‘What other owner is playing full court?’: Luis Scola’s transition from the NBA to owning an Italian basketball team
Houston Rockets Phoenix Suns NBA
Mike Vorkunov
For his second act, the five-time Olympian who Daryl Morey calls a "basketball genius" is trying his hand at ownership.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/static/img/athletic-icon-96x96.png
The Athletic
This summer, Luis Scola texted Paolo Galbiati, a two-time head coach in the top Italian basketball league, asking if they could talk. Galbiati was floored, and excited.

Scola asked Galbiati to find a quiet place somewhere outside of Milan’s city center where he could go unrecognized. Galbiati grew up near Milan and was a staffer at Olimpia Milano. He considered the request, and how preposterous it seemed.

Scola was an international basketball star, not just a former NBA starter but a five-time Olympian. Eighteen years ago, Galbiati was in Athens, watching in person as Scola and a hallowed Argentinian national team slayed the U.S. to reach the gold medal game, where it defeated Italy.

Where could he go to allow Scola to hide in plain sight?

“Luis, you are Luis Scola,” Galbiati recounted telling Scola. “Jesus Christ, everybody knows you. You are not a secret.”

The two settled on a bar; Scola was recognized but mostly undisturbed. He was there to talk to Galbiati in a new capacity. Not as a wily and bruising big man but as a team executive. It is a part of Scola’s second act, one that has anchored him in the northwest of Italy. At 42, he is now the majority owner of Pallacanestro Varese, one of the country’s winningest clubs but also one that has fallen on hard times in recent years, trying to not only bring it back to greatness but also disrupt how professional basketball teams operate in Europe. He landed there by a slip of serendipity; one failed blueprint remade into an even grander one.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended Scola’s tidy exit strategy for his storied career. That season was supposed to be his last; a one-year warm-up at the famed Olimpia Milano to get him ready for the Olympics that summer. Then, when he had represented Argentina one last time on the international stage, he would finally bow out.

But the sports world stopped that month, the European basketball slate got canceled, and the Olympics were moved back one year. That left Scola, who played nine full seasons in the NBA, beginning in 2007 with Houston, in search of another team that could serve as a bridge once again. He had been marooned in Italy for months at the start of the pandemic and had no interest in seeking out another EuroLeague team and leaving for another country, so he chose Varese, the small but historically great franchise roughly an hour north of Milan.

This time, the run-up to his retirement went as planned. He played for Varese, and then in the Tokyo Games. When he retired, at 41, he contemplated his next move, where he could go after a life that began in Buenos Aires and took him to the NBA and professional leagues in Asia and Europe.

Scola considered assisting with the Argentine Basketball Confederation. Instead, he moved back to Italy and settled in with his last team. At first, he planned to only consult, but became CEO in September 2021. Varese started losing games, and Scola was more and more involved. Then the general manager resigned, and things got worse still, and Scola became more entrenched.

His return to Varese came with its own kind of plan too. He rejoined the club with the option to eventually purchase it. The agreement called for him to buy control over five years. By May, it was his.

“I feel there is a lot of margin for improvement here in Europe and European sports,” Scola said. “People with NBA experience have a huge edge compared to other places. They’re a little bit behind. I also knew that it would be difficult to do things because teams structured here in Europe are used to doing things in one way for many, many years, and sometimes it’s hard to get people to do things differently. I knew whatever I did I had to be in a role to make decisions.”

Varese, with Scola as its controlling owner and Michael Arcieri, a former Knicks executive, as its general manager, could be on its way back to glory by a duo bringing the NBA to Italy. Not just in personnel, but also in philosophy and reach.

The club lured an NBA assistant to be its head coach, replacing the archetypal European iron-fisted coach with one who has direct ties to Moreyball. Meanwhile, Scola has leaned on advice from executives from those 2010s Rockets for which he once played and embraced analytics as he tries to shake up a team that has lingered at the middle and bottom end of the standings since it was promoted back to Italy’s top league in 2009.

