“Everything is Earned.” Jamelle McMillan, Monty Williams Hope To Change the Culture in Detroit
Jamelle McMillan at practice on November 3rd, 2023. Captured by Zariq Turner for Bullyball.
The Motor City Cruise enter their third season in Downtown Detroit with a new captain of their ship. The team underwent a lieu of changes between the coaching staff and roster since the conclusion of the 22’-23 season. The Cruise finished their last campaign hot in the second half of the season, just falling short of a second consecutive playoff birth. Since, the Cruise’s coach of two years, DJ Bakker took a job to join Bucks’ head coach Adrian Griffin in Milwaukee. Within the Pistons organzation, Dwane Casey and Tom Gores agreed it was time for him to leave his head coaching job with Detroit (which he held for five seasons) into a new front-office role. With Bakker and Casey’s departures, both segments of the Pistons front office were left to fill coaching vacancies.
Once Monty Williams agreed to his lucrative deal to join the Pistons as their next head coach, a Cruise hire shortly followed. Initially agreeing to join Williams’ staff as an assistant, Jamelle McMillan found himself with a new opportunity. McMillan was offered a role as the head coach of the Motor City Cruise by Monty Williams, a task he was more than willing to take on. McMillan, a former assistant coach most recently in Atlanta for the Hawks, is the son of a prestigious NBA coach and former player Nate McMillan. Outsiders would point to Nate as Jamele’s most influential voice in becoming a coach, but they would be incorrect. Although Nate has played a large part in his son’s molding as a coach, it was Monty Williams who crafted the coach you see today.
There’s much more to Williams’ connection with Jamelle than a job title. McMillan played four seasons on the collegiate level at Arizona State University, but after his playing career concluded, he was left questioning his role in basketball moving forward. When I spoke to McMillan at the Cruise’s open tryouts in September he told me, “I was on my way to do tech in the beginning, back in 2012, and that guy (Williams) called me. And he’s thrown me in the fire multiple times, and really given me a spark and an edge for this position.” In 2013, McMillan joined Monty Williams’ staff in New Orleans as Williams embarked on his very first head coaching position in the NBA. McMillan would go on to spend eight seasons as an assistant in New Orleans, and then three seasons in Atlanta with his father Nate, and briefly with his successor Quinn Snyder.
When Williams accepted Detroit’s record deal to become head coach, it wasn’t long before he made a call to a familiar face to help solidify his new coaching staff. Now, McMillan not only is part of Williams staff once again, but becomes a head coach as a result of the man who brought him on during his first head coaching tenure. “I couldn’t think of a better place to start something as a head coach, with the way the identity is, the way my identity is,” McMillan told Bullyball. Firmly a product of the Monty Williams coaching tree, McMillan looks to establish the same identity Williams has with the Pistons.
“Everything is earned,” a phrase uttered by McMillan during the Cruise’s media day on November 3rd, is the philosophy shared from the top to bottom. It’s evident already in Williams’ start to the season, that these words are not empty. I observed the Cruise’s practice, open to the media, that day and it was evident this philosophy is being personified by McMillan as well. Typically, practices I observed in the past were far more lax in nature, which is common for a lot of practices on the NBA/G-League level. McMillan’s practice was the opposite, it was intense and very thorough. Nearing two hours, the practice seemed to be a tone-setter as training camp got underway. Despite the intensity of the practice, it was not a toxic environment of yelling and lecturing that can sometimes follow intense practices. Instead, McMillan spoke delicately, intricately, and with compassion to each player for the entirety of the session.
“We got to learn how to win. We got to learn how to learn how to win together. It means the same thing to everybody involved,” McMillan told the press at media day. Winning means development to this staff, those two words share a symbiotic relationship in their eyes. Often, winning has been pushed to the side for developing teams looking towards the future. That is not the case with Monty Williams, and that is not the case with Jamelle McMillan. The Cruise and Pistons have talent that still needs nurturing and development, but in the eyes of the staff, now is the time to start putting wins together. The immunity of being young and developing is no more, the new coaching regime is as no-nonsense as they are compassionate. Simply put, moving forward, whether it’s the Cruise or Pistons- everything is earned.