Another practice at Birmingham-Southern had just wrapped up, this one more crowded than usual. The Pelicans had assigned forward Naji Marshall and rookie Trey Murphy III for the Squadron’s next game against the Austin Spurs, sending down Brandon Demas, a player-development coach, along with them.
Pannone, content with the day’s work, settled into a chair and rested his head softly against the wall. There were still more than two months left before the G League playoffs, and yet, it wasn’t too early to deem the season a success. Pannone’s primary goal was to help players reach the NBA—three of his guys had been called up, and one of them was never coming back.
It was easy to forget that Pannone, too, was chasing the NBA dream. In fact, he had been chasing it for far longer than any of his players. His coaching career had already spanned nearly two decades, beginning right after he graduated high school. The pursuit of the NBA was no less arduous for a coach; in a lot of ways, it was more demanding and required more sacrifices.
Pannone had traveled the world in search of the best opportunities, accepting meager salaries—$700 or $800 a month—to build his résumé. Along the way, he had picked up many side hustles (working camps, training players independently, running a website) and sold many of his belongings to make ends meet.
When he was an assistant coach for the D-League’s Erie BayHawks in 2014–15, he found himself handling duties such as doing laundry, cleaning the locker room, and—literally—scrubbing toilets. “It didn’t necessarily go the exact way that I was told it was going to go,” Pannone said. “It was a very frustrating season professionally, probably the hardest season of my life.” He earned just $1,000 a month, and the team did not provide housing or insurance. The only building where Pannone could afford to live would later be condemned. He couldn’t cover the cost of heat, so he slept in multiple sweatshirts every night. For dinner, he often ate peanut butter banana sandwiches.
Pannone remained alert for any opportunities to advance his career. He paid for his own plane ticket and hotel to attend the D-League Showcase—held in Santa Cruz that year—so that he could be with his team and establish more connections.
In 2016 Hapoel Jerusalem wanted to add Pannone to its staff but didn’t have an open position. Pannone desperately wanted to make it work. He knew the experience with Hapoel Jerusalem would be invaluable, for both his growth as a coach and his quest to reach the NBA. “Whatever it costs to live in Jerusalem, that’s all I need,” Pannone told the team. “As long as I’m not accruing debt, I’ll figure it out.” The club eventually hired him as an assistant, and Pannone was able to parlay that opportunity into a head coaching job for BC Prievidza in Slovakia the following season.
The situation in Slovakia was ideal (great team, supportive fans, amazing city), except for one problem: the organization wasn’t paying Pannone on time. Whenever it had the money to pay either him or his players, he deferred to his players. It was frustrating, no question, but Pannone stayed anyway. His club was winning, and his résumé was becoming all the more impressive. When the season ended, BC Prievidza had gone 25-11, and Pannone was still owed five months’ salary.
Pannone built many of his relationships abroad but did what he could to expand his contacts in the United States, showing up to every important networking event that fit his schedule. For the annual NBA Summer League in Las Vegas—an affair that has the feel of a New York City happy hour—Pannone always rented a car just to drive people around. It afforded him quality face time to make an impression. “People always need rides, and they want to save money,” he explained. “Then you get like ten minutes alone with them, and they also feel like you did them a favor, so from a psychological standpoint, they are now indebted to you.”
Connections are everything in the coaching world. It is often about who you know or what circle you’re in or how wide a net you’ve cast. Pannone conducted his own extensive study to find the easiest path to the NBA, beyond just having a first-rate LinkedIn profile. After poring through the backgrounds of every head coach, assistant coach, and PD coach in the NBA, he discovered that the best way to land one of those positions—for anyone not a former player—is to be an intern with an organization and work one’s way up.
“When I started coaching, I didn’t even know that was an option,” Pannone admitted. The year before he became a head coach in the G League, at age thirty-two, he was seeking an intern job with an NBA team. And only one coach—Fred Hoiberg with the Bulls—even considered hiring him but ultimately could not get it approved.
The next best route, as Pannone’s research indicated, was to go through the G League. Well over one hundred coaches have made the jump from the minors to the NBA, including prominent names such as Quin Snyder, Nick Nurse, Taylor Jenkins, Dave Joerger, Luke Walton, and Darvin Ham.
Still, it was hard for Pannone to determine why exactly certain coaches got an opportunity over others. The consistencies were lacking, so trying to make sense of it was futile. Pannone could figure out the blueprint for each of his players, but not for himself. He could tell Malcolm Hill how to get to the NBA, but he wasn’t entirely sure of his own formula.