So far, this season, the results have supported them. Varese is out to a 6-3 start and tied for fourth in the Serie A standings. It is a promising beginning for a franchise that has only placed in the top 10 three times over the previous decade. Scola, too, must be validated. Varese was to be a stop-over, a coda to a long and illustrious career. It has become a new passion project for a hands-on owner who still gets into the gym to work out against his players when he could have just retired and finally relaxed.

“Some days I ask myself that question,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that. I just wanted to do this. I wanted to do a basketball project.”

There are many differences between an NBA organization and one in the Italian league, not least of all the number of emails. In the NBA, Arcieri said he was besieged by them. When he was an executive in New York, he would answer 40 to 50 a day. In Varese, he averages two. When important meetings happen, he sometimes hears of them because Scola’s executive assistant sits nearby.

The break room is just outside his office. So is the coffee maker. That is a hub for internal communication. Here, no one gets into the office at 7 in the morning.

“They’re getting in at 9,” he said. “We’re trying to change that.”

Arcieri, 58, is no newcomer to the country or its ways. He was already living in Anconella, a small village in the Bologna province, before he took the job at Varese and was quite comfortable. He had resettled there with his wife, herself Italian, and they were raising a young son. It was an opportunity for him to explore his roots. His parents are Italian; his mother was born there and his father went to medical school in Bologna, Arcieri said.

He already had one dream job in the rearview. Arcieri was a Knicks fan growing up in New Jersey and bootstrapped his way into the NBA while also attaining his law degree. He started out in ticket sales for the Nets, turned that into a scouting opportunity, left to run a Manhattan community center and led a peripatetic basketball life until he was hired by the Orlando Magic in 2012. When Scott Perry, an assistant general manager in Orlando, took over as Knicks GM in 2017, Arcieri went with him as one of his top lieutenants.

But in Nov. 2020, after another regime change at Madison Square Garden, and after working for three-plus years with the Knicks, Arcieri decamped to Italy and lived contentedly there, not quite putting the NBA behind him but at least on hold as his family grew. He planned to look for a job back in the league this season until he received an unexpected text last December from Gersson Rosas, the former Timberwolves president of basketball operations and now a Knicks adviser who at that point was still out of the NBA.

Rosas told Arcieri he was working to help Scola and asked him to scout the team. Arcieri told him he would but forgot. Days later, Rosas texted again. Arcieri said he would, and fortunately, Varese’s game was being broadcast on Italian TV that day. Soon after, he contacted Scola, but Arcieri’s wife went into labor on the day they were supposed to have a video call.

While he was sounding out Scola, Arcieri had the same questions as everyone else for the 22-year pro. Why was he in Italy, and why did he buy Varese? Scola laid out his motive during a meeting in early January outside the Milan train station.

Scola told him he believed the European model for team management was decades behind the NBA, with a shortsighted focus on winning games year-to-year and no overarching philosophy in place. The coach was king, and the decisions stemmed from him. He thought the NBA provided a better construct, and Varese should emulate that.

He said, Arcieri recounted, that he was committed to this rebuild. Scola and his wife bought a house in Varese, a few kilometers from the team’s facility. He wanted to create a linear structure for player development. He wanted to refresh the club’s style of play, prioritizing shots in the first eight seconds of the shot clock, valuing layups and 3s and discarding the rest.

Arcieri was convinced. He agreed to take the job on Jan. 9. Scola asked him to join immediately — Varese was already spiraling. Two days later, Arcieri packed enough clothes to last him a few months and drove the three hours from Bologna to Varese. His wife and newborn didn’t join him until March 1.

“Obviously being able to get GM experience and have the opportunity in a small way and with a small-ish team, (to) just be able to build a basketball team the way you kind of always thought, ‘OK, this is how it should be done,'” he said. “This is the kind of players you want to have. This is the kind of staff you want to have. This is what you want coming to work every day to look and feel like. So that part’s amazing. Because I spent all my years working for other people prior to helping them.”

When Arcieri arrived, Varese was a mess. It fired one coach last January and then another in April, reportedly after he clashed with players. The club had a late-season surge just to finish 12th in a 16 team league.

