This is a story about a father and son, or maybe two sons, two brothers. Father and Sons. As Cat Stevens used to say. Jim Baron is coming from Brooklyn, where he was born in 1954, and basketball has always been his love. He was a very good guard, good enough to get a scholarship from St. Bonaventure, in the Buffalo area. During his last season, the Bonnies won the NIT Tournament. No small thing. Baron didn’t have big numbers and no chance to build a pro career. But basketball was running in his blood. So, he supported his love by becoming a coach.
As a coach, he was going to have a 40-year long career, 29 seasons were spent as a Division One head coach, plus a handful of seasons as an assistant at Notre Dame. He was hired to coach St. Francis, who won 11 games out of 28 the year before his arrival. Four years later, led by Mike Iuzzolino (who was going to be a big star in Verona, but in the 2000/01 season was playing in Milano, too), St. Francis won the Northeast Conference and clinched a berth to the NCAA Tournament. It was 1991 and Billy was just an infant. His family lived in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where Billy was born. Jim was an up-and-coming coach who was outgrowing St. Francis. In 1992, his alma mater, St. Bonaventure, brought him back home as a head coach (in 2000, his best season, the main player was JR Bremer, who was going to play two seasons in Milano later in his career). In 2001, he was then hired to resurrect the Rhode Island program, which he did. Three times he was named the Atlantic-10 Conference Coach of the Year (a fourth award was won while he was still coaching at St. Bonaventure), five times he led his team to the NIT, but mostly he enjoyed coaching his oldest son Jimmy for four seasons.
The journey brings us back to Altoona, where during the month of December of 1990, Jim Baron second son, Billy, was born. His development as a player followed the path paved by his older brother Jimmy: Bishop Hendricken High School, followed by one season at the Worcester Academy, Massachusetts, to get ready and be prepared for the challenge posed by college basketball. Eventually, he was supposed to playing for his dad at Rhode Island. But Billy had greater aspirations and better offers. Virginia recruited him to play in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference. The coach was Tony Bennett, the team had great ambitions and the competition level within the team very high. Three years later, that team was going to rise to the number 3 of the national rankings, with six future NBA players on its roster. That was a rebuilding year: Billy started very well, scored 19 points in his debut against William & Mary, staying on the court for 21 minutes, going 5 for 6 from three-point range. He scored 14 more points against USC Upstate. 33 points over two games and his career started with a big bang. But reality set in very early. From the third game on, he was going to play scarcely. As his great friend Joe Harris did, all he needed to do was to wait for his turn. Harris is now one of the best three-point shooters in the NBA at Brooklyn. But, after 17 games, Billy decided to leave Virginia behind and to come back to his dad. He was going to play for him, after all, at Rhode Island. Father and Son.
This is not a happy ending story, however. Rhode Island had a bad season. Billy averaged 13.0 points per game, but the team finished just 7-24. On March 3, 2012, Baron scored 11 points in a road loss to UMass that ended the season. The morning after, Billy was going to meet his dad over coffee when the news hit heavily. Coach Jim Baron had been fired. He had won 183 games for the Rams, and, before that subpar season, his team averaged around 22 wins per season over a five-year span and was consistently among the top Atlantic-10 teams. Jim Baron thought of Rhode Island as the final stop of his coaching career. In that moment, the disappointment was huge but there were a lot of doubts about the future, too. What Billy was going to do one year after leaving Virginia to join forces with his dad?
He decided to transfer again. He was going to attend his third school over three years. He didn’t know at the time, but this kind of journey was going to serve him well for what was waiting for him in Europe, where changing teams almost every season is common. In a matter of 15 days, Jim Baron was hired by Canisius, in Buffalo, some kind of return at home. Billy never had a doubt: just like he did when he left Virginia, he left Rhode Island to help his hurting dad. Just to understand what Canisius was at the time: during the 2011/12 season, the team won five games and finished last in the MAAC (Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference) with a 1-17 record. During the first season of the Baron family there, the Griffs won 20 games and moved up to the fourth place; during the second season, they won 21 games and finished third. After averaging 17.2 points and 5.0 assists over the first season, Billy came up big the following season, increasing his scoring average to 24.1 points per game (and 5.3 assists). He was player of the year in the conference and the fourth-best Division One scorer. That season he shot 42.1 percent from three.
Jim Baron retired in 2016 as a coach. In the meanwhile, this story became a brothers’ story. Jimmy Baron was already established as one of the best shooters in Europe, playing for Mersin in Turkey, San Sebastian in Spain and in 2013 for Kuban in Russia, helping his team win the Eurocup championship. He averaged in double digit and shot better than 44 percent from three. It could have been his chance to make the jump to the EuroLeague, but he had an injury and had to take a step back and come to Italy, in Rome. His career ended in 2020 (now he is moving the first steps to be a coach). In 2015/16, when Billy was in his second season as a pro, the two brothers played together in Charleroi. A unique situation, a terrific one, something to cherish for the rest of both brothers’ lives. Billy had his breakout season, averaging 20.7 points per game in the Eurocup. So, one season later he moved up to Spain and spent two years in Murcia, playing again at the Eurocup level, something that he was going to do again with Red Star. Totally, he has 57 Eurocup appearances in his resume with 699 points scored, 122 for 279 from three. In Charleroi, the Baron brothers played together for the first time, but their careers were going inevitably in opposite directions. Jimmy was past his prime, Billy was about to enter it.
During the last three seasons, he has been one of the shooters in the EuroLeague, playing for Red Star and Zenit Saint Petersburg. He has scored 933 points over 88 games, 10.6 points per game, 20.5 minutes per game spent on the court, basically he has scored one point every two minutes of playing time. He’s made 188 threes, shooting north of 40 percent for his career. During the last season, that he finished with Zenit in the VTB league, he’s won the league championship overcoming CSKA Mosca in a great final series, winning Game 7 on the road, coming back from a 1-3 deficit. His reputation as a shooter is unquestioned. He is accurate, of course, but has also a lightning-quick release that allows him to take a shot in a blink and from everywhere past center court. His game has been built around the player he admires the most, Steph Curry. It has been years since he started studying him on films, trying to understand how to create a shot for himself while closely guarded or how to make a decision between shooting or attacking off the dribble or again passing the ball to a teammate left open. Billy Baron is a shooter, first and foremost, and we are going to find out about him soon. Stay ready.
