Legend of French basketball of which he was the leader in the selection for a good ten years until this famous Olympic medal in Sydney in the year 2000, Antoine Rigaudeau is no longer directly involved in the affairs of a club, as he may have been in the past, whether as sports director at Paris Basket (in 2006) or coach at Paris-Levallois (in 2015). But he remains an informed observer, often seen in the aisles of French theaters, in Cholet or elsewhere.
“There is a passing deficit in the current game”
Like Nikola Jokic who also loves this expression, Antoine Rigaudeau regrets the old-fashioned collective, with a richer passing game than in modern basketball, inevitably influenced by the NBA.
“The pass does not make two players happy, but five! “, explains “the King” on Skiweek, in a retrospective interview of his career carried out on the stage of his beginnings at La Meilleraie, in his hometown of Cholet. “ I definitely think there is a passing deficit in the current game. We no longer pass each other, we no longer keep the ball alive. And perhaps even more so, in French basketball, we have a lot of players who dribble a lot, but dribbles that are useless. »
Although he was very comfortable on the pitch from a tactical point of view, Antoine Rigaudeau was, however, cramped in the coaching outfit. A second career which ended short, at Paris-Levallois in 2015, after seven months and a record of 5 victories for 10 defeats.
“I didn't enjoy coaching more than that. Training on a daily basis, taking care of young people and making them understand things, [ça me plaisait] but where I didn't enjoy it was the match itself. To manage the team and see what was happening on the pitch… So, I saw things, but they didn't match what the team needed. And then, the message didn't get through. There was no pleasure, I didn't have the right sensations. That's how I work and it didn't work. It was better to say stop because it was becoming negative for everyone. »
“The keys cannot be given, they must be earned”
An attentive spectator of French designs in international competitions, Antoine Rigaudeau was obviously marked by the failure of the last World Cup. He regrets that the group did not have this feeling of urgency, and of sacred union which had allowed it to sublimate itself in the past. And in the future, he hopes so.
“For me, everything starts from scratch at each competition. No matter who we're talking about, you have to come to the French team with the mentality of proving that you can be part of the group. There is a possibility of getting a medal [aux prochains JO]. In the last competition, I found that everyone's objectives were not the common objective. In any team, if there is not this common desire to go to the same place, and to do what needs to be done to get there, there is little chance that the objective is achieved. »
And there is no question of directly giving the keys to the Blues to Victor Wembanyama, for Antoine Rigaudeau.
” The keys [de l’Équipe de France], it is not given, it is earned. Whether it is the players, or the staff members, to be able to become a leader, you have to prove it on a daily basis. And not just during matches. [Dans le cas de Wembanyama], he will have to prove that he is capable of taking on this. But it is not the work of a single player, we come back to the collective aspect, it is a whole group which will ensure that we get this medal. Generally speaking, I am not in favor of creating a hierarchy because so-and-so plays in the NBA, so-and-so won a title…”
