When Dennis Schröder recently stopped by the cup final tournament in Munich, he talked about an interesting plan. He hopes to “win a German championship title with Braunschweig” after his career in US basketball. An ambitious goal, as the club has been stuck in the middle of the Bundesliga for years. But for Schröder, Braunschweig is a matter close to his heart; after all, the 30-year-old’s roots in his homeland are so deep that he has also been the owner of the Lions since 2020. Schröder and Braunschweig, a lifelong liaison – and the NBA professional is serious about his plans to play for his youth club again one day. A world champion comes home, that would be a nice story.
But before that, Schröder is still working on his history in the US professional league, where he recently moved from the Toronto Raptors to the Brooklyn Nets in his eleventh season. The tricky thing about it: the thing about changing clubs has become its own story for him, the one about the wandering man. Seven restarts in the past six years are extraordinary even in the NBA’s “hire and fire” culture, especially since the German rarely came close to winning a title. And so, in the late phase of his USA tour, the question arises as to whether Schröder isn’t wasting his best years a little by aimlessly wandering around the league.
It is probably well known that the NBA offers tough conditions for the professionals, despite all the millions in income of its participants. Players are peddled, shipped and traded without any influence. That’s what happened to Schröder, who recently fell victim to a complete upheaval in Toronto – in the middle of the season he suddenly fell out of the starting lineup, then the club decided to give up almost all of the suitable players in order to regroup. “I know that this is a business here in the NBA,” Schröder recently said succinctly to the German Press Agency. What the heck, you can’t change it anyway.
He thinks that if he changes, “my salary won’t change, I may be in another city, but I can bring my family with me, they pay for all the travel – that’s a luxury problem.” So now New York, where the coach recently had to leave and a lot of things also look like a transition year. An annual salary of more than twelve million dollars for one of the currently worst teams in basketball’s main virtue: shooting baskets.
At Schröder’s new club, the Nets, it looks like a transition year again
When the Nets played in Orlando on Wednesday night, Schröder was briefly happy to see his World Cup buddies Moritz and Franz Wagner from the Magic again. Like the Berlin brothers (16 and 21 points), he himself had some strong scenes (15 points and three sunk three-pointers), but Brooklyn played horribly overall. In the end it was 81:108, beaten up again, the playoffs a long way away – that is now Schröder’s reality. He experienced a similar dead end in the 2021/2022 season when, after leaving the LA Lakers (including failed contract negotiations), he first ended up on the bench in Boston and then with the notorious losers the Houston Rockets.
At the end of the current season he will around $90 million deserved, you can get over some fainting and some series of defeats. But that’s just the financial aspect. From a sporting perspective, such a career path cannot satisfy a seasoned NBA professional like him. Schröder is still an excellent instinctive player, his ICE approach, his feeling in the undergrowth of the zone and his willpower to show it to everyone have brought him to where he is today: he is the playmaker of the world champion. Because in the German national team he enjoys exactly the freedom that his game needs. Under national coach Gordon Herbert, he was allowed to be the deciding factor at the World Cup, with the result that he was voted the best in the tournament.
Open detailed view
This is how the Brooklyn Nets need Dennis Schröder: on the way to the basket to score points.
(Foto: Petre Thomas/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con)
This role was mostly denied him in the USA, where Schröder was an adjutant for the elite when he played in ambitious teams (such as for LeBron James in his Lakers days) – but not one who drove an entire team into the title race. “When the shots fall, everything becomes easier for me,” he said this week after a rare win against Memphis in which he underlined his improving form with 18 points – and indirectly added what he sees as the problem: “If When I meet my colleagues as well, my game also opens up.” Schröder has to live with the fact that his teammates miss all too often in Brooklyn, in the no-man’s land of the league.
“We need his three-pointers, but also his aggressiveness towards the basket,” says his new coach Kevin Ollie, who has taken over on an interim basis. “He knows how to organize an offense, so he should play with all his freedom and be communicative.” Whether this freedom will result in more victories will probably only become clear next season after a few modifications. The question is whether Schröder hasn’t moved on by then.
2024-02-28 12:17:15
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