Scola and Arcieri have set out to systemize the franchise. To tweak the working hours and the channels of communication. To put a process in place if a player gets hurt so that word spreads across the organization, instead of just sitting in a silo between coach and physio.

The two work in tandem, different in personality and style but affixed as a smooth pairing. Scola brings a brand name, while Arcieri has contacts developed over decades in the sport from the grassroots on up. Scola, still lithe and athletic, and often seen in basketball shorts and battling on the court, brings a ground-level expertise to the executive suite. Arcieri is oft-composed, with his well-coiffed gray hair and a blazer, choosing his every word carefully, deploying his years of front office experience.

“They complete each other,” Galbiati said.

Scola has leaned on old Rockets executives for advice. He said he speaks with Rosas frequently and tries to run most important decisions by him. He talks to Sam Hinkie sporadically.

He and Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey go back-and-forth too. Morey, who calls Scola a “basketball genius,” asks him about team culture, and Scola asks about running a team.

Still, Scola talks openly about how much he has to learn. He jokes that when he was near retirement, at 41, he was quite old for his job, and as soon as he took over as CEO, he became very young for his new one. He tried to ease into it but found that Varese needed more from him.

“Playing is not the same as being in the front office,” he said. “I discovered that very quickly. Maybe you understand basketball playing but from the optics you have in the office and behind the desk in the office is very different.”

The new management has tried to infuse an NBA mindset without preening about it. There is an emphasis on a player-first approach, and a more relaxed environment.

Matt Brase, a former NBA assistant and the grandson of legendary Arizona coach Lute Olson, was named head coach of Scola’s team. Galbiati, a former head coach in the league, was brought in as an assistant. They hired a former Japanese national team assistant to head player development.

The influx of new faces has been met with a shift in office dynamics, with Arcieri and Scola trying to sift through the cultural differences.

“I come in relaxed and really just trying to integrate myself with them and not be heavy-handed at all,” Arcieri said. “Like never say ‘in the NBA.’ No. I’ve stricken ‘in the NBA’ — I don’t want to talk about that. I want to understand how they do their jobs. But then at the same time now we’re going to do it a certain way. But I think I’ve been able to kind of sow some goodwill and be a partner and so then you can affect the change you want as opposed to coming in heavy-handed and saying I want emails from all of you.”

But these changes, Arcieri believes, have made them a destination. During the coaching search last summer, he and Scola sought an NBA assistant and Arcieri said nine Americans were willing to take the job. He conducted some interviews while tucked into a corner of his son’s room with a light, talking on Zoom while his infant slept at night.

They were able to poach Brase from an NBA bench; he was an assistant with the Trail Blazers last season. He has a long history not only in the league but also with how Scola wants to play. Brase was the head coach of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in Texas for three seasons and then a Rockets assistant for two more.

Brase had two more seasons left on his contract with Portland but wanted to be a head coach, so he overlooked his fears about leaving the NBA for a league he did not know.

“It’s not easy to get an American NBA coach to say, ‘Hey I’m going to leave my high-paying job and my per diem and my five stars to leave my American team to go coach a team in Italy,’” Arcieri said.

There have been adjustments for everyone.

For Arcieri, free agency last summer was chaotic compared to the NBA, where front offices prepare throughout the season, with an understanding of who will be available on the market and months to rank options. In Europe, he said, agents send out lists of their clients that offseason. Some have a handful, some offer dozens. In all, he had over 1,000 players to sift through.

The season ended in May, but he was still working on signings into mid-August. Eventually, Varese landed several players with past ties to the club. Markel Brown, a 2014 second-round pick, played for Brase in the G League. Tariq Owens, who was on a two-way deal in 2020, and Colby Ross share an agent, whom Arcieri got to know while in New York. Each wants to get back to the NBA, and Varese was an intriguing choice.

“They all have experience in the NBA,” said BJ Bass, the agent for Owens and Ross and who represents about 25 players in Europe. “They are trying to run an NBA system, which is kind of unique. They have an NBA coach. That’s appealing for prospects.”

