With the head coaching vacancy taken care of, the LA Clippers are moving to fill the bench with quality assistant coaches.
There was practically no time at all between the announcement of the hiring of Ty Lue as the next head coach of the LA Clippers and the names of his assistants coming out.
While announcing the hiring of Lue, Shams Charania dropped the first name – Lue’s associate head coach:
Sources: The Los Angeles Clippers are hiring Ty Lue to be their next head coach -- with Chauncey Billups as a lead assistant.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) October 15, 2020
Chauncey! After spending some time calling Clippers games, Chauncey Billups has lately been indicating an interest in picking up a coaching job. And then… things got a little weird.
We started hearing that, wait, Chauncey might not have accepted the assistant coaching spot just yet. That he was still holding out for a head coaching offer, especially from the Pacers.
And so we waited in a bit of limbo, with some reports saying Billups was definitely a Clippers assistant and some saying that the Pacers were going to hire him as head coach.
Today, that’s finally been resolved. The Pacers hired Nate Bjorkgren as their head coach, which ostensibly seals the deal for Chauncey Billups. After a bit longer of a wait than we initially thought, we got our guy!
Since his retirement from the NBA in 2014, there’s been an expectation that Billups would find himself wearing a suit on the sidelines one day, and that time has come.
As the point guard of the 2004 NBA Champion Detroit Pistons, Chauncey has seen a team that wins through hard-nosed defense and playing together. We can only hope that he brings that same sort of leadership to the Clippers as a coach.
But that’s not the only name we’ve heard. A bit later, multiple sources, including Shams again, revealed that Larry Drew would also be joining Ty Lue’s team of assistants. And this one sounds like it’s an official done-deal.
Drew will be reuniting with Lue; he was Ty’s assistant on the 2016 champion Cavaliers, and they will certainly be hoping to recreate that magic in LA with the Clippers.
Though Drew has never had great success as a head coach, as an assistant he brings a long history of experience and knowledge of what it takes to make a run to the Finals – in addition to the 2016 Champions, he was an assistant on the 2003-04 Nets team that would make it to the Finals.
He was an assistant coach with the Cavs until they fired Lue, so he’s seen 4 Finals appearances and 1 championship as an assistant coach.
Between Chauncey Billups, whom Ty Lue wanted as an assistant wherever he landed, and Larry Drew, it seems like Lue had a solid idea of who his guys were before he was even hired.
Steve Ballmer has never shied away from spending on this team, and this is no exception. With these assistants, Ty Lue is getting the bench he wanted; let’s see him go to work with his team.