Dan Clark: Doing what’s best for basketball

Ahead of tonight’s opening round of qualification games for the men’s FIBA EuroBasket 2025, we sat down for an exclusive interview with the General Manager of the GB national team, Dan Clark, to discuss building trust back into the national setup.
 
This will be your first EuroBasket window since as GM and GB’s first EuroBasket involvement since a disappointing campaign in 2022, can you explain what work has happened between then and now to prepare for EuroBasket qualifiers?

Me and Marc [Steutel, GB men’s Head Coach] were officially appointed - I say officially appointed as we were in the roles in an unofficial capacity for a bit longer - just before the summer and it was very clear that the structure that was the BBF wasn’t fit for purpose.

It wasn’t something that had solid foundations which we could build something off, and I think that automatically, from day one that the likes of Fiona [Pimblett, Performance Lead], Kieron [Achara, Technical and International Relations Lead and GB legend] and Chris [Grant, BBF Chair] were in those positions that their main objective was to build a solid base that we could then build the rest of the federation on.

When needed, I’ve always been ready to express my opinions about things that were going on and it wasn’t in a good place, especially after the men’s EuroBasket in 2022. The federation wasn’t in a good place, the men’s team wasn’t in a good place. Sometimes you need to hit rock bottom, and hopefully that was rock bottom for us.

I do think since then, Fiona, Chris and Kieron, and the people involved across the federation are allowing us to do things that previously weren’t possible. You just look at the youth team combine, it’s something that in recent years wasn’t even a thought and people like Fiona and Kieron have made that happen.

Things aren’t going to change overnight, and there’s still a lot of trust - both with the young players and the senior players - and belief to rebuild. We’re aware of that, and we’re a long way off where we want to be, but we’re moving in the right direction.

A lack of practice time was cited as one of the challenges that faced you and your teammates at EuroBasket 2022, what's the planned program of preparation ahead of this window?

The good and the bad thing about the way the windows work now is that all national teams have the same amount of training time. There’s a stipulated time of ten days in the FIBA calendar and in the clubs’ calendars throughout the year where that’s identified as the FIBA window. That’s when clubs have to release their players that are selected for their national team. It’s very structured so all teams have the same. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got millions and millions to spend at camp or not, everyone’s got three days to practice.

You see in the windows that a lot of the more successful teams are the ones that may not be the most talented, but they’re the ones that have been together the longest and have a core group of players that know each other inside and out. Them stepping on the court together every four or five months is like other guys going to practice together every day. They know how to player together, they’ve done the system for a number of years. In an ideal world that’s where we want to get to; a core group of players that we can plug talent into where needed.

This means every time Marc gets his players into a window he’s like; “OK guy’s we’re running this play, or that play” and everyone automatically goes, “yeah, lets do it”.

I’ve always said that international basketball is the purest form of basketball you can find. There are no egos involved, there’s no money involved, anything involved that means there’s an alternative objective that’s not just winning basketball games for your country. I think that’s a rare thing to have in the modern game, where a lot of it is around social media and money, this and that. The national team basketball is just about basketball.

I loved every game I played for GB and I’ve loved every game I’ve been involed with it since. You still get that tingling sensation in your stomach that it’s a GB game, or a GB window coning up, and it’s really fun and different for the players, which is what makes it so special for them.

So, it is what it is. We’ve got three days to prepare a team to play against some of the best players in the world and that’s our job. Marc’s great at managing groups, great at managing people, and is a great coach but I don’t care if you’re Marc Steutel, Phil Jackson or Gregg Popovich, there’s only so much you can do in three days. You’re dependent on pure talent, emotion, getting hot, and it’s fun, you never know what’s going to happen.

In terms of invites and players ‘being on GB’s radar’ so to speak, how does communication work between yourselves and the people looking to bring in? Do they know they’re on that radar, and how far out of the window does that communication begin to take place?

Using my experience as a player, I always had a problem with the lack of communication. Lack of communication is not about funding, it’s not about money, it’s just asking a player how he is. Asking how their club season is going, just those little things go a long way with a player. That’s something I’ve really tried to enforce, alongside Marc who’s a great communicator and a really good manager of people, I think we’ve done a much better job of communicating with players. We’ve also started to implement new ways of tracking and monitoring our depth charts, so I think in that sense we’ve made big steps.

We’re in contact with the players throughout the season. What it has been in the past was literally from window to window where you’d get a message asking you to “come to camp, come do this, do that, believe in us it’ll be fine” but that level of trust and belief needs to be built up and it can’t just be a message out of the blue in the middle of January saying “come to Newcastle nest week and play a couple of games”. It has to be a more constant and professional team, using all the resources and - a word I hate, funding - it’s not an excuse any more.

Do we want more money from governing bodies? Yeah, we’ll take it, but at the same time there are certain things that we need to be held accountable for, and communication was one of those things that, no matter what, we can be held accountable for. And if we’ve not done a good enough job of it, we should be told. These days everyone has a phone, everyone has WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever it may be, it’s not that hard to send a message or make a quick call. It’s been very high on mine and Marcs’ priority list because we want to have the best players available in camp, and the way to do that is developing those relationships.

