Now in his second season with the Lakers, assistant coach Chris Jent first worked with Darvin Ham as a fellow assistant in Atlanta, prior to joining Ham’s staff in Los Angeles to start the 2022-23 season. Jent, who’s been coaching in the NBA since 2003, also had a wide-ranging career as a player that found him on the court 13 different teams, in five different countries.
Jent joined us at the team hotel during a recent Lakers road trip to detail his basketball journey:
MT: When did you fall in love with basketball?
Jent: Growing up in a small town, you played multiple sports, so it was when I was 13, the summer before 8th grade. I was drawn to hoops, but also loved football and baseball. That summer sparked the serious passion for the game.
MT: You grew up in Sparta, in the northern part of New Jersey. You’re 6’6’’, but were you a tall kid? Early or late growth spurt?
Jent: I was always tall. Had tall parents, and I was always the tallest kid. I grew four to six inches every year until I was a sophomore in high school. I played a lot of pickup basketball at the part, and usually with adults. I’d usually play point guard, but I was also a rebounder, so I’d rebound and push the ball and play on the perimeter.
MT: When did you get into the AAU circuit?
Jent: That started my freshman year of high school; I went to play for the best AAU team in New Jersey, the Road Runners. Kyrie Irving, and a lot of guys who played in the league played for the Road Runners. There was also travel basketball, a lot of good basketball, but our town was not known for hoops at all … it was a football and wrestling town.
MT: What position did you play in football and baseball?
Jent: I played running back as a youth, ended up as a receiver and linebacker, and returned kicks and punts as well. I stayed on the field the whole time. In baseball I pitched, and played center field. My dad was a big-time baseball player who was drafted a couple of times to play professionally before he threw his arm out. That was the first sport you learned in our household.
MT: In a four-kid household, all four of you played Division 1 sports?
Jent: Yes, it was an athletic household. My oldest brother Eric played basketball at Colgate, the middle brother Tim was a quarterback at Lehigh University, and our younger sister, Megan, who is 13 years younger than me, played basketball at Robert Morris. I played at Ohio State. I was the youngest of three for a while before Megan, and that reflects my personality.
MT: So in short, you got pushed by the two older brothers, maybe pounded on you a little bit…
Jent: Yes, my brother that’s a career Marine is three years older than me, yeah. He works for the government now. Infantry … he’s been out of service for eight years since his last tour in Iraq.
MT: I imagine it’s hard to complain about much to your brother that has served!
Jent: Keeps things in perspective, for sure. That was my guy, the one that was always there to punch me in the arm, so to speak.
MT: When did you start to stand out as an athlete?
Jent: I was the best athlete in our area and certainly in our town, in a lot of sports. It had a lot to do with that nurture from my brothers and dad. We just had a very competitive household. Everything changed for me the spring of my freshman year when I went to try out for the Road Runners. Got in the gym, and I was one of about 35 kids. And you either made the team, or you got cut. I was shooting around, and distinctly remember looking around the gym for my dad, and he was gone. It was like, ‘You gotta sink or swim, buddy.’ I remember that feeling of ‘I gotta be me,’ and I was a young kid, but I felt so comfortable in that gym, in that moment, with people that were more like me that could run, jump and move. I thought it was great. A whole other level. Then I started to spend a lot of time with the Hurley family in Jersey City in the offseason. I would live with them, travel with them, just to be around the sport.
MT: You’re of course referring to Bob Hurley, the legendary coach of St. Anthony in Jersey City*, and his sons Bobby (Duke University and six-year NBA player, current coach at Arizona State) and Dan (current coach at UCONN, the defending NCAA champions). Was it Bobby that you played with?
Jent: Yeah, he was a year younger than me. He graduated high school in 1989, and I was ’88. Bobby was the point guard for that Road Runner team starting with his freshman year of high school when I was a sophomore.
*Bob Hurley won four national championships and 26 state championships.
MT: Did you ever think about transferring to St. Anthony to play with Bobby under his dad?
Jent: It was talked about, but I just had way too close ties with my buddies I was playing with. And we were very highly competitive in the state as well at Sparta, so it wasn’t like we were a bad team and I needed to go elsewhere.
MT: Did you have a moment where you first started to play against really good national competition and you realized what that level was, or was it already available just going into New York City or Philly?