When Brase started watching film of the Italian league while he went through the interview process, he saw a more physical sport, with more post-ups and grabbing and holding. He did not know the referees were touchier too. He earned a technical foul in a preseason game after asking why there wasn’t a foul call after a play. Brase was bemused and confused; he doesn’t even speak Italian. But he did receive a text after the game from an NBA executive who knows the league: “Welcome to Italy.”

It took some time to adjust to the roads and how to navigate the city’s roundabouts, and to reconfigure the practice schedule. Brase wanted to practice during the afternoons but found out that restaurants in the area shut down mid-day and players need somewhere to eat lunch. Varese now starts at 10:30 in the morning and is done by 1:30, just before the shops close.

“Living in Italy, I’ve told a couple of people, it’s not just anything is wrong,” Brase said. “But it’s just a little bit different than what you’re used to.”

Scola told Brase that the sport needs to be fun and to imbue joy into the team, so he has added music before practice and during drills — an outlier from the Italian norm.

Galbiati has been the head coach of two Serie A teams, and the change in style at Varese is apparent. In his new organization, there is more of an emphasis on politeness, on happiness. When Varese lost on a buzzer-beater early in the season, he was struck by the smiling faces at the facility the next day. “That’s not usual,” he said. “For two days in Italy you used to stay sad.” Yet, he has come around to it.

The use of analytics is irregular in the league as well. Italian teams use numbers, of course, Galbiati said, but not to the degree Varese does.

Brase has been fluent in this since he was in Houston, growing up in what he calls the “Daryl Morey lab” and using numbers to make decisions. There, he said the team’s analysts were the smartest people in the organization; it became the coach’s job to get the team to play in a way that got the end result they needed.

Varese hired its own analytics analyst and Scola is a strong believer, as is Arcieri. The team now plays in a way reminiscent of the NBA Morey has catalyzed. Brase wants them to get to the rim, to the free throw line, and to take 3s. The team leads Serie A in points, 3s, and shots per game, is second in free throw attempts, and is third in assists.

“They try to do something different,” Galbiati said. “Basketball is basketball in every part of the world. Talking about analytics, talking about points per possession, talking about many different things that are usually different than in Europe. They really believe in that. … The approach to the game is different. The approach to every single practice is different.”

When Brase first came to Italy, he landed in Milan and took a car straight to the practice facility. No Varese players had arrived yet but the organization’s Serie B team was there, comprised of Gen Z ballers, few older than 20. Scola was on the court with them.

“This is awesome,” Brase said. “What other owner is playing full court?”

Scola has earned a reputation as a hands-on owner. He is involved at every level of the team, buoyed by three decades in professional basketball and an Olympic gold medal.

After practice, he is known to change into his compression shorts and dive into player development sessions with the team’s big men, helping on their pick-and-pop and pick-and-roll games, lathered up from the workouts.

“I like to sweat,” he said. “I like to play basketball. I just like to hang around when my schedule allows it… I wish I can do that more. It’s more fun than a desk job.”

That role has been time-consuming. Scola is a presence around the office and involved at every level of the team. He is a grinder, just as he was during his playing career. He pokes and prods in conversations with staffers, encouraging them to speak but also demands cogent responses.

He has grand ambitions for Varese, hoping to turn it into a large-scale operation. Scola already bought back Varese’s youth program — sold off, Arcieri said, by previous owners for liquidity. He may also bring in outside investors to build up the club even further.

It is all at the heart of Varese’s new direction. Scola has deviated from European norms because he has his sights set on bigger ideas.

At Varese, power has shifted away from the coach and to the front office because as owner Scola can now think years ahead into the future. He does not just want a winning team, but also wants to create a success over the long term. That could take five or even 10 years, and coaches don’t last that long in Europe.

“It’s a little bit different the way the teams are run in the NBA than the way teams are run in Europe,” Scola said. “And we feel a little bit more to an NBA type of team; maybe a lot more towards an NBA type of team. But the point when I say NBA, I obviously use quotes because there’s no jets here, there’s no Vince Carters, there’s no €200 million training facilities.

“So we’re not the NBA — that’s very, very clear. But the principles, we feel closer to the NBA than Europe.”

(Photo illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Getty; Mattia Ozbot / SOPA Images)