-
Ohm Youngmisuk, ESPN Staff Writer
MARK FEW WANTED Ty Lue to get some fresh air away from basketball at the Olympics. He kept trying to coax his fellow Team USA assistant coach to venture outside of their Paris hotel this summer.
“He’s in his comfortable little box,” Few told ESPN earlier this month from the Summer Games. “I try to get him outside and get him to grow and see the rest of the world out there.”
Lue, though, was broadening his horizons on basketball. When Lue wasn’t coming up with schemes as Team USA’s defensive coordinator to slow down Serbia’s Nikola Jokic or France’s Victor Wembanyama, he was also learning from some of the game’s best coaches.
Over the past two summers with Team USA, Lue took note of head coach Steve Kerr’s mastery of movement and ability to command a locker room with a measured voice — traits that helped Kerr win four NBA Finals titles with the Golden State Warriors. Lue picked up on assistant Erik Spoelstra’s trademark intense preparation that led to two titles with the Miami Heat. And Few got Lue, who thrives at making adjustments game to game, to see coaching through a one-and-done tournament approach which made Gonzaga a NCAA powerhouse.
Lue also spent an increasing amount of time with Jeff Van Gundy, who will now return to an NBA sideline for the first time in 17 years as Lue’s top lieutenant and defensive coordinator with the LA Clippers.
Lue and Van Gundy, who has long been a Team USA staff member, dove deep into the Clippers over four dinners in France. They reviewed playsets, pick-and-roll and transition defensive schemes. They crunched the numbers on Van Gundy’s research to improve the team’s rebounding.
And when they weren’t breaking French bread and X’s and O’s together, Lue and Van Gundy were found sitting side by side on several of the team’s train trips to games.
“They were obviously so dialed into helping us with [USA Basketball],” Few said. “But then they’d be meeting on the side, eating or riding [together] somewhere. “Sometimes I would sit in and listen to them [talk Clippers] a little bit …”They’re both just basketball grinders, man.”
After helping Team USA win gold, Lue (who led the Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2016 NBA title) says he is as energized as ever heading into his fifth season as Clippers head coach. He’ll need to be at his best with All-Star forward Paul George now with the Philadelphia 76ers, and Kawhi Leonard‘s late-season knee injury — which led to his replacement on Team USA’s Olympic roster — casting some doubt over whether the two-time Finals MVP can remain healthy.
After building a perennial contender around George and Leonard for the past five years, the Clippers will now try not to miss the postseason for just the third time in 14 seasons.
“When you lose a guy of Paul George’s stature, instantly people [think] oh, they can’t win or they’re not going to be competitive,” Lue told ESPN last week. “But that just challenges me even more. OK, people are counting us out or people don’t think we’re going to be good. That right there just gives me an extra dose of [motivation].
“I can’t wait to prove everybody wrong.”
DURING TEAM USA coaches’ meetings and dinners, Lue scribbled sets and diagrams on anything he could write on. He’s stored some 300 plays on his iPhone photo album and notes, knowing the Clippers will now play differently than they did with George.
“He’s like Russell Crowe in ‘A Beautiful Mind,'” said Spoelstra in July, comparing Lue to the actor’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash. “He’s got papers, diagrams, notes all over the place.
“He never stops. He’s always thinking about a way to do something better.”
After George signed a four-year, $212-million deal with the Sixers on July 1, Lue began strategizing how to play without the All-Star swingman.
Since replacing Doc Rivers during the 2020-21 season, Lue has tried to crack the code of getting the Clippers to their first-ever NBA Finals. But now he has to do so without George’s 22.6 points per game and 41.3% 3-point shooting.
“My mind’s always going,” Lue told ESPN in July at Team USA camp. “When you lose an important piece like Paul, you gotta do it by committee. He’s a very huge defensive player for us, handling the ball, scoring the basketball, making plays. So losing him is going to be tough.”
While the Clippers were not willing to give George a fourth year or a no-trade clause to go with a three-year deal as he wanted, the franchise did show how much it believes in Lue, handing him a five-year extension this offseason. With George gone, the Clippers added defensive-minded players like Derrick Jones Jr., Nicolas Batum and Kris Dunn.
They also signed guard Kevin Porter Jr., who last played for the Houston Rockets before he was charged with assault and strangulation of his former girlfriend last September.
Once again, Lue may have to do more with less like during the 2021-22 season when the Clippers reached the play-in tournament despite George limited to 31 games due to injury and Leonard missing the entire season following ACL surgery.
