{"id":132415,"date":"2025-06-28T21:08:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T21:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/132415\/"},"modified":"2025-06-28T21:08:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T21:08:10","slug":"chris-beard-shares-what-ole-miss-can-learn-from-nba-finals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/132415\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Beard shares what Ole Miss can learn from NBA Finals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many college coaches use NBA film to show their players how high-level players go about playing the game on a professional level. This is no different for Chris Beard<\/a> and his Ole Miss<\/a> program, fresh off its second ever run to the Sweet Sixteen last season.<\/p>\n

Beard, who is a known NBA junkie, discussed how he will be using this year\u2019s NBA Finals matchup<\/a> between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers in his team\u2019s film sessions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re watching as many clips from this year\u2019s Finals right now with our team than anything else,\u201d Beard said. \u201cI think the Oklahoma City defense, from opening night to game seven, was much talked about and deservingly so. A lot of position less stuff. Their ability to switch and switch back. The pressure they put on the ball. They\u2019re just really aggressive. What I would say is as the season started going on, the Pacers were in the same category. Their defense was just outstanding in the playoffs with individual players making plays and the help and rotation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve always studied the NBA Finals team because it coincides with summer starting. We study USA Basketball when they\u2019re playing in the Olympics or whatever\u2026 that\u2019s always been a part of our summer journey. But this year as much as ever. I think we\u2019ve got enough video to work until the last day of the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 10 seasons of coaching at the Division I level, Beard boasts a 215-97 record with a Sweet 16 appearance (Ole Miss\u00a0in 2024), an Elite 8 appearance (Texas Tech<\/a>\u00a0in 2018) and a National Championship runner-up in 2019 (Texas Tech). Because of this success, he was asked about potentially jumping to the NBA at some point in his career. He didn\u2019t quite shoot it down.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of me, I\u2019ve got practice here in a couple of hours and I don\u2019t think much ahead of that,\u201d Beard said. \u201cBut what I would say is I\u2019ve been asked that a few times over the years. I don\u2019t shy away from that. One thing about me is I love coaching the best players and I love being in the most stressful moments in terms of competition. That\u2019s what kind of fires me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rebels brought in a strong transfer portal class (ranked No. 19 in On3\u2019s rankings<\/a>) to go along with returning forward Malik Dia<\/a>. Dia is Ole Miss\u2018 lone returner from last year\u2019s Sweet Sixteen team that averaged more than 2.0 points per game (10.8).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many college coaches use NBA film to show their players how high-level players go about playing the game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,4002,6,11],"class_list":{"0":"post-132415","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba-playoffs","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-chris-beard","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-nba-playoffs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114763039041339128","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}