So how many people are GB keeping tabs on at a given time?

Without going into specific numbers, the players we’re in communication with know we’re in communication with them, there are certain players that we’re monitoring that we haven’t necessarily communicated that to and that’s for a number of reasons. It could be that we know they’re not available for windows, like the college kids and the guys in the NBA, whether that’s a viable option or not yet we’re not in direct contact with them. We have made it clear that we’d obviously love them to play at some point, but we know that during the windows it’s not possible to have NBA players, so there’s not really much point in persuing that and that’s OK.

A lot of people question the amount of talent that’s developed on these shores, or can play for GB, and I will go on record saying there’s a lot more than we think there is. There’s a lot of talent out there and I think that some of the work going on at the clubs around the country in developing these players, you have to take your hat off to them. I’m not saying we’re doing it perfectly, and we don’t still have a million miles to go,but there are those examples of what can be done with the talent in this country.

Naturalisation is always a topic that comes up when selecting your squad, what are the challenges in navigating passports and eligibility for the international game?

It’s all about understanding what we can and can’t do as a federation. Who we can pick and who we can’t pick, because there are two types of players that we can have of the GB national team: GB national players and one naturalised player on the squad of 12. That’s not in the window or in the camp that we’re having, but when there’s an official game going on, we can only have one naturalised player. So that’s another limitation that we have.

Because of Britain’s history around the world, there are a lot of people that have access to a GB passport, but FIBA’s regulations state that a naturalised player is someone that didn’t physically have a British passport before the age of 16. You’d be stunned to see how many of these guys haven’t had a passport before the age of 16 - and why would they? But that’s FIBA’s cut-off point and that’s what we’ve got to work with.

So out of that whole group of naturalised players, only one can play. I 100% understand what’s everyone is saying around British basketball, and I think it’s great that everyone’s talking about it so much, but that's the reality of it. It’s a difficult decision for Marc and I to make.

How important do you think it would be for the majority of GB roster to be playing domestically? During your career when you played overseas you’d come back for the window, are there benefits to having the players plying their trade in the UK when it comes to the national team?

I think that’s an individual question for each player. The direction the British Basketball League is going in, there’s a greater interest for those elite GB players to be playing back on these shores.

There are very few things I’ve been jealous of in my career, but one of them was watching guys in Spain play in their home town and the amount of joy and pride that brought to them. I think the British Basketball League is another example of British basketball moving in the right direction, and I think British players overseas will see that and think “if only I had that in London” or “if only I had that in Manchester”, over wherever it may be, at a level that they deemed at a level where their career could progress. Who wouldn’t jump at that? Who wouldn’t want to play at home in front of their friends and family every week and be a home town hero?

At the end of the day they go to these cities around the world and they’re another import who goes in for one year and they’re gone the next. We need to create these stories around the players, making a big deal of them and giving them a profile. Not just in the basketball world, but in the sporting world, making a big deal of what they’re doing. Just look at Luke Nelson and Gabe [Olaseni] playing in London, that’s an amazing story. Gabe was born 10-minutes down the road from Stratford, that’s great. It’s amazing, he was born there, he was built there.

It would be great, not just for the national team but for basketball. It would make it a lot easier to do my my job, but also having that level of teams that these player deem that their career is progressing by signing with them.

What role to do you see the British Basketball League having in developing domestic players? I’m assuming that from their point of view, they want to have the best players out there, where do you see the responsibility GB and the of the League splitting off?

I think there’s definitely an amount of responsibility there. I think there’s a conversation that needs to be had about it, and what’s best for basketball in this country.

The League may have a certain set of objectives and the BBF may have a certain set of objectives, but I think both sides will want what’s best for basketball. If basketball is successful, we’ll be successful. If we’re producing great players and these players are going on to have amazing careers, whether that be in GB or wherever it may be.

The academy structure here in the UK is hugely important as well. It’s just how that’s incorporated into the the League, there are loads of different workflows and algorithms in terms of what’s best and how to develop players, but I just think there has to be a consensus of ‘if basketball’s successful, we’re successful’ and that’s where we’ve got to get to.

I don’t want to say that this new campaign for the GB men’s team is a blank canvas, because there’s been a lot of stuff going on, but there’s a lot of opportunity to be creative and be different. Do different things. We’re in a wonderful place to be able to do that. There’s a lot of stuff that can be done, it’s just doing it and doing the right way.

I do think we’re moving in the right direction and we’re doing things the right way. We’re fully aware that a lot of things have to improve still, but there’s a definite, 110% conscious effort to make sure that we’re trying to do things the right way and do what we think is best for the development of the national teams, whether that be U16s, U18s, U20s, men’s or women’s, whatever it may be we’re making a conscious effort to do the right thing for what’s best for those programs.

The GB qualifiers will be available to watch on FIBA's streaming service, Courtside1891.