Jent: We spent a lot of time going into NYC across the bridge, playing against the Gauchos, and Riverside Church. In fact, I played with Riverside Church during my senior year, back when you could bring somebody in from out of state; that was when Kenny Anderson and Malik Sealy were there. All you had to do was stay in that Tri-State Area, including Philly, where we’d drive down to. And we’d also play in Newark, NJ, and played against the Newark Y, who had a really good squad.
MT: When did you start getting recruited, and where were you choosing between?
Jent: It was Big East vs. ACC, and everyone was really surprised when I went to the Big 10. I was a top 25 kid in the country, all that good stuff, and everyone assumed I’d stay around, at Seton Hall, Syracuse or Pittsburgh. It was just something about the people at Ohio State, the recruiting class when I went onto campus and visited, I just jived more with the incoming freshman that were there. In hindsight, it might not have been the best basketball decision, but it was a great life decision as far as meeting great people, and that chemistry was evident from the start.
MT: Any other schools in the mix?
Jent: I was originally going to go to Georgia Tech, but then Dennis Scott signed there. Back then, you recruited a two guard and a small forward. I was the two guard they were recruiting, but when Dennis signed … back then, you didn’t leave school early, so if you had someone in your position ahead of you, you just moved on and went to the next school. And then he left early, which was new to our game back then.
MT: In hindsight, you could have easily played together, but that’s not how it worked back then?
Jent: Yeah, back then it was a different mindset. And they did try to sell me on that, where I’d be the small forward.
MT: What was your Ohio State experience like?
Jent: It was great. We lost our head coach after my freshman year, Gary Williams went to Maryland, so there was a time where some of us were thinking about transferring, and I was certainly one of them. I was thinking about going back East to Seton Hall, Pitt or Wake Forest, who had a young kid coming in named Tim Duncan. That was a process that summer, but I decided to stay. And it was great. A very close-knit group, we really grew together, and had a heck of a team by the time we graduated.
MT: How here’s where we start to get …
Jent: A little funky!
MT: For sure, and let’s just lay out the whole deal:
1992-93: Rapid City Thrillers (CBA)
1993-94: Columbus Horizon (CBA)
1993: Joventut Badalana (Spain)
1993-94: Houston Rockets (11 playoff games, and won a ring)
1994-95: Rapid City Thrillers (CBA)
1995: North Melbourne Giants (Australia)
1995-96: Serapide Pozzuoli Napoli (Italy)
1997: New York Knicks
1997: Serapide Pozzuoli Napoli (Italy)
1997: Atlantic City Seagulls (United States Basketball League)
1997-1998: CFM Reggio Emilia (Italy)
1998-1999: Termal Imola (Italy)
1999-2000: Panionios (Greece)
2000-2001: CFM Reggio Emilia (Italy)
2001-2002: Pallancanestro Pavia (Italy)
MT: Before your worldwide hoops travels begin, and presuming that the dream was to be drafted in the NBA, how did you handle going undrafted?
Jent: I was disappointed. There were some teams that were talking about drafting me. I did some draft workouts, and I thought they went well. I played a different style than the player that I was in college, where I was more of a blue collar, dive-on-the-floor, take-charges type. I could still score. I was still the second leading scorer on our team, but I didn’t show my offensive talents. I was hoping I could show that in the next chapter of my basketball career, and get that confidence back in my offensive game. But my mindset was, I’m going to give myself three years to make the NBA, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll move on.
MT: Your first stop is with the Rapid City Thrillers of the CBA, in South Dakota.
Jent: I asked to be traded from Rapid City, because I was just a token rookie, with all former NBA guys on the team. (The coach at the time) Eric Musselman did a fantastic job of keeping the rights of any guy that got a call up to the NBA, and I just wasn’t getting burn. I was like, ‘Muss, I need to play … can you trade me to Columbus?’ They didn’t have a very good team, but I could be marketable, because of the Ohio State connection. And they honored that. I ended up going there and being all rookie team in the CBA, and when I was on my way home to train for NBA camps, I got a call from Joventut in Spain, who had lost their American, Harold Pressley, that they needed a player. So by the time I got to Jersey, the next day I had a plane ticket to head to Spain for the playoffs. I was there for just the end of the year.
