Adam Caporn has been selected as the next head coach of the Australian Boomers.
Caporn, 42, is currently an assistant coach with the Washington Wizards, and will take the reins of Australia's men's national basketball team following the departure of Brian Goorjian.
One of Australia's rising coaches, Caporn has been an assistant for the Boomers over the program's last four major tournament campaigns, serving under both Goorjian and Andrej Lemanis, winning a bronze medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
"I feel very prepared," Caporn told ESPN.
"Brian Goorjian, in the last campaign, really helped me flourish and gave me a lot of confidence, and I feel very ready for the role. The other part is, being part of the Basketball Australia pipeline, the basketball community all my life. It's what I really love and cherish, and value, and feel a product of."
Caporn was among five candidates who progressed to the advanced stages of the Boomers' head coach search at the end of January. Joining Caporn as finalists for the position, sources told ESPN: Quin Snyder, Gordon Herbert, Will Weaver, and Bret Brielmaier.
Snyder -- currently the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks -- was a strong candidate for the head coach position but removed himself from the process due to an inability to commit to the time commitments. Snyder is currently in talks with Basketball Australia about potentially joining the Boomers program in an advisory role, sources said.
"It's an exciting moment for everyone involved to announce Adam Caporn as the next coach of the Australian Boomers," Jason Smith, Executive General Manager of High Performance, said.
"If you look back on every stage of Adam's career, he's had a positive impact. From the Centre of Excellence to the NBA and his work as an assistant with the Boomers program. There's a trail of success wherever he goes. This appointment speaks to Adam's dedication to his craft and a testament to the calibre of the coaching pathway in Australia."
After finishing his playing career in 2009, Caporn joined Saint Mary's College as an assistant coach, where he'd spend four seasons. Following that stint, he would take up the head coach role at Basketball Australia's Centre of Excellence -- based at the Australian Institute of Sport -- for seven years, developing strong relationships with the nation's best up-and-coming talent.
Caporn -- a native of Western Australia -- has spent the last few years within the NBA ecosystem, first as head coach of the Long Island Nets in the G-League, before joining the Brooklyn Nets' coaching staff. He's currently a front-of-bench assistant for the Wizards.
"The Boomers have so many compelling attributes that help us compete on the world stage," Caporn said. "My pitch really was that those things need to be held up, valued, re-established, encouraged. The things that make the Boomers special are the culture. That's not the three words written on the board; it's what they're about when they come together from all parts of the globe now, to represent a country, inspire a generation, and that, ultimately, I feel like my experiences being part of the team the last two campaigns, working with a lot of these athletes, my NBA experience, makes me the right leader at the right time to be a facilitator for this team to achieve something special."
The Boomers are coming off a sixth-place finish at the 2024 Paris Olympics, bowing out of the quarterfinals at the hands of eventual bronze medallists Serbia.
The program has been in the midst of a transition between its preeminent stars of the 2010s - led by the likes of Patty Mills and Joe Ingles - and the current rising players in Josh Giddey and Dyson Daniels. The next major tournament -- the 2027 FIBA World Cup in Qatar -- projects as a completion of that transition, with a larger focus on those younger players.
"The guys who have had a lot of experience in the last two campaigns, those roles are gonna grow," Caporn said. "I think that seems most likely. What Dyson and Josh Giddey, and others, but those two in particular, are doing currently at their age in the NBA is really exciting, and how they performed in the Olympics and World Cup is really exciting for Australian basketball.
"What I really see it as is us standing on the platform of a lot of Boomer success, greatness, culture, and writing our own story... I don't see this specifically as a line in the sand or anything like that -- past Boomers will remain a part of it; we've got a lot of exciting things on the horizon -- [but] Josh and Dyson are doing some exciting things, for sure."
Giddey, Daniels, Jock Landale, and Dante Exum are regarded as the program's leadership group entering the next wave of major tournaments.
"I thought a lot of good things happened in the last campaign that gives us a good platform to build off," Caporn said. "As a playing style, it's certainly to our strength to play as Australians, and in our interests, and that's how we'll be successful. The concepts of that, that I'll try to uphold are that we're tough defensively, that we're disruptive defensively, that we're difficult to play against, and a united approach on that end. I think in the last tournament, we finished second on the defensive end of the ball, and I was really proud of that achievement.
"Offensively, I do think Australians play best at pace. That's not just running up and down the court, it's playing together; playing fast up and down the court, and moving the ball side to side as well. The strength of Australian basketball is often in its collective IQ and toughness. Offensively, we will be a team that moves it, shares the ball; we have great versatility in the current squad and people I anticipate coming into the program over the next couple of campaigns. They would be the main concepts."
Melbourne United head coach Dean Vickerman will serve as an associate head coach under Caporn, and take control of the Boomers during the non-major-tournament FIBA windows. Caporn is still in the process of filling out his coaching staff, and said he'd like to include a former player.
"Very excited about having Dean on the staff," Caporn said. "A very highly regarded and experienced coach. We've both worked for Andrej Lemanis, and I've seen him in other FIBA campaigns - World University Games and other things - and followed his NBL team closely. Really excited to have him on staff. I love the way Dean's teams play but, more importantly, how they compete, and how much he pours into developing the culture of his teams."