featured-image

Walton Seeks to 'Empower' Clarkson and Others

SANTA BARBARA — Few people were as excited to hear about Luke Walton becoming head coach of the Lakers as Jordan Clarkson was.

“When he got hired, I ran around the house for like five minutes,” Clarkson said at training camp on Wednesday. “My friends will tell you that I jumped over the couch like three or four times.”

Hurdling some furniture shouldn’t be much of a sweat-inducer for Clarkson, who is one of the best athletes on the Lakers.

His new coach wants him to use that to his advantage on the defensive end.

“The challenge for him is become a very good defender,” Walton said. “The first two practices we’ve had, he’s been one of our best. He’s been aggressive. He’s been chesting. He’s been fighting over screens.”

Clarkson knows that he has areas to improve upon from his first two years in the NBA, including drawing fouls, hitting 3-pointers consistently and, yes, defense.

“I was just terrible on that end,” Clarkson said. “Taking wrong angles, wasn’t there. … It kind of got to a point where it was bad. We were a bad defensive team as a whole last year. But I just took it upon myself to really improve on that.”

And while defense has been about 90 percent of the focus in the Lakers’ first two training camp practices at UC Santa Barbara, Clarkson says that Walton has the team thinking differently about offense as well.

“I want to play the right way,” Clarkson said. “I felt like at times last year I wasn’t playing the right way on offense. In college we could take tough shots and your field goal percentage would go down. I’m glad Coach is here and preaching about moving the ball and getting the easy shots. That makes the games a lot easier.”

Walton doesn’t have any goals set for Clarkson on the offensive side, preferring to keep the 24-year-old’s mentally locked in on defense.

But he has indeed preached his offensive philosophy to his players.

“It’s more of a team idea of ball movement, player movement and never standing around,” Walton said. “I think if the team embraces that, the way Jordan plays and the way he moves on the court, he’ll have a great year.”

While Clarkson and D’Angelo Russell have been two of Walton’s biggest supporters, they are far from the only ones that he has given free rein to.

One of Walton’s theories as head coach is that success follows when coaches instill a sense of responsibility.

He cites his head coach from his playing days with the Lakers, Phil Jackson, who famously never took timeouts when his players were struggling because he wanted them to figure the problem out themselves.

“I want to empower all of our players, honestly,” Walton said. “When players take over and they take ownership of the team, they play harder. They hold each other accountable because it’s their team.

“You always have more pride in something if you feel like you have a bigger role in it. The more ownership our players take and the more power they want to have — as long as we’re doing things the right way, I’m gonna encourage all of our players to do that.”

This can certainly be seen in rookie center Ivica Zubac, who has been encouraged to work on his perimeter shooting.

He played the last three seasons in Croatia and Serbia and says that he would be benched for the rest of the game if he had tried an outside shot in Europe.

“I don’t feel bad that I take shots from almost the 3-point line,” Zubac said. “I know I can hit that shot. Whenever I think I can make a shot, I take it and no one will say anything bad to me. That feels great.”

Zubac and friends will reconvene at UCSB’s Robertson Gymnasium later in the afternoon for their first two-a-day session of training camp.

Walton figures the players will be eager to scrimmage for the first time as a team.

“We want to see the carryover from the drills we’ve done the last two days,” Walton said. “I would expect that what we see is a lot of turnovers and sloppy play because we’re finally going to let them loose and let them get out there and play. And people are fighting for jobs and time and everything else.”