He made Germany world champion in basketball: Who is Gordon Herbert?

As with every photograph, there are many questions and stories behind this shot that try to capture that moment. And some got lost in the winding roads of the past; Many people, some with their names and some with their bodies have made it to this day...

What is Gordon Herbert trying to do?

Does he thank the God he believes in?

Is he trying to enjoy being as light and free as a butterfly after tons of weight has been lifted off his shoulders?

Otherwise, “Okay, I'm in heaven now.

So, is he chasing a question that he knows the answer to best, asking "Where and how did I get here?"

The story of this man began 64 years ago in a small city called Penticton in western Canada. He fell in love with a game like basketball, which was not very popular in that region. Thanks to his rapidly growing height, he managed to distinguish himself from other children on the field and received scholarship offers from some US universities just across the border.

Thanks to the game he loved, he graduated from the University of Idaho, and the harsh winds of fate blew him to Finland. To a country where winters are snowy, icy, and long, just like the land where he was born and raised, and whose people are more interested in sports played on pure white ground, such as skiing and hockey, rather than basketball...

Herbert was steady. From 1982 to 99, exactly 17 years remained in the Finnish League.

12 seasons as a player, then five seasons as a coach...

In the meantime, he got married, started a family, and got used to eating venison and meeting friends in the sauna. In a sense, he became Finnish. Then it spread to Austria, and from there to Germany...

At the beginning of the 2000s, although he had lived in Europe for a long time, he was a basketball traveler who was still at the beginning of his coaching career, whose name not many people knew, and who was completely unknown in Canada, where he was born and raised, and in the USA, where he spent his university years.

From the day he signed for Würzburg to the magical tournament in which he took the German National Team to the top of the world, 23 years have passed. 23 seasons in seven different club teams, a year spent as an assistant coach in the Toronto Raptors, hundreds of matches, wins, losses, missed ones at the last minute... Gordon Herbert came here without knowing what a shortcut or a highway was, always through stony and thorny back roads...

That's why, when the final match is over and his players are celebrating wildly in the middle of the field, it is necessary to understand that he wants to be alone with himself in a secluded corner, taking shelter in a nook that will exclude the world of which he is the champion. Even though we can't fully understand his feelings at that moment...

Summary of success in Germany

It was September 2021 when he was announced as the head coach of the Germany A National Men's Basketball Team.

The Canadian coach, who has assistant coaching experience in the Toronto Raptors in his career, also served as an assistant coach in the Canadian National Men's Basketball Team for many years.

Gordon Herbert, who previously had head coaching experience at the national team level with the Georgia and Finland Under-18 National Teams, won the FIBA Europe Cup championship in 2016 with the Skyliners Frankfurt team and was selected as the coach of the year in the German League.

While Herbert stated that the 2022 European Basketball Championship would be an important target tournament for Germany, he would play his first match with his new team against Estonia in the World Cup Qualification match to be played on November 25, 2021.

And the result:

Championship!