Scoggins: What you think you know about Chris Finch isn’t close to who he truly is

Chris Finch pulled up a chair at one of his favorite establishments in the North Loop section of Minneapolis, fresh off an eventful 48 hours as Timberwolves coach.

One night he collected his 200th win in a dominating performance, the next night his team lost to a depleted Indiana team in frustrating fashion.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Finch said, “it’s an emotionally violent business that we’re in.”

This has been a particularly stressful season for the 55-year-old basketball lifer. Consistency has been a fleeting proposition as the team navigated a new iteration after jettisoning keystone Karl-Anthony Towns. Nothing has come easy.

Finch has won more games than every coach in franchise history except Flip Saunders, all amid a five-year cyclone of upheaval with three different general managers, two blockbuster trades and one contentious ownership change.

His entire coaching career has tested his adaptability. He has seen and experienced more than most coaches with a résumé that spans the spectrum.

I wanted to learn more about the person behind his professorial demeanor, so I asked Finch if we could grab a beer. He accepted.

Here’s what I discovered over a pint and hourlong discussion …

Finch loved to visit Gettysburg and Valley Forge as a kid. He was high school teammates with former NFL quarterback Kerry Collins. His mom danced with the Radio City Rockettes before he was born. He coached two teams that went bankrupt during the season. He has a rule of thumb when picking a housing location: Only live where he can walk to get a sandwich. He still buys music on iTunes, and if you catch him cruising on his 19-foot boat on Lake Minnetonka one summer day, he’ll likely have country music on the speakers, though his tastes range from Pearl Jam to ‘70s disco.

If he hadn’t become a basketball coach, he envisions a career as a college professor or a writer.

“I didn’t really have a Plan B,” he said, “but I didn’t know where Plan A was going to go either.”

He studied politics/government in college and flirted with the idea of law school or the FBI.

“The part of politics that I liked was the competitive part, the elections,” he said.

He pursued a master’s degree in international politics from a university in England while playing professional basketball there. His thesis topic: The collapse of communism post-1989 and the misperceptions by Western government and media.

His 17 years spent in Europe as a player and coach nurtured his fascination with history, culture and geopolitical makeup of different countries and how places looked immediately after the fall of communism compared to today.

Those experiences shaped him both personally and professionally — and taught him the best place to order carbonara in Rome.

When he played in England, he got to know the family that owned the team. Finch worked in the marketing and public relations departments for extra cash and to try something new. He also helped organize events for the family’s sports management company.

He got hired as head coach at age 27. He wasn’t a product of a coaching tree. He had no NBA connections. He didn’t attend coaching clinics of prominent college coaches. He loved the fluidity of Bobby Knight’s motion offense, but his own system came through trial and error.

“I knew who I was and what I believed in,” he said, “and then I stubbed my toe a lot along the way.”

Nights spent in low-budget hotels in Romania or Hungary reinforced values that have not eroded with NBA fame and fortune. Show humility, be a normal guy. He doesn’t view his job as a tier above others in his profession.

Finch has struck up a friendship with St. Thomas coach Johnny Tauer and makes himself available to coaches seeking advice.

Minnesota’s high school coaches hold a clinic every year in downtown Minneapolis at the end of October, which coincides with the start of the NBA season. The Wolves usually send a coach to the clinic for a chalk talk session.

Longtime team executive Jeff Munneke asked Finch during his first year if he would be willing to visit with the coaches for a half-hour.

Recalled Munneke: “He said, ‘Half an hour? These are high school coaches. I’ve got to give them more time than that.‘”

Finch spoke for an hour and also brought assistant Elston Turner, who also gave an hour presentation. At the end, Finch told the 400 assembled coaches that he had passed Brit’s Pub on his walk to the hotel and that they were welcome to join him for a beer there when they were done.

A bunch jumped at the offer, resulting a night of telling stories.

“I consider myself lucky to be where I am,” Finch said. “I put the work in and had the journey, but I don’t feel that just because I’m in the NBA that I’m necessarily a better coach than a high school coach. There are a lot of great high school coaches out there. [Tauer] is probably every bit the coach in many ways as guys that are walking the sidelines in the NBA. It’s just we all do it in a different context.”

His basketball idol as a kid growing up near Philadelphia was Dr. J, Julius Erving, but he preferred watching the Celtics and Lakers because of their style of play.

Finch believes basketball should be improvisational, allowing players to have freedom on the court. “I don’t think the game should be overly patterned, programmed, scripted,” he said.

He points to seminal moments in his coaching career. There was the time he coached Great Britain in the 2012 Olympics and six summers before that event. The team’s director of performance was an Australian whose background was in women’s field hockey and rugby. The man knew nothing about basketball.

“He never pretended to be a coach,” Finch said. “But he was really good at coaching coaches.”

The director encouraged Finch to be creative, try new things, don’t be afraid to fail. They were underdogs already, he reminded Finch, so he had nothing to lose.

“That’s extremely liberating for a coach,” Finch said. “You almost never get that.”

His NBA break came when the Houston Rockets picked him to coach their minor league affiliate, Rio Grande Valley Vipers. The Rockets were fully invested in analytics and Finch’s team was used almost as a lab experiment. His squads in Europe had played fast and shot a lot of threes with “zero science behind it,” so this was a perfect marriage.

“I already had proof of result before I understood why,” he said.

Former Watertown-Mayer High standout Matt Janning joined that Vipers team in a trade. Finch brought Janning into his office the night he arrived.

“He had this book shelf and it’s just filled with three-ring binders,” Janning recalled recently. “Each one had probably 200 to 300 pages in it. He was like, ‘Hey, just pick a book and open it.‘”

Janning walked over, grabbed one and opened it to find detailed analytics for every facet of basketball. The coach was putting science into action.

“I’m a big believer in, if you give freedom to your players,” Finch said, “they’re going to gravitate to the things they do well.”

He has things he gravitates to in his personal life. Downtown living, being on the lake on a summer day, walking to Target Field for a baseball game.

Many coaches live an existence that restricts their presence to two places: Home and arena. Finch fell in love with Europe’s café culture long ago, which is why it’s not unusual to see him out and about in the North Loop.

“I want to walk and be outside,” he said. “It adds to your quality of life. I got used to living that way. I don’t have kids. It keeps you young. If I’m bored — which I get bored easily — I’ll be like, ‘Let’s go grab a beer at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a summer day.‘”

He says he has a rhythm but not a strict routine as a coach. He re-watches his team’s games only once, then moves on to preparing for the next. He doesn’t have trouble falling asleep after games, though if he wakes up in the middle of the night, his mind starts racing.

“That’s kind of my torment,” he said.

As our glasses neared a final sip, Finch reflected on his five seasons.

“I’m super-lucky,” he said. “I’m one of the one-percenters to get to coach and fulfill my dream. I’ve had really good rosters, and I got here at the right time. The team was ready to win.”

Outside, Finch headed back to his place. But not before recommending an outstanding pizza place next door.