MT: So what was it like for a Jersey kid who’d only played in America to suddenly be in a high-level Spanish league?
Jent: It was unbelievable. It was right into the playoffs – high intensity. We ended up losing to Arvidas Sabonis’ Real Madrid team in five games, and to see the intensity and passion at that level was really impressive. I was thinking, ‘I don’t care what anybody says about overseas, this is the real deal over here.’ They offered me a minimal, kind of nothing two-year deal, and I said ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ In hindsight, it probably would have been good to do it just to stay in that Euro League level. Because I didn’t realize how things worked. The difference between leagues in Europe … that was one of the most hostile environments I’d ever played in in my life.
MT: Did the head coach speak English?
Jent: No, but the assistant coach was fluent in English, and he was my right-hand man. But it was hoops. That’s a thing I’ve always hung my hat on. I can get in any basketball environment, and I don’t need to speak the language, I can figure it out. Because of playing so much hoop, you can really survive, and I’ve always had that feel on the court.
MT: The universal language of basketball. So, you end up going right into another playoff series, but this time in the NBA, where you win a title with Houston in 1994. How did that come about?
Jent: I was having an All-Star year in the CBA in Columbus, and I actually got a call up earlier in the year. Houston was trading Robert Horry and Matt Bullard to the Spurs for Sean Elliot. The Rockets called me and said I had a roster spot, and this was in the middle of the season. But Sean Elliot failed his physical, and the trade was off.
MT: Ouch!
Jent: I go from fulfilling my NBA dream to going back to the CBA. Unbelievable. But (head coach) Rudy Tomjanovich was like, ‘Hey, CJ, if there is ever a chance for me to bring you back here, I don’t care if it’s for a 10-day, I’m going to do it.’ Sure enough, the last five days of the season, they found a way to do it. It wasn’t like today; you were either in uniform or you were out. If you were on injured reserve, you had to prove that you were hurt. So someone was on IR, and Rudy called me up, and I played great. Robert Horry, who I knew from high school and college, was like, ‘Yo, CJ, I’m going to say I’m hurt.’ We were playing Denver at home. And he was a little banged up, but he said, ‘I’m going to tell them my wrist hurts so you can start the second half.’ And I made like five threes, had 17, played well, and that was what catapulted me to being in uniform for the playoffs.
MT: OK hold on, I have to stop you there, as Robert is not only a Lakers champion, but an analyst for us on Spectrum SportsNet, and I need to ask him about this immediately. So …. He just volunteered?
Jent: He probably wanted to sit his butt down too, because it was the last game of the season.
MT: Oh I see, so you’d already clinched the playoffs…
Jent: We were already the No. 1 seed. It didn’t have stakes. Rob said he’d talk up the injury so I could get some opportunity. I was like, ‘My Man!’ I ended up fouling out. But … fantastic.
MT: So did you feel like you had some momentum towards getting an NBA contract?
Jent: That’s what stunk … that offseason, I had the first surgery I’d ever had in my life. I was training at home and I tore my meniscus, doing a medicine ball workout on a wrestling mat. I was playing for a three-year contract in Utah, and I wanted to be in great shape. It hurt bad, but it wasn’t major. I probably should have just tried to play on it, tried to get through. But the next year, they moved the 3-point line in, and that really hurt me. I wasn’t as valuable then, trying to get more average shooters to hit threes, and more scoring overall. I was a 40-whatever percent 3-point shooter, but now more guys could shoot in the 40’s. So I made the team the following year, but got let go before the contract guarantee date.
MT: You had a couple of other NBA opportunities…
Jent: First I went over to Australia and played for Brett Brown, then came back and made the Knicks that following season. I was going to go the Clippers, but Bill Fitch had a heart operation that summer. I had played really well in the L.A. Summer League in Long Beach, and they’d offered my a partial-guaranteed contract, but coach wasn’t around, and back then it was hard to communicate with people on the Clippers. So the Knicks came around and offered me a deal for more money, and I thought, ‘I’m an East Coast guy.’ But I knew I wasn’t going to play on a team that had John Starks and Allen Houston and those guys, and eventually, they couldn’t prove my injury to the NBA, so they had to let me go.
MT: What was your game like? I saw some highlight clips of your stint in Australia, but how would you describe it?
