Ross McMains brings perspective and joy to Celtics coaching staff

When Svi Mykhailiuk comes out to warm up before Boston Celtics games, he follows the same routine, and it all starts with a trick shot. He’ll grab a ball from the rack at half-court and take a stand-still hook.

One day, he nailed it, but no one caught it on camera. Mykhailiuk pointed over, pleading for me to have gotten the shot on video, but my phone was down.

A few moments later, player development coach Ross McMains stepped onto the hardwood. He started chatting with Mykhailiuk, and the Celtics wing revealed that he had finally made the shot. But McMains didn’t believe him.

He asked if it was on film, but no dice. No proof meant no credit.

Not long after that, on one of Mykhailiuk’s next few attempts, I had my camera rolling. He sunk the shot and pointed at me in acknowledgment.

But McMains was none too pleased.

He looked at me and expressed his sarcastic disappointment that I had gotten the shot on camera, waving in my direction as if to say, “Don’t give Svi the satisfaction.”

Mykhailiuk then rolled into his normal workouts, where he and McMains’ pre-game ritual begins. If Mykhailiuk misses his first shot, he has to run all the way down to the other side of the court and back. And every time he does, a smile creeps across McMains’ face.

That smile is always there.

Whether he’s making Mykhailiuk jog down the court, guarding guys in a shooting drill, or jokingly upset that I got a trick shot on camera, he’s constantly smiling.

Even when Xavier Tillman calls him out on the bench to come run through workouts with him, McMains loves it. He even scores a sneaky bucket every once in a while when he gets the chance.

McMains’ love for basketball runs deep, spanning multiple continents and millenniums, and it was forever centered on coaching.

It was always basketball for Ross McMains.

Hoops courses through his veins. It’s a love that pushed him to make history, even if there was no one there to see it.

“Ross, more than likely, made the very first basket of the millennium,” said Shea Frazee, a well-respected trainer and close friend of McMains.

McMains cemented himself in basketball lore without anyone knowing.

“He was living in New Zealand at the time, and they get the new year first,” said Frazee. “So, he, right at 12, made the very first bucket of the millennium. And Ross might like basketball as much or more than anybody I’ve ever known.”

Though he was born in New Hampshire, McMains grew up on Waiheke Island in New Zealand. He moved back to the United States at age 11 and eventually attended Santa Barbara High School.

Even as a high schooler, coaching was the plan.

“I think Ross has been trying to coach since he picked up a basketball,” said Charlie Torres, a highly-regarded trainer for many NBA players and McMains’ long-time friend. “I’ve heard stories of Ross going to coaches clinics when he was like a sophomore in high school.”

After high school, McMains returned to where he grew up and at roughly 18 years old, took a job with the New Zealand Breakers as a video coordinator in 2007. But it didn’t take him long to head back stateside, as he moved to Los Angeles roughly a year later to help train various pro players.

From there, McMains ran NBA pre-draft prep for two years before working with players in Latvia, France, and China. He then studied at Santa Monica College from 2008 to 2010 and at John Cabot University in Rome in 2011. There, he gained a greater understanding of European basketball, expanding his hoops palate.

Before his coaching career fully began, McMains already had one of the worldliest perspectives in the space.

“I think having an American dad, a Kiwi mom—he grew up on this little island in New Zealand, Waiheke Island, so he had a really unique kind of upbringing,” said Dean Vickerman, the head coach of Melbourne United, who McMains coached under during the 2019-20 season.

“Living on some boats in different places. And I think that was certainly a part of the travel bug, that his parents would bounce around from different places, and I think he grabbed some of that. But there was always a thirst for knowledge about different cultures.”

McMains converted his global expertise into ball knowledge.

“Anywhere around the world, he’s got an opportunity to either learn something himself or add some knowledge to someone else,” said Vickerman. “So, yeah, he’s pretty rounded in his perspective of the game, and I think the way that he can teach the game is from a perspective of, just that round, broad approach to what Europeans are doing, what the Aussies, what the Kiwis, what the Serbians have done.

“So, I really believe that when you have him as a coach, you’re getting a high-level perspective of basketball.”

Staff photo by Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

McMains has gained invaluable insight at every stop of his worldwide coaching tour, which has helped him establish his status as one of the greatest basketball minds around the globe.

