LAS VEGAS – A sense of guilt almost crept over Jacob Rubin late Friday night as he headed to dinner. Rubin, who recently turned 31 years old, is in his first head-coaching role as he leads the Warriors’ summer league team. He knows summer league is more about development than wins and losses, but he’s competitive to his core, like any coach should be, and badly wanted a victory.
Maybe even more than usual.
Rubin grew up in Los Angeles and vividly remembers Lakers games feeling like a second home. They were his team as a kid, but also the team that knocked his Warriors out of the NBA playoffs in the second round last season. The Warriors fought until the very end, though their fourth-quarter comeback attempt Friday fell short in a 103-96 loss against the Lakers to open the team’s slate of games in Las Vegas. Rubin has a large contingent of friends and family supporting him in Vegas, and yes, he did enjoy dinner but the loss still festered the next morning.
The 2023-24 NBA season will be Rubin’s ninth in the Warriors organization, and he has cleared every hurdle from years in the video room and everything in between to get to where he is as a player development coach on Golden State’s bench. Rubin believes he wouldn’t be here without his two years spent in Santa Cruz, where he was a basketball operations coordinator for a season and then manager of basketball operations the next year. The climb up the ladder began in the G League, and Rubin always will credit people like Casey Hill (then the head coach in Santa Cruz, and now a New Orleans Pelicans assistant coach), Jonnie West (then the general manager of Santa Cruz, and now the Warriors’ director of basketball operations) and Ryan Atkinson (then the assistant GM in Santa Cruz, and now the Warriors’ director of team development), who Rubin still calls a major mentor today.
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NBC Sports Bay Area on Saturday sat down with Rubin for an exclusive interview to discuss a number of Warriors topics.
Dalton Johnson: As someone who has kind of gone through every step, how would you best describe your climb to where you are now?
Jacob Rubin: I just got to do everything. Do the laundry, do the jerseys after the game, the mesh bags, drive the van. You're doing the 5 a.m. Southwest flights and checking in 54 bags off the curb at Southwest. That’s kind of how I started, and I think it just gave me the perspective of, I joke around a lot about I see everything, but I really try and see everything because I think it just helps give perspective of what everyone might be doing in their own role – for whatever it is. So that's how I started. It started there and it just taught me about all the behind the scenes things and I think it made me really realize that it's great to be involved with the game, but on the coaching side is just where my heart was and where my soul was.
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From there, it was two years in Santa Cruz. And then I got really lucky James Laughlin was in charge of the video room up here with Khalid Robinson. There was an opening there and they let me in. It feels like a blur here. It's just been the most incredible journey that I could have ever expected. I think I've already done more than I have ever thought would happen. So at this point, you just just keep your head down and you just hold on and try to soak everything up that everyone's willing to give to me. But I do think everything for me started in Santa Cruz, and it's always near and dear to my heart.
What has been the biggest surprise from a head-coaching perspective that maybe you didn't even expect going into this?
It's just there's so much more besides the game plan. There's so much more besides who's playing, who's not playing and what plays are you running. You're really managing a staff, you're managing a set of players. You have to have the big picture in mind. You have to know when enough is enough, when it's not enough, dealing with giving everyone their roles and making sure everyone feels involved. From the coaching staff, to the players not playing, to coaches who are less involved and coaches who are more involved, you just got to be on your toes. It's just such a different experience. It's fun, it gives me so much perspective for everyone who's doing it.
I told [Warriors coach] Steve [Kerr] this morning, I was like, ‘You're incredible.’ That’s all it was. Like, ‘You're incredible.’ I woke up this morning so mad that we lost, even though it's not about wins and losses. It's fun. I think one of the things I really enjoy is you have to just spend time really thinking about the messaging. I realized that I have great great assistants helping me out with Anthony Vereen and Khalid and Nick [Kerr] and Lainn [Wilson], and they're so good with the offense and the defense and the details. I've started to really try to take the approach of what's the message, what are we trying to get out of the day, what are we trying to get out of whatever we're doing? That for me has been way different, because, obviously, the messaging is not what I’m supposed to do. For the big club it’s way more about the details and the clips and the behind the scenes. So I’m feeling out what do you say in a timeout when we need a burst? What do you say in a timeout when things are going well? What do you say in all that stuff and pregame postgame? How do you just keep it moving?
We're just trying to go day after day after day. After a loss, how do you keep the spirits high? After a win, how do you keep the spirits regular? For me, I think that's been the most interesting part of it, because you can't really prepare. There's no book that says do this, don’t do that. A lot of advice from people I'm really fond of, and just trying to go with the flow with it.
I know you guys are making some changes in player development. What do you think has gone right the last few years, and what are some areas that maybe have fallen a bit short?
