Chesterton rising sophomore Bradly Basila’s summer basketball education progressing well

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Quietly, in the hallway outside the Chesterton boys basketball locker room after last week’s summer league finale, Trojans rising sophomore Bradly Basila achieved another first.
Basila conducted an interview in English without coach Marc Urban using the Google Translate app on his iPhone to translate the questions and answers to and from French.
“I’m better now than when I came here,” said Basila, who moved to Chesterton from the Democratic Republic of Congo on Jan. 18 and made his hoops debut Jan. 31. “My English is better now. I can say some things. I can talk to people. In basketball, I keep learning, but I have some stuff.”
That he does, and the more he slows down, the more rapidly he improves as a basketball player.
Even before the summer games tipped off, it was easy to see differences in Basila. He has bigger muscles on his bones. He weighed 164 pounds during the season and on June 1 weighed in at 188, according to Urban.
Basila didn’t hesitate when asked to name his favorite new food since moving.
“Ribs,” he said. “I like ribs.”
He also credited Chesterton strength and conditioning coach Matt Wagner with helping him to inflate his muscles.
Then when the games started, the changes were even easier to spot. He appears to be jumping with more explosiveness and is blocking more shots. He displays a better feel for what counts as a good shot. And he looks even quicker, perhaps in part because subtracting hesitation always accentuates quickness.
As Basila’s knowledge and feel for the game expand, Urban puts more on his plate.
“When he got here, throwing him right into the heat of the DAC with everything that we had in he did a really good job but there were a lot of things that we knew getting through this summer was going to be really big for him, and I think that he’s done a really good job of continuing to learn how we’re playing and where he’s going to be able to score,” Urban said. “The one thing we didn’t do much of was we didn’t put him in a lot of isolations. We tried to keep everything as basic as we could with him, so he had to learn that piece, but he has the ability to be a mismatch problem.”
Not many 6-foot-7 high school players match Basila’s speed, quickness and dribbling ability. He can blow by big defenders and post up smaller ones.
As the approach shifts from games to individual skills when workouts resume next week, dunking remains a skill on which Basila needs work. He never had a successful in-game dunk during his freshman season. He had many in June but also missed too many.
“Throughout the year, his finishing got better. It has to keep improving, but he’s an extremely hard worker, a great kid,” Urban said. “He’s going to continue to work hard and get better. He’s starting to play more athletic. He's getting some dunks. He’s starting to block some shots, rebounding better.“
Learning how to defend aggressively without encountering foul trouble figures to be an area of improvement as well. In foul trouble from the start, Basila was a non-factor in a season-ending loss to Portage in the sectional final at Valparaiso.
That end of the foul equation is not the only area where improvement can be projected.
“The more athletic he can play the better he’s going to be, and the other thing is his ability to get fouled and get to the line,” Urban said. “He’s quick but he’s strong and he’s physical and he’s quick in small places.”
Knowing what to do can unlock a player’s quickness, which appears to be the case with Basila.
“I’m smarter because I learn everything,” he said. “I know how to do things now.”
Part of his basketball education comes from watching the game on TV.
“I focus more to the college game,” Basila said. “I don’t really have a favorite team in college, but I like to watch all the games.”
He said he can see himself playing in those games in a few years. Considering he has three more seasons and three more summers of improvement before playing college basketball, it’s easy to project the uniform of an NCAA Division I school in his future.