Jent: I was a shooter. I lost a little bit of confidence in college, where there was a little bit of a ‘Don’t shoot!’ type thing, but that was always my game. I was a passer too. Athletically I was fine. Laterally it was hard for me, I was kind of a tweener, where at 6’6’’, was I a 2 guard because I was too small to be a 3? In the 1994 Finals, Charles Smith was the 3 for New York at 6’11’’. I preferred being posted up by someone bigger than having to guard a really quick, fast guard out on the perimeter.
MT: The next stint is very Europe heavy, mostly in Italy. How did you get through the process mentally of moving on from the NBA and focusing elsewhere?
Jent: It’s definitely a mindset. The summer after 1996, when I’d made the Knicks and had a good season overseas, I came back and went to three different NBA camps. One was with New York when Jeff Van Gundy was the coach. They played up in Boston (in the summer). I remember that we were moving from a town house to a house in between double sessions of practice. We were supposed to have a morning practice and then drive up to Boston. Me and a friend moved my house with a rental truck, working until about 4 a.m., and when I got up to Boston the next day, I asked myself, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know if I can do this. Can I continue to give this type of energy to being a free agent and trying to make teams’? Then a couple of offers were coming through the door, and my wife had gone through some health issues overseas. I just decided to lean into being an overseas player. And if an NBA team gave me a contract, I’d do that, but I wasn’t going to keep going to the summer leagues.
MT: For the next five years or so, you’re mostly based in Italy, with a stint in Greece as well. What stands out as you reflect upon it?
Jent: There are so many highlights, so many lowlights. We just really enjoyed Italy after a little while, and I had opportunities to go to other countries and leagues, but we decided to stay there. We loved the culture. We started really learning the language. Our favorite city was Reggio Emelia, it was gorgeous. You’re not by the water, but you can ride your bike everywhere, walk everywhere. It was a close community with beautiful food and great people. Imola was very similar, and we also loved Bologna.
MT: How was the competition in Italy?
Jent: Very good. That was when Manu Ginobili was playing for Virtus Bologna, and they won the Euro Cup two years in a row. Dominique Wilkins played for a different team as well. There was another tier of teams, and we were right in the middle, finishing fifth or sixth. We always won games, and would qualify for a cup tournament. The one time I went back to Reggio to try and move the team up from the second division to the first division, but we lost in the final to Miles Simon’s team. Had we won that game, I’d have been able to stay there for a couple years, and that might have changed my willingness to stay for a longer stint. What’s tough is moving from team to team, especially with a child, and my son was born over there.
MT: Your experience in Australia was just the one season. How did that contrast?
Jent: I had a great time playing for Brett Brown. The pay wasn’t as good. This league, they would bring a bruiser out to hurt you. You played at a little different intensity. There was a chance that you’d gotten into a bar fight against a couple of these guys a week ago. They’d come to Melbourne, and there would be a lot of scuffles. There was stuff going on between my teammates and the other team in town, and it was almost like playing high school basketball (against a crosstown rival). You played different, almost emotionally drunk.
MT: Any Ginobili stories from Italy?
Jent: It was very distinct the first time I played against Manu Ginobili. Everyone knows how great he is now, and there are a lot of great players that nobody knows about. Antoine Rigaudeau was a great player, a French point guard who I played against him in Italy. He was so underrated, such a good player. A facilitator, but he could defend, and he ended up coming to the NBA too late. I played against Dejan Bodiroga in Greece, another fantastic guard. I think he was the winningest guard (of the former Yugoslavian countries) before Luka Doncic. Another one was Rasho Nesterović, he could really play.
But the most distinct memory was playing Ginobili that first time. You knew who he was. A teammate of mine had been his teammate in Sicily (at Viola Reggio Calabria), so I asked my teammate for some info. He said: ‘He’s super athletic, a one-foot leaper, but he can’t really shoot.’ I thought, OK, just keep him in front of you, go under everything. So the first three possessions, Ginobili shoots 28 footers, nothing but net. I look over at my teammate like, ‘What’s up bro?!’ He’s like, ‘He must have worked on his game!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ But when you played against Ginobili and the things he did over there, it was just clear that he was going to be so good.
MT: Was he Euro-stepping everywhere at the time, as one would assume?
