SALT LAKE CITY — There were brooms and there were streets and sidewalks to be swept. Jordan Clarkson was there in the crowd, relishing another playoff series victory by his hometown San Antonio Spurs. It was the early 2000s, and the Spurs had completed another sweep, so a young Clarkson and his family left their home in the northeastern part of San Antonio and drove downtown to see fans in black and silver hollering and high-fiving another postseason series win by an organization in the midst of a dynasty.
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They ran around San Antonio, reveling in the celebration. Fans brought brooms with them to commemorate the sweep, hoisting them into the air or using them to dust off the sidewalks near the famed Riverwalk. Growing up in San Antonio at the height of the Spursian domination of the NBA, Clarkson would go to the Westin Hotel on the Riverwalk where his mother worked. Whenever there was a Spurs championship parade — and by the time he was in high school there had been four — they’d watch from the hotel as Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Gregg Popovich strolled through town hoisting NBA trophies. NBA teams playing the Spurs in San Antonio often stayed at the Westin, so Clarkson was one of those awestruck youngsters in the lobby pleading for autographs or photos.
From a young age, Clarkson saw what a model franchise could accomplish. He saw star players sit comfortably in the roles their Hall of Fame coach carved out for them. He saw Ginobili famously accept what was, way back when, perceived to be a demotion to the bench. Instead, Ginobili’s legacy was further fortified as he became the poster child of the sixth man, the scorer off the bench, the injection of life into a game. Ginobili won the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year Award in 2008, and was also named third-team All-NBA that season.
All these years later, Clarkson sits in a chair inside the Utah Jazz practice facility, holding onto a basketball, unable to stay still. He isn’t big on interviews. He’ll tell you straight to your face. He’s not rude about it. Just up front and honest. Maneuvering the ball around in each hand gives him something to focus on as he looks back on the path that led him to Salt Lake City, onto his third NBA team, where he is having arguably his best year as a professional. Since arriving in Utah in the Christmas Eve deal, Clarkson’s provided the scoring jolt the Jazz were without — and desperately needed — early in the year.
Since leaving the Los Angeles Lakers, the team that drafted him in 2014, he’s made coming off the bench look like the guy he idolized growing up: easy.
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“To be honest with you, when I started coming off the bench and stuff like that, I always looked up to Manu Ginobili,” Clarkson said, shifting the ball from his right hand back to his left. “He was the guy who made being the sixth man, to me, in my eyes, made it really cool.”
In his limited time in Utah, Clarkson has served as a piece the Jazz really haven’t had in years: a dynamic, go-to scoring option off the bench who can take over a game, someone who can remain so hot that coach Quin Snyder is forced to leave him in. As basketball evolves away from the big man, allowing more 3-and-D players to thrive on the floor alongside superstars, Clarkson is, in a sense, a throwback. A scorer in the purest sense. He gets buckets with ease. Always has. Not every player makes it look as easy, but the Jazz brass knew they needed someone of Clarkson’s caliber to keep them in the Western Conference chase.
“It can be a little bit like kindergarten-like psychology, but when you’re really needed?” said Dennis Lindsey, executive vice president of basketball operations. “It feels good. We needed him and he maybe needed us.”
Beyond two glass double doors in a hallway that, if you keep going, wraps around a tight corner eventually leading out to the Jazz locker room, are a few offices and small rooms where the Jazz brain trust watch games. One room has four TVs; all display basketball. It’s roughly an hour before the Jazz tip off, and Lindsey and general manager Justin Zanik are watching two college basketball games and two NBA games.
Turns out, on this night, one of those games features the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs have been a team that Utah has gone to over the last three years for in-season trades. In February 2018, the Jazz dealt for forward Jae Crowder. In November 2018, the Jazz acquired sharpshooter Kyle Korver. On Dec. 23, a day after a tight loss at Miami dropped the Jazz to 18-12, the front office went back to Cleveland again needing to, yet again, solve an issue that cropped up mid-season.
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“We couldn’t score off the bench,” Lindsey said. “There was a wide range of opportunities that were offensive substitutes that made much lower salaries, all the up to where Jordan was at. A lot of times when you’re addressing an issue in-season, and this one was relatively early, it usually is need-based.
