Pacers lead assistant coach Lloyd Pierce discusses his coat drive
Pacers lead assistant coach Lloyd Pierce led a holiday coat drive at Indianapolis’ Horizon House for the second year.
The Pacers have two Basketball Without Borders alumni on the roster in Pascal Siakam and Bennedict Mathurin.This week, Lloyd Pierce is on the camp coaching staff in Kigali, Rwanda along with Fever legend Tamika Catchings, former NBA players Kerry Kittles and Marvin Williams and Hornets coach Charles Lee.
In his fourth stint working as a coach with the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders Camp and his third in Africa, Indiana Pacers lead assistant coach Lloyd Pierce can see the fruits of the investment the league has made in the continent.
Pierce has taken part in the event in prior summers in Angola and South Africa as well as Tokyo, Japan, and this week he’s on the camp coaching staff in Kigali, Rwanda along with Indiana Fever legend Tamika Catchings, former NBA players Kerry Kittles and Marvin Williams and Hornets coach Charles Lee.
The Pacers have two Basketball Without Borders alumni on the roster in Pascal Siakam and Bennedict Mathurin, and the event was particularly life-altering for Siakam, who grew up in Cameroon and had very little organized basketball training by the time he played at Basketball Without Borders in South Africa when he was 18. Siakam caught enough attention to earn an opportunity at a Texas prep school which turned into a scholarship to New Mexico State which turned into an NBA career that is about to enter its 10th season. He’s earned three All-Star trips, two All-NBA nods and two trips to the NBA Finals, including this season’s run with the Pacers and his 2018-19 championship with the Toronto Raptors.
Pierce’s first experience with the camp came in 2016 in Angola, and each year he’s returned, he said, he’s seen the payoff of what the NBA has built in Africa. Along with his Basketball Without Borders Experience, he took part in the Basketball Africa League in 2022. Few NBA players in the 1980s and ’90s came from the continent in part because of a lack of investment in development, but Hall-of-Fame big men Hakeem Olajuwon of Nigeria and Dikembe Mutombo of The Congo gave teams a reason to look for and develop talent there and the league responded with its own investment. There were a record-tying 17 African-born players on NBA rosters at the start of the 2024-25 season, which included Siakam but also 2023-24 MVP Joel Embiid.
“Like anything the earlier you can start putting in place the resources and growing and build the infrastructure, the better,” Pierce said by phone from Rwanda. “Whether it’s court dedications, sending over basketballs, improving the quality of teaching and health and heating and stretching and the repetition of being on the court.
“I know the goal of the program has always been let’s find and develop the top prospects, the young players. Let’s teach the game at the lower level. I think when you go back 20, 25, maybe 30 years ago, there was a lot of talent, they just didn’t get the development and the teaching until later in their teens. We’ve been wanting to get these guys and gals a lot earlier. We’re hoping that there’s a lot of infrastructure throughout the different countries and they’re seeing and working on this game and using it as a tool to college access and professional access.”
It’s rewarding for Pierce on a personal level to be a part of that, and it also helps his development as a coach as he sees other coaches’ and players’ approaches to the sport. The 49-year-old has been in coaching since 2003, shortly after his professional playing career ended. He was the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks from 2018-21 and has been Rick Carlisle’s lead assistant since Carlisle began his second stint as head coach in Indiana in 2021. The Pacers are coming off a trip to the NBA Finals, their first since 2000, but they go into the 2025-26 season knowing they’ll be without All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton.
“This gives me an opportunity to learn how the game is being played and taught in different countries and how we can help impact some of the things that we know and some of the things that we’re doing,” Pierce said. “It’s a unique opportunity for the participants we get to coach, but it’s a very unique opportunity for us.”
Whenever he’s taken part in Basketball Without Borders, Pierce has tried to immerse himself into the culture of the country he’s in. When he took part in the event in Tokyo, he said, he got to watch a Sumo wrestling practice and he took a bullet train with other coaches for a clinic in another Japanese city that had been hit hard by a tsunami. His wife Melissa traveled to Rwanda with him and they took a cooking class on the first day to learn more about how the prepare food in the country.
Pierce is also a student of history. Prior to a preseason game against the Grizzlies in Memphis in October of 2023, he took a contingent of Pacers players to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968. The Pacers posted a video of the visit on their YouTube channel and Pierce said he makes a point to visit any time he is in Memphis.
So in Kigali, Pierce felt compelled to visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which commemorates the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi tribe. More than 500,000 people were killed in the genocide and 250,000 were buried in a mass grave near the site of the memorial.
“In Rwanda and Kigali, it’s imperative that you visit the genocide museum, the memorial I should say,” Pierce said. “Understanding some of the history, reckoning with some of the past. … It touches your heart. It’s painful. It’s painful to watch, it’s painful to see. Hearing the stories, reading about the information. Without getting too deep, how we can help each other moving forward will always be the best thing we can do when watching some of the tragedy. It just hurts your heart. Again, to see how beautiful this place is, how clean Kigali is, how warm and welcoming everyone is, you leave here with a sense of pride and with a lot of compassion toward the growth and development of this country.”
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