The Clippers’ success this season will ride on Leonard’s health, who played in 68 of the first 74 games in 2023-24, including 27 straight to start the regular season. That helped the Clippers win 51 games for their most since 2016-17. But inflammation in his surgically-repaired right knee kept him out of the final eight games of last season.
That injury also limited Leonard to just two games in the first round for the second straight postseason, this time resulting in a six-game exit to the Dallas Mavericks.
The last time Leonard was seen on the court was in July at Team USA’s camp in Las Vegas before he was ultimately replaced on the roster by Boston Celtics guard Derrick White. Lue said Leonard will be ready for Clippers camp in October.
“I speak to him all the time,” Lue told ESPN last week. “He’ll be ready for [Clippers] training camp. He’s feeling good and I know he’ll be ready for training camp.”
Lue is also looking forward to having a full camp with point guard James Harden, who was traded to the Clippers at the end of October. The Clippers immediately lost six straight, five with Harden in the lineup. But once Harden got on the same page with Lue, the Clippers went 26-5 during one torrid stretch.
“It will make a huge difference,” Lue said of having an entire camp with Harden.
“Having to learn [how to best use him] on the fly was tough… What he’s shown us is that we can run a pick-and-roll … scoring the basketball, making plays for each other, making it easy for everybody to play.”
While the Leonard-George era only produced one Western Conference finals appearance in five years, Lue told ESPN in July he doesn’t “look at it as a failure.”
“We never put our best team on the floor in the playoffs,” Lue said. “That’s when Kawhi’s at his best, PG’s at his best. That’s when I’m at my best. When you get to a seven-game series and you can pick teams apart offensively and defensively, we were never able to get to that point.
“These guys put the hard work in. We took different approaches to help guys stay healthy and it just didn’t work. We tried everything.”
LUE’S TWO SUMMERS with USA Basketball has allowed him to sharpen his coaching mind earlier than usual entering a Clippers camp.
But while the Team USA coaches have grown close and shared laughs over their group chat and happy hours, their competitive nature means they didn’t always reveal all their secrets.
“I’ve been trying to get Spo’s zone out of him for two years now,” Lue said with a smile. Lue, though, now has Van Gundy’s defensive expertise. The 62-year-old hasn’t been on an NBA sideline since the 2006-07 season, having worked 16 years as a television analyst for ESPN and at various roles with USA Basketball. But he might be the Clippers’ biggest addition this summer.
In the nine full seasons he coached the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets, his teams ranked in the top-six in defensive efficiency, according to research by ESPN Stats & Information. He will look to enhance a Clippers defense that ranked eighth in 2020-21 and 2021-22 but dropped to 17th and 16th the past two seasons, respectively.
“Jeff is not afraid to share his opinion,” Few said. “What you need as a head coach is somebody that’s strong as an assistant that’ll give you a different opinion if needed, try to change a coverage, an approach, how you deal with a player. It’s just so healthy to have somebody that’s had so many experiences like Jeff.
“It was just a great move. It was brilliant.”
Lue’s relationship with Van Gundy stretches to his playing days when he played under Van Gundy in Houston during the 2004-05 season. When Lue was the Cleveland Cavaliers coach, he tried to convince Van Gundy to join his staff. Lue is well-versed in the Van Gundy philosophy having also played for Jeff’s brother, Stan, and working with Tom Thibodeau, a longtime Van Gundy disciple, as assistants with the Celtics.
“I’m a little nervous and on edge,” Van Gundy told ESPN. “Because I want to do my part and blend in with the other coaches and help Ty because I’m really grateful for the opportunity.”
That anxiety led Van Gundy to treat his time in Paris like a study abroad trip. In between his Team USA duties and those dinners and train rides with Lue, Van Gundy was glued to his laptop watching Clippers games from this past season.
“He’s a basketball film rat,” Lue said. “He’s calling me, asking me questions, offensively, defensively, all the different things about game 17 [of last season]. I don’t remember that s—.
“But he’s locked into all that.”
And so is Lue. Both coaches are known for not getting much sleep and there will be countless late nights trying to figure out life without George.
“That’s what we need,” Lue said of him and Van Gundy trying to get more rest. “Losing PG, starting over with a younger team and doing things the right way — it’s going to take both of us to really get our guys on track. The addition of Jeff is going to be huge for us.
“The pieces that we added this year, we got to play a different style. But we’re going to play winning basketball and I know we’re going to have a chance to be pretty good. It’s going to be my job to make sure we get to that point — whatever I have to do.”