“Lucky for us we had a couple of extra picks. We had a good, young prospect in Dante Exum. Always, you kind of have natural trade partners. While we’re having those conversations and trying to address the need, clearly Jordan was the best option of the options we were looking at, but he was going to cost the most, as well.”
Utah finally cut bait with Exum, its 2014 No. 5 overall pick, along with two second-round picks and landed Clarkson. Lindsey said the organization had shown interest in Clarkson as far back as last summer when he and Snyder imagined what Clarkson could look like as a fit in the team’s system. His last game as a Cavalier on December 20 was prototypical of what the Jazz desired: 33 points off the bench on 12-of-17 shooting. News broke the afternoon of Dec. 23 that Clarkson would be shipped out West. He did not play in the Cavs’ game against Atlanta that night. The next day, the trade was official.
When he found out, he polled former Snyder assistants Antonio Lang and Chris Darnell, now part of Cleveland’s staff, about what lay ahead with Snyder.
“I was just looking at it day-to-day for me,” Clarkson said. “Really concentrating on all the details. All those guys tell you how detailed he was. It was just all the small things, all the details, concentrating on that day in and day out. They told me everything else, just let it be. Just flow and be yourself.”
The Jazz needed him to flow and be himself. They got him, and Clarkson has added the sort of offensive punch the team was without for some time. In 30 games with the Jazz, Clarkson is averaging 16.1 points per game off the bench, nearly a career high. He’s shooting 48.6 percent in Jazz colors and 38 percent from beyond the arc. Everything the Jazz needed Clarkson to be within Snyder’s system, he’s become: A sixth man who terrorizes opposing second units and can heat up and stay hot. In 11 games since his arrival, Clarkson’s eclipsed the 20-point mark. Utah’s bench is averaging 31.7 points per outing in 2019-20, and Clarkson’s average is more than half of that. Since Snyder was hired in 2014, the Jazz bench average has stayed in the high-20s to mid-30s range in terms of output. Last year’s 36.3 bench average was the highest since Snyder arrived.
“I would say we should give both Jordan and Cleveland some credit,” said Zanik. “We study everyone in the league over multi-year bases and some of the things that maybe were criticisms of Jordan early in his career, he’s worked on and really changed his shot profile and become refined and become more efficient in some of the things he really does well. He’s eliminated some of the tougher shots. As a pure scorer, he’s going to take tough shots, but where they are on the floor, that was already apparent on the video and some of the changes he’d made.”
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Outside of the game’s established star players, it’s rare to see a role player get the sort of green light and freedom to change the complexion of a game the way Clarkson has under Snyder. For years, Jazz fans pined for a Jamal Crawford or Lou Williams type to infuse the second unit with a dedicated scorer. They have one now in Clarkson. After dropping 37 points at Denver, Snyder said, “Sometimes a system needs to be malleable.”
That’s what Snyder and his staff have undertaken since acquiring the combo guard. Clarkson is undoubtedly Utah’s most potent scoring option off the bench. Before being traded to Cleveland in 2018, former Jazz guard Rodney Hood was averaging 16.8 points per game primarily off the bench. Beyond that, the Jazz were long in search of a dedicated off-the-pine option. Those options included Gordon Hayward in the early years, Alec Burks, Trey Burke and Crowder, all of whom at one point averaged double-digit numbers off the bench.
What is it, then, about Clarkson that has allowed him to become part of the Jazz DNA on the fly?
“To kind of answer it a little more abstractly: when you look at him, whether it’s in a meeting or a practice or a huddle, there’s a focus that he has. And you can see it in his eyes. He’s dialed in,” Snyder said. “Scoring is instinctive, but I think his efficiency, but even his desire to be efficient is something I think has been a focus for him. He helps your team by putting the ball in the back of the net, but he’s been I think really focused on making other people better and doing the things he can do on the defensive end. When that’s where your mind is, good things usually happen.”
