.
After Shamir resigned in 2022 following a 5-23 season, Maor was elevated to head coach and turned the franchise around, finishing 18-10 and leading the Breakers to the playoffs for the first time in five seasons, before losing in the championship series to the Sydney Kings, 3-2.
Maor’s early success didn’t get him set in his ways. With the Breakers, Maor’s teams were the second-slowest in pace in both his seasons as head coach. Maor decided he wanted to play faster when he got to Japan, and Velca ranked ninth out of 24 teams in pace his first year and first this past season, also leading the league in scoring.
Playing faster excites him about coaching at Michigan with a point guard like Elliot Cadeau.
It’s also important to May that Michigan is a program that develops players, and Maor’s answer for why he would move from head coach to assistant spoke to May. Maor said his favorite part of the job is working with players, and he looked forward to eliminating some of the responsibilities that come with being a head coach — like media and public appearances — to focus on helping players improve.
“My biggest gripe is just not having as much one-on-one and small group time as I would like,” May says. “It’s probably my favorite part of the job, so that answer just really resonated with me as well.”
Dusty May wants his program to be strong at player development. (Trevor Ruszkowski / Imagn Images)
May also believes that Maor’s abilities in player development will help him in recruiting. Several of the recommendations for Maor came from agents who had sent their players to play for Maor.
“In today’s climate, the traditional assistant is becoming obsolete,” May says. “The agents have more influence than ever, and agents are businessmen first, and they’re going to want to send their clients to whoever they think can develop them the best and the quickest and help them maximize their ability.”
May also believes Maor will be able to provide better intel on international players.
“He can streamline the information quicker,” May says. “Some colleges have really struggled with the international market of grabbing guys that just aren’t very good and overpaying them and not getting the right intel. I think he can help with that tremendously.”
The final selling point that convinced May he’d found the right guy was the type of questions Maor asked. He wanted to know about staff chemistry, how the Michigan coaches worked together and how collaborative they were.
May’s answers lined up with Maor’s own research. “It’s very basketball-centric, not around politics and ego and stuff like that, which I don’t enjoy much,” he says. “It seems like the structure is really one that’s very similar to how professional teams operate.”
Maor’s biggest hesitation with leaving professional basketball for college was an “innate skepticism about the quality of basketball.”
“A lot of college coaches are really good at coaching the system, but not necessarily coaching players,” Maor says.
The more he watched Michigan and talked to May, the more he saw that May was dedicated to getting the most out of players using constraint-led approach (CLA) concepts and “high-level processes that are not just connected to X’s and O’s.”
Pannone, who was the first call for both coaches when gathering intel about the other, believes it’s a marriage that will work well.
“Most coaches want people that think like them,” Pannone says. “Dusty wants them to think different than him. That is why Dusty May is one of the best coaches in the world. He is constantly pursuing greatness, and he’s never satisfied.
“They’re two brilliant basketball minds that see the game very different. And the whole reason why they want to work together is to learn from someone else. It’s beautiful. How beautiful of a story is that?”
