The LA Clippers Have Hired Their Next Coach: Ty Lue

After a long search, the wait is over! The LA Clippers have hired Ty Lue to be the next head coach.

After all the speculation and worry about the coaching search, the LA Clippers ended up making the choice that many of assumed they would from the very beginning.  We can breathe again; Ty Lue is the head coach of the Clippers.

News broke today from Woj that the offer was extended and Ty Lue accepted it; he’ll move from assistant coach to head coach and take the reins next season.

Throughout the search, Lue was constantly mentioned as the frontrunner, but a lot of us were getting antsy as the list of interviewees kept coming and no hire was made. Especially lately, when we were hearing that Lue was also a finalist in New Orleans and Houston, some of us were wondering if the Clippers were going to wait too long.

But that fear can be put to rest now. We’ve got our guy. And in his piece for ESPN, Woj mentioned that Lue “has had significant support among key Clippers players in the search process.”

To me, “key Clippers players” means Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.

This will be Ty Lue’s head coaching gig since being let go from the Cleveland Cavaliers. He won a title in his first year and made the Finals in his second and third years before being fired 6 games into the post-LeBron era.

While we can credit a lot of those Cavs’ successes to LeBron, of course, Lue was known for making quality adjustments to exploit matchups, which is something that fans of the LA Clippers will be all too happy to see, coming from Doc Rivers.

When Lue was hired as an assistant, we assumed that it was going to act as a stepping stone to another head coaching gig for him somewhere down the line. And while we didn’t necessarily expect it to be with us, we now get to reap the benefits.

Bringing Ty on as head coach will let the Clippers keep some institutional memory in the organization; the coach is a guy that the players already know, and he won’t be bringing in a bunch of terminology and playcalling from a different team or from twenty years ago.

So breathe easy, Clippers fans. We didn’t bring on Mike Brown, we didn’t bring on Jeff Van Gundy and we didn’t bring on Mark Jackson. Instead we have a championship level head coach who already knows the players.