“Everyone knows he’s a genius, basketball-wise,” said Isaac Fotu, who McMains coaches with the Tall Blacks.

“One of the smartest basketball brains that I’ve been around,” said Vickerman.

“Everything on the court or within the organization, I consider Ross to be as intelligent and genius-level as one would get,” said Frazee.

McMains’ eye for the sport goes past the court. He’s reading and teaching the game in every aspect of his life, from the hardwood to a bag of Lay’s potato chips.

“[He’s] always [been] a student of the game,” said former NBA player Nigel Hayes, who McMains coached in Westchester. “Like, there’s a way to talk about basketball, and then there’s a way where it organically is just like, you’d be looking at chips, and the way the chip cracks, [and] he’s like, ‘Well, see the way that chip cracked, that’s like the same crack that you need to cut on the court. Like that angle.’ Weird stuff like that.”

Photo by Randy Belice/NBAE via Getty Images

Beyond the bag of chips, McMains’ experience from his many stops has allowed him to develop a keen sense of what the next trend will be.

“To be like a basketball savant is a really hard thing because the game is always changing,” said Torres. “It’s always moving. Like fashion. And Ross is usually five years ahead of that fashion statement. So, he looks a little crazy. But then it’s like, you look back five years later, and it’s like, ‘Oh, Ross was telling me about this.’”

And he’s always keeping those around him updated on where the game is going.

“So, now it’s like, everyone’s using stuff that was in Europe five, ten years ago as vocabulary. And who did I hear that first from? Mainly Ross,” Torres said. “You know what I mean? Like different words, different terms, [and] different ideas.

“I mean, the guy needs his f****** flowers. You know what I mean? He needs his roses. His bouquet. He needs the whole s***. Because [he’s] advancing the game. He does it daily.”

Even when the world shut down because of COVID, McMains still found a way to push the game forward. Torres said that he would set up Zoom calls where he would “come up with special situations, and they’d start a timer like it was a timeout.”

“Genius,” said Torres. “It was giving us all our coaching rush.”

For all the work he’s put into studying the game, McMains has always been able to translate it into his coaching. Getting his message across to players has always been a strength.

“He’s not going to do a workout with someone without spending the hours beforehand,” said Vickerman. “Knowing as much as he can about people, and then knowing the areas of improvement, and then probably having some video ready of [the] best practice in the world of someone who does this skill that they might be able to pass on or try and see a different way of doing it.”

McMains methodically prepares everything he teaches on the court. Every player he coaches is treated as an individual. Rather than applying general ideas across the board, he takes the time to carefully cultivate detailed workouts and developmental plans for each of them.

It’s why players are endlessly itching to get in the gym with him.

“Every workout you do with him is specific to your position and you as a player,” said Fotu. “It’s not just any cliche drills he’s going through, it’s specific to what you’re going to be doing in the game and what you need to improve on, [and] what he feels you need to improve on as a player, which was super helpful, especially in our camps.

“Everyone would be lining up to get a workout in with Ross before or after practice because they know how beneficial it was.”

Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The intricacies of McMains’ coaching go deeper than shooting forms and on-court specifics. He takes personal anecdotes and turns them into hilarious ways of pushing players forward.

“I hate to sound like that person, [and] this has nothing to do with it, but I’m vegan,” Hayes explained with a laugh. “I’m not trying to be that vegan, alright? I’m not doing it. This is not where this is going. But anyways, my diet pertains to the story because, during games, he would always come up and be like, ‘Alright you f****** vegan, use that plant power.’ And like, that was our thing—plant power in the fourth quarter.

“When there was like five minutes left in the game, we were always like, ‘Plants don’t get tired.’ So that was always our little thing. He always had things that he could say to different guys that were their little inside jokes, if you will, or inside motivation. Yeah, that’s, again, something else I just remembered. Plant power in the fourth quarter.

“I actually told myself that two weeks ago, and I forgot where it came from. But in my mind, I was on the bench like, ‘Alright, plant power. We got to power through.’”

It’s a perfect blend of humor and intensity.

“You know, they’ll call players, like, this player is a dog, or that player is a dog, and that just means they’re willing to take the extra level of intensity and fight to the competitive situation,” said Frazee. “And I guess you call coaches less that way, but Ross is a dog as a coach.”

He pours his heart into helping his guys improve, doing anything he can to give them an advantage, even if that means benching a player during a workout.