Jent: We all did. We worked on that a lot.
MT: No kidding? We give Ginobili a good chunk of the credit for really bringing that to the NBA…
Jent: Oh yeah, you’d practice it a lot. It was footwork that we worked on a lot over there. We all had it, but he was just on a different stage to show it. And he’s a lefty.
MT: OK, so did you see the Euro step a lot when you first went over to Spain?
Jent: No, it was later, more in Italy. That was a big element of the footwork, both the slide by, and the Euro step.
MT: Was there another player that you thought could have really made it in the NBA, but never did?
Jent: A guy that I played with I thought would be a really good NBA player, was Gianluca Basile, an Italian player. He didn’t like the idea of learning a new language, he was a little fearful. And he got hurt in the Olympics when he was around 25, which did away with an opportunity to come over. We called him Toro. He was a bull. One of the only guys I’d ever played with where he had around 10 games where he didn’t miss. Eight for eight. Nine for nine. Six for six. It was low volume too. Jump shots, getting to the hoop. I thought he was a young Manu at the time. He just didn’t have the luck.
Another guy was Theodoros Papaloukas, the kid that beat Team USA. He was like Basile, where he was a junior player to our senior team, but our veteran point guard got hurt, and he got called up. He was 18, and he was like a LaMelo Ball. He had that flair, the passing, the size. I would have liked to have seen him come over to the U.S. and play.
MT: When did you start thinking about making a transition to coaching?
Jent: I always knew I’d stay around basketball. I got offered a number of different jobs when I initially retired in the sporting world like selling knee braces or ankle braces. I thought, ‘No, I gotta stay with the game.’ My first year after retiring I saw an ad in the newspaper as a head high school coach opportunity, and my wife was working at the time, applied for it and got the job at West Hill High School in Stamford, Connecticut. That summer, I was up at Five-Star basketball camp working, and then my college coach, Randy Ayers, called me when he got the head job for the Philadelphia 76ers, and said he wanted me to be his first hire. That’s when it all changed.
MT: And since then, you’ve worked for six different NBA teams, including with Darvin Ham in Atlanta, and now the Lakers. How did you shape your coaching philosophy throughout your experience as a player and a coach?
Jent: The experience overseas as a player, playing for very critical-minded coaches in college and being the guy that you can yell at, and then playing for a guy like Rudy Tomjanovich, a Brett Brown, and coaching with someone like Mike Brown, you get all these different influences to build your basketball philosophy, mental and physical approaches, what you want the game to look like offensively and defensively, and then your work ethic. I feel like I’ve gotten the best of all these worlds, and I haven’t gotten a chance to display what I feel and know, but I’m glad it’s always growing. And I feel very fortunate I’ve been able to coach rising superstars, aging superstars, help people become a superstar, and see young teams get better and great teams go young, and older teams become successful.
MT: Finally, I know you spent some time working with LeBron on his shooting. What stands out about that experience?
Jent: Yeah, I traveled all over the world with ‘Bron for three summers. I was the only player development coach back then for the team. I only worked with the rookies, but I had always taught shooting. LeBron got a little exploited in the (2007) series against San Antonio where they just made him shoot jumpers, and he got frustrated, and decided he was going to work on his jumper that summer. He was like, ‘CJ, I want you to be the guy to travel with me so we can work together.’ So from then on, wherever he went, from D.C. to China or wherever, I was there. The focus that first summer was re-teaching muscle memory on his shot. We grew within that. And I’ve also tried to be a scoring coach, my job being to help people learn how to score in the NBA, whether it be within the system or the individual strength. So we worked on a lot of stuff, but it started with the shooting piece.
MT: And I heard you’d often have shooting contests with LeBron, but also sometimes, Rich Paul?
Jent: I shot a lot against Rich Paul. Rich can shoot. He made shots.
MT: LeBron’s work ethic is well known … what did you notice?
Jent: The thing about him that I always tell young players is that, say you’re doing form shooting with LeBron James, and he’s working on something he knows he has to get better at. He has the mental capacity to shoot 450 form shots. Where some guys have the capacity to do 52. So his ability to then grow quickly is there. He has the mental ability to stay on task, not be distracted, and stay locked in. I think that’s what separates him. His focus and his mental approach to things is unprecedented.