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Then-Los Angeles Lakers head coach Jerry West took unheralded rookie Michael Cooper to the side in 1978 before that season’s first practice and told him to pay attention to the elite scorers. The roster included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Norm Nixon, Jamal Wilkens, Adrian Dantley and Lou Hudson. West told him it was in his best interest to concentrate on defense. “I’m heading to training camp. I get to Loyola Marymount,” Cooper, 68, said. “And when I walk into the gym I see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes and Norm Nixon. So, we get into practice and stuff. Jerry pulls me to the side and he goes, ‘Coop, I already have scorers. I got 30 points in Kareem. I got 27 to 28 from Jamaal Wilkes. I got 22 to 25 in Norm Nixon. There is not enough balls to go around for you to get shots. So, I need somebody to play defense.’ “So, I said, ‘Hey, I already got the fundamentals down. I got the aggressiveness down.’ And now I’ve been told that this was going to be my role. So, I took that to heart, embraced it, got better and better.”
Jerry West, the late Hall of Fame player and executive: It first started when we did (a league) in LA. Teams wanted to showcase their players. Along the way, young kids like Kobe Bryant came in and with all the hype they had, the place would sell out every night. Teams started coming out there because they wanted to give their younger players a chance to play. When they moved to Long Beach, my gosh, it was really popping. But then they moved it back to LA and it sort of died out. Warren LeGarie, Las Vegas Summer League co-founder: When I first started, I walked into a gym at Loyola Marymount (in Los Angeles), I didn’t know what to expect. I had a successful business selling fresh fruits and vegetables on the streets of LA from midnight until eight in the morning. All of the sudden, I walked into (the gym) and my life had meaning.
Monty McCutchen, NBA Senior Vice President of Development and Training for Referee Operations: After 30 years, I’ve seen a lot of iterations of summer league. I started as a young referee trying to get into the CBA when it was at Loyola Marymount. It was much more — I don’t use this term pejoratively — but lazy. It was this thing that was there and teams used it, but it didn’t have the energy to it the way this does now. Rod Thorn, former NBA Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations: When Warren was pitching (over the years), he was like everybody wants to go to Vegas. I was like, “Wait a minute, are you serious?” But you had the Rocky Mountain League in Salt Lake City that didn’t have that many teams. Then you had the Orlando League with more teams, but no fans were there.
Indiana Pacers guard Bennedict Mathurin is shoring up his skills ahead of the 2023-24 NBA season. Working with trainer Charlie Max Torres, Mathurin went one-on-one against Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson. The pair also went through multiple shooting drills on the Loyola Marymount court in California.
Jim Boylen has stayed busy since Artūras Karnišovas’ decision to fire him last August in one of Karnišovas’ first major moves as Bulls executive vice president. Boylen spent two weeks with Terry Stotts and the Portland Trail Blazers before and during training camp to consult on the team’s defense. He accepted invitations from college coaches to offer input and advice with visits at Toledo, Loyola Marymount and Golf Coast University. He ran Zoom clinics for the NBA for international coaches. And just recently, Boylen worked the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) International Combine, which filled the void when the Portsmouth (Va.) Invitational fell victim to the pandemic.
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The stories are endless. Kobe challenging a rookie to a fight. Kobe mocking a fringe backup’s limited skills. Kobe demeaning another’s worth. And another’s worth. And another’s worth. He could be unambiguously mean, and one need not dig deeper than the 2003 training camp experience of a former Loyola Marymount standout named Pete Cornell, who happened to fall into Bryant’s sight line while drinking a Gatorade. “Hey rook!” Bryant yelled. “Rook, you know I need a Gatorade! Grab me one!” Cornell handed a 12-ounce bottle of red Gatorade to Bryant.
On afternoons and weekends, the backyard of the Ball family’s two-story home often resembled a basketball camp. The Ball brothers and other neighborhood kids played 3-on-3, hoisted shots or went through ball-handling drills. “It was real intense,” said Loyola Marymount senior Eli Scott, a high school and AAU teammate of the Ball brothers. “We'd push each other every day. There was always something you could work on and there was always someone to push you to get better.” LaMelo may have been four years younger than Lonzo and three years younger than LiAngelo, but neither his dad nor his brothers cut him any slack. When Lonzo ran hill sprints, LaMelo was expected to keep up. When LiAngelo hit a half dozen corner jump shots in a row, LaMelo was expected to match it.
This is what Parham does for a living. His job is to reach people, often professional athletes. Parham is a licensed psychologist and the counseling professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles. Before he took the position with the NBPA, he was a consulting psychologist for the Los Angeles Lakers and worked with the NBA, NFL and several U.S. Olympic teams for years. Parham is also Black. This detail provides important context in an NBA community filled with white leaders and the surrounding racial crisis in America. The NBPA represents a player pool that is approximately 81 percent Black, but that ratio dips precipitously the higher you climb on the NBA’s ladder of power.
For the two decades of this century, and for the last two decades of the last century, the question has triggered debate among friends, on talk shows, and all over the Internet: Is L.A. a Dodgers town, or is L.A. a Lakers town? For 2020, we have a definitive answer: L.A. is LeBron’s town. The Lakers reclaimed their title as the most popular team in Los Angeles, albeit with an asterisk, in a survey conducted by Loyola Marymount University. But no asterisk was attached to the popularity of James, who has united the city in a way even his team has not. “That guy only being here one year and he’s already L.A.’s favorite sports star? That’s pretty amazing,” said Fernando Guerra, director of LMU’s Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss sidestepped a question about Luke Walton's future with the franchise during a live podcast taping this week yet made sure to praise the embattled coach. "I'm not going to give you the answer to that question," Buss said when asked about Walton remaining as coach in her appearance on the Sports Business Radio Road Show on Tuesday at Loyola Marymount University.
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Timofey Mozgov: I did a lot of three-pointer shooting and we went to play to UCLA and LMU several times a week. Basketball players who live in Los Angeles gathered there. Actually, it happens in every city (it's a pity they don't do it like this in Russia). In big cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles and others NBA players train together and play against each other. Up to four fives can be formed in UCLA, for example.
“I take pride in my decision. There are no regrets at all. At the end of the day, people are going to do what they want to do. Whether it’s going to college, whether it’s skipping college to go to the NBA, whether it’s quitting basketball altogether — people will make their choices. This decision is what I wanted to do, and I embrace that. It’s my life, my decision, my path and my journey.” Bazley has been part of five-on-five games consisting of NBA players at local gyms in L.A. this summer, and he explained his new decision while waiting his turn to enter a recent run at Loyola Marymount University. He starred at Princeton High School in Cincinnati, committed to Syracuse and has been projected as a top-10 pick in the 2019 NBA draft. He wanted to become the first top prospect to forgo college and make the professional jump in the G League, but a closer inspection proved there are obstacles.
Adam Himmelsbach: Per a source, former NBA star Clyde Drexler's son, Adam Drexler, is working out with the summer Celtics today. Not on the full summer league roster yet though. Drexler played at Loyola Marymount and Houston before playing overseas.
In his early teen years, DeRozan began studying every Bryant move. At age 16, he met Bryant at a summer run at Loyola Marymount, and Bryant quickly took to him, offering his brand of vicious advice when they'd see each other. DeRozan swallowed it whole. "Kobe had an aura around him when he was on the court; he intimidated all of us. I was inside a video game," DeRozan said. "I'd watched him growing up. I watched Kobe do everything. His shot. His footwork. How he works in the post. Everything growing up was Kobe. I tried to emulate the tough shots he took, his pump fake. There's nothing you can show me that Kobe has done on a court that I don't know about or have tried. I practice almost all of them."
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