Building a Champion - Brampton Honey Badgers

With the CEBL Finals upon us, let me dive in a bit more to the building of a championship team.

Indeed, we do have a Honey Badger book club where we’re currently reading Think Again by Adam Grant.

I was reading it this week and sent this nugget Jermaine Anderson (BHB GM):

“You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.”

I messaged him that this was a perfect summation of how we operated this season.

Our objective, handed down day 1 from our CEO, Al Whitley, NBA Champion with the Dallas Mavericks, was to win a championship. Not in 5 years, not next season but to win a championship this season.

This was the worst team in the league last year. And the goal wasn’t to improve or to make the playoffs, it was to win a championship.

5 games into the season, we had matched our win total from last season and tied the best start in CEBL history at 5-0.

At 7-1, we added 3 more players who were finishing up their seasons overseas and we immediately lost 5 straight.

The energy of the team was gone and there was a lot of noise and negativity around us.

And we did the same thing we did when we were 2-0, 3-0… we got together and talked about how we could make the team better.

We all believed in ourselves and our ability to build a championship team but we also knew we didn’t have the right tools (players and staff) in place. If the goal was to be better, we already were. But the goal was a championship so we had to make adjustments.

We cut multiple players. We let go of multiple staffers. We were determined not just to add talent but to turn the energy of the team.

In our league, players have to play or be active in 5 games to be eligible for the playoffs. With a game on Wednesday, we were on phone calls and in meetings all day Saturday, Sunday, Monday… discussing options, watching game film, calling agents to find the missing pieces to the roster. With a Monday deadline… our discussions continued into Tuesday when we finally made our decision and got 2 players on a flight straight to the city we were playing in (Saskatoon), one arriving midway through the team shootaround after having 3 flights canceled. All in all, we had 4 players arrive on gameday throughout the season.

We thought early in the season, when we added our 3 pieces from overseas that our roster was set for the season. Little did we know, we’d be making 7 more cuts and additions after that. But the thing I credit our group with was sticking to the daily process of being confident in ourselves while also admitting we had not built a championship mix… yet.