“Being a G League head coach is a phenomenal way to break in, but there is no guarantee—there is no pathway,” Pannone said. “And if you’re a G League head coach and you don’t have a lot of relationships at the NBA level, because my career has been different and unique, it’s like, what are you being evaluated on and how do you break in? There is no magic formula. Win games? Done that. Be the top offensive team in the league? Done that. Develop players into multiyear deals, two-way deals, call-ups? Done that. The reality is, for almost all of us, you have to get lucky, and someone has to take a chance on you.”
The Bill Burch Gymnasium had gradually emptied out. Pannone remained, still sitting on the sideline, reflecting on his journey. He was thirty-seven years old, married with three children. He didn’t need much more than that to be happy.
Pannone is a simple man. He doesn’t desire fancy things; he prefers “Versace” robes designed by his kids and wears baggy sweatpants with a baggy T-shirt on most days. He once teased Joe Young about his designer Balenciaga shoes, comparing them to a pair of socks. His favorite restaurant is Olive Garden; he swears its Alfredo sauce is among the best in the world. During one road trip, Squadron staff members posed the following question to him: “Would you rather add $15,000 to your salary every year but never be able to go to Chipotle or Olive Garden ever again or keep the same salary but you can go to those places whenever you want?” Pannone, somewhat surprisingly, chose the $15,000.
As much as he loves basketball—and he loves basketball—Pannone’s perspective has evolved through the years. It is more mature now, more pragmatic. He doesn’t take the game too seriously. Even when the Squadron lost, he graciously thanked the fans as he walked back to the locker room and always brought out waters to the families who stuck around afterward. “There’s never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he would say. Perhaps his most popular saying during the season was “Character is who you are, every day, all the time, even when no one’s watching.”
“He’s a player’s coach,” described Young. “He’s more focused on how we’re doing in the morning. That’s his first question before we come in the locker room. ‘How are y’all doing? Can I help you?’ That’s any player’s dream to have a coach that really cares about him and wants his players to be great.”
“Ryan is a once-in-a-lifetime coach,” Cheatham added. “You just don’t really meet coaches who actually give a fuck about you, whether the ball is bouncing or not, like actually still genuinely care for you. Ryan is a person who even when I wasn’t on his team was still checking on my mom, still sending me clips or advice. He’s just a good person. You’ll see him helping with bags and shit as a head coach. In my opinion, you don’t see that very often. You don’t meet guys like him. He’s shown me that there are genuine people in business sometimes.”
In team meetings, Pannone often invited his players to consider the bigger picture, to keep in mind the things that truly mattered. As he told reporters on media day right before the season started, “It’s basketball; it’s exciting. In reality, especially in the current shape of the world, we’re super fortunate. I get to coach a game for a living.”
Whether he ever made the NBA or not, Pannone counted himself lucky. The game had brought him to some extraordinary places. The Pelicans front office had trusted him with an incredible opportunity to lead its G League program. It was a joy to come to work every day, to be around this Squadron team. He had other more pressing goals at the top of his mind—making the playoffs, winning the championship, developing his players—and Pannone wouldn’t measure success based solely on whether he one day reached the highest level.
“If you can finish your career and look back believing that you did everything that you could, you just didn’t get the break—I can live with that,” he said, staring out at the Bill Burch court. Without the clamor of balls bouncing and sneakers squeaking, his voice seemed to carry throughout the gym. He continued:
I can live with never receiving the break to be able to coach in the NBA if I can look back and say I worked extremely hard, I was extremely prepared, I did the right things, I treated people right, I treated the players right, I stuck to my beliefs, I had a core philosophy, and I just didn’t make it. Hey, there are a lot of great coaches that are better than me that never made it. They just didn’t get the break.
But if I look back on my career and say I didn’t work hard enough, I wasn’t prepared enough, I wasn’t a good person, I was an asshole, I was selfish, I was about myself, then that’s on me. It’s the same thing you tell the players. Making the NBA or not making the NBA doesn’t determine the success of your career. If Joe Young signs another NBA contract tomorrow, he’s not a better player than he was today. You can’t evaluate the success of your career based on the opportunities that someone else has to give you. I can’t sign myself to a contract. If I get an opportunity to coach in the NBA tomorrow, I’m not a better coach than I am today. And the reality is, there are coaches at the high school level, Division III, Division II, NAIA, junior college, second division in Germany, third division in Serbia that are better coaches than me. There are truly great coaches everywhere, all over the world, right? And when you realize that and you can accept that, then you can be at peace. To be an NBA assistant coach is my dream—it is my goal. But whether I achieve that or not won’t determine the success that I had in my coaching career. It won’t define my career at all. And it won’t define my happiness.
Of course, being at peace did not mean the chase was over. Pannone would continue to do everything within his power to get to the NBA—to ensure, no matter what, that he would never look back at his career with any regrets. And hopefully, the break would come.