Once, while trying to coach a player about shot selection, he had to take matters into his own hands.

“Ross [was] trying to, over the course of weeks, beat this into this person’s head,” Frazee said. “And they get into a drill where there’s a good amount of autonomy to take any shot you want within the context of the action they’re working out of.

“And this player shoots like a 17-foot pull-back jump shot, and Ross just makes the loudest horn sound you could ever imagine and tells him to go to the bench because he’s subbing him out of the game [even though] it was an individual workout. And I almost died [laughing].”

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McMains carries himself with a radiating sense of elation at all times.

“There’s a joy and a fun element that he that he likes to coach with, and engage people, and find that little competitive edge,” said Vickerman.

If McMains is on the court, he’s smiling.

“I’m sure if Stan Van Gundy saw us in the gym, he would be ripping the hair, or the hair that he has left, out of his head because of how much fun we’re having in the gym,” Torres said.

With all the work McMains put in to get to Boston, the gig he has now is a dream come true.

“He smiles too much, and he’s having just so much fun. Every day is Disneyland for Ross,” said Torres. “Going to the arena, going to the gym, going to the practice facility, he’s at f****** Disneyland. Getting to guard Jaylen Brown. Getting to have Jaylen Brown guard him in a scout. Being able to go eat with those guys.”

And just as he does with Mykhailiuk pregame, McMains has always made it a habit to mess with his players.

“He’s cracking jokes [with] the guys that were on the team,” said Hayes. “Making fun of, for example, like, we’d be working on something that you did last game, and he’s making a joke about like, ‘Yeah, because last game, you tried that move, and it looked like s***.’ You know, something like that.

“So just, like I said, tried to keep things light, tried to keep things good. But yeah, he was tremendous. And obviously, it’s showing off [with] where he’s at now, and he deserves all the success and everything that’s coming to him.”

That’s where McMains’ mastery of the game goes from elite to otherworldly. He doesn’t just know basketball. He doesn’t just coach basketball. He embraces everyone he interacts with.

Photo by Randy Belice/NBAE via Getty Images

McMains may love hoops more than anything in the world, but he also loves the people behind the sport. And that’s what makes him remarkable.

“That’s the thing that Ross brings,” said Torres. “He’s not just a professional. He’s a human. And he wants to make sure that these professionals that are away from their homes and families and friends and all that crap, he wants to make sure that he is there for them.”

McMains last coached Hayes in 2018, over five years ago. They only spent one season together. Yet he left his mark.

And now, with Hayes playing professional ball in Turkey, McMains still found a way to use his coaching style to give him a nudge.

“They [McMains and Torres] were just bullying me in a group chat,” said Hayes. “They just put me in a group chat, those two, and started bullying me about this year. So, those guys are great with their — that’s their humor. Their humor is, it’s like healthy hate. Like, the bullying that doesn’t make you feel bad it makes you go. ‘You know what, Ross is right. I really do got to step it up. I do need to do this. I do need to do that.’

“And him and Charlie together, Ross and Charlie together are like f****** Larry and Curly. They just need Moe.”

His demeanor has helped him form long-lasting relationships that span multiple stops, years, and continents. Whether it’s a text in a group chat or welcoming a player into his life, McMains’ benevolence knows no bounds.

“One summer, I went to work out in Santa Barbara, and he happened to live there at the time,” said Fotu. “Just hanging out with him off the court, he introduced me to his friends, we went out to eat tacos, and go get ice cream, do all those things. And just hanging out with him off the court is awesome. Just his energy as well.

“He’s hilarious, too. He’s a funny guy. But yeah, just the energy on and off the court. He’s the same dude. Works hard on the court, and then off the court, you just want to hang out with him. So, he’s just a good dude.”

Photo by Anthony Au-Yeung/Getty Images

McMains was always going to be a coach. He pushed himself into the field from an early age, and his devotion to the game led him on one of the most incredible paths in the industry.

The level at which he perceives the game is a direct result of his experience and willingness to coach with an eternal jubilation that resonates with everyone he crosses paths with.

McMains has made an undeniable impact on the game of basketball. He has already done so much for the game, and at the same time, he’s just barely begun.

“I pray every day that that guy is going to be a head coach, because the basketball world deserves it,” said Torres. “Not only does the world deserve it, Ross deserves it. Nobody’s done what he’s done. Nobody.”