I think the process has been right for us. We have a great group of guys. We're really inclusive of one another. We're always talking about what we want to do. I think at times, it is difficult when you want to work with guys on the player development side of things and you're trying to win a championship. Yeah, right. That's one of the most difficult things, and it kind of goes with what I was saying about summer league. How do you keep guys trying to get better every single day when they're not necessarily going to be able to get minutes every single game? That’s one of the more difficult things when your team is trying to win like we are, and you have to deal with it.
But I think one thing we love is that everyone has had their moments. Everyone has proven that they had their moments. Now it's about OK, how can we have more consistent moments that turn into careers, that turn into a season for longer than just a month or a stretch of 10 games or whatever it is. But we have an incredible group. The thing that makes it great is when you want to just work with everyone. When Vereen is working with [Jonathan Kuminga] he's inclusive of everyone with all the young fellas. It's been fun to work together.
Jama Mahlalela was big in his player development role, but is leaving for the Toronto Raptors. What have you learned from Jama that you can take going forward?
Jama was really good for us with his organization of things, and then making sure everyone understood what the next thing that was coming was so we were all on the same page. Player development for us has been an ongoing process. What we learned from him is that we are very powerful as a whole. We got a lot of guys where you see something and this person sees the next thing and I see one thing, where all of a sudden if you put it together, that might be the entire picture of what can unlock a Brandon Podziemski. That's one of the best things Jama did for us was understanding we're very powerful when we work together. But I think that goes with everything from the coaching staff to player development. I hope people can feel it and sense it out there. When you're together as a staff, when you get a group of guys to get buy-in to doing it together, all of a sudden it's more fun. All of a sudden going into work doesn't feel like work, it feels like going to get better.
Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga are going into Year 3 and that's kind of like your Leap Year, right? What makes you the most confident that they can take that leap that's expected of them?
It’s the moments they've shown. Moses, we went to him later on in the playoffs. He was great. JK had an incredible couple of stretches this year when he was going up against guys like Brandon Ingram, at home he had a big-time defensive game. He's shown the likes of being able to guard guys like Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, and you can just throw him against everyone and he can guard so many positions. The moments let us know what's in there. And I think that's just what makes us hungry from a player development point. We know it's there, so let's get it out of them. If they hadn't proven that they could do it, it would be a different story.
There's no doubt in our minds that there's something that those two can tangibly do to affect winning for us, and that not a lot of people on the roster can do. That's big for us. We're just trying to unlock it every single day, and it's always fun when you're working with guys on the younger side of things than the older side of things, although I kind of have been working with the older side of things my majority of the time here, but it's a different challenge. It's a different challenge. It's really fun and we're really close with Moses and JK, and we have a blast working with them.
How do you think someone like Chris Paul can really help those two guys out?
I can't even put it into words. You can't put it into words, you can just see it and you can feel it when you're playing against him. Chris is gonna make all of our jobs easier. Just in my first interaction with him, you can already tell he's just a basketball savant. He still wants to ask questions about the Warriors Way and what we do and how we do it and why we do it, and you can tell he's one of those guys who's going to take all the young guys under his own. He's just going to put them under his wing and bring them along.
Obviously, he's going to be able to orchestrate the offense. Whether JK’s screening and he's diving in the pocket or Moses on the weak side, Chris is just going to be able to see all the pictures and make the right read – not once but twice or even three times. Now you have the defense really trying to figure out what to do. He's gonna be huge for us, he's gonna be huge for them. We’re just excited to see it, you just want to see it.
The way that the two-way contracts worked out last year, Ty Jerome and Anthony Lamb provided a lot as veteran type of players. Now that there are three two-way contracts, do you think that can open up an area for a more developmental player as well to be on a two-way for someone like a Gui Santos? Does that third two-way give a younger guy an opportunity to be able to develop at both levels?
Oh, 100 percent. What you're always trying to get out of the two-ways, we want someone who can either play right now, like a Ty Jerome, like an Anthony Lamb or you want someone who you can develop. When you add a third slot, it's like OK, there's just another chance to develop a guy. If you look at our rotation, we're pretty deep right now. I mean, we want him to win, right? We think we have the pieces to do it right now. So anytime you can get a back-end player who is less about needing to play minutes and it's more about let’s lock into the process and let's really start to understand on the day-to-day, how we can improve them long term, it can really reap some benefits.
That's one of the things Gui has had success with is he's been able to just slowly but surely plug away every single day in Santa Cruz. Same with Lester [Quinones]. Guys like that, it's huge from a player development perspective. Anytime you can get another young guy, it just helps. The more young guys we have, the more they can play against one another, the more you're doing threes and fours, so we'll take bodies every single day of the week, because a lot of the older guys aren't going to be playing in those 3-on-3, 4-on-4 low-minutes scrimmages.