How Clarkson unlocked his own scoring ability was embracing a mantra to not only play free, but be free: free from the noise of the crowd, of the referees, of all of it. There are two parts of Clarkson’s basketball life where he felt like he found himself that helped him be the player he is today.
The first came in college after transferring from Tulsa to Missouri. Clarkson was given a release from Tulsa after the university fired former coach Doug Wojcik, who recruited Clarkson heavily out of high school. He had to sit out a year due to NCAA eligibility rules, so his first year in Columbia was a lot of proving to himself in practice that he had what it takes. Not only to be a good player, but to be a player who can score at will. In college, you practice so much more than the NBA, so that’s where Clarkson’s game nights were: in the gym, against his teammates, showing them how seamless scoring was for him.
Clarkson is still spinning the ball between his palms as he recalls working with basketball trainer Drew Hanlen. There was a night where Hanlen, Clarkson and others went out to a bar, but the bouncer wouldn’t let Clarkson in. He wasn’t old enough. Hanlen told Clarkson that if he kept improving the way he was, one day, he could breeze into any bar or club he wants. Because then, he’d be a pro, a household name.
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“For me, I wouldn’t even call it a killer mentality. I just be out there playing free,” Clarkson explained. “I never think about the last shot or the last play, because I’ve got to make another one. Especially when you’re in a position like I am in terms of scoring. You’ve got to wash everything out so fast, so I feel like that’s where a lot of my success has come. I’ve been able to do that with my mind and kind of forget everything else when I get the ball, to be honest with you.”
The second moment for Clarkson came after the 2018 NBA Finals, when the Cavs were swept by the Golden State Warriors. Cleveland acquired Clarkson from the Lakers to provide the necessary scoring punch off the bench on a team that needed it. He began his career as a starter in L.A., but his last full season in Southern California in 2016-17 saw him transition to the bench. The last three years, Clarkson has started just two games, both of which came in his last year with the Lakers. In his time with the Cavs, Clarkson played in 138 games, all off the bench. In that Finals series against the Warriors two years ago, Clarkson went just 3-of-13, including 0-for-3 from 3-point land.
“Just being able to go through that process, sit down, analyze it, it’s helped me become a better person and better player,” he said.
Once LeBron left Cleveland, the Cavs, once again, struggled mightily without their hometown megastar. Clarkson said he eventually knew that he might get dealt in 2019 or 2020. The phone call came on Christmas Eve. His time on a cellar dweller was up. The Jazz hoped they’d be getting the Jordan Clarkson they’d been scouting on those same TV sets inside their offices.
“They got a good one in him,” James said. “He’s a great kid.”
“He’s got the type of game that fits very well inside of our system,” Lindsey said. “Quin quickly had confidence in him which gave Jordan a shot in the arm. I think the other thing Jordan doesn’t get enough credit for is: we watched and studied him over a number of years, and as conversations picked up, even at a greater level now, he just has really good offensive footwork. He can maneuver in the paint in particular, after he picks up his dribble, there’s just a lot of different ways that he can find angles. I think a lot of that has to do with his footwork.”
The man who watched Clarkson play dozens of games in San Antonio concurs. Former Tulsa coach Doug Wojcik still catches Clarkson highlights on SportsCenter when possible. Wojcik is now on Tom Izzo’s staff at Michigan State.
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“The guy’s body control,” Wojcik said of why Clarkson’s always been able to score. “More than anything else, he had phenomenal body control. I think it just came naturally, but it just started to come out more and more. Getting buckets on people then scoring on contact, with size, he wasn’t herky-jerky, it was smooth, it was easy to him.”
His body is covered in ink dedicated to those who helped him get from the blistering tracks in San Antonio to the gyms in his hometown to college and eventually the NBA. On his left wrist, he has different beads with names of his dearest: his mom, his dad, his brother.
“A lot more people believed in what I could do more than what I believed I could do, you know what I’m saying?” Clarkson said. “I could say there were so many people that were hands-on outside of my dad and my mom, there were so many people who had a hand in making me what I am today. I speak highly of my hometown.”
He’ll wear those bracelets until game time each day.
“They see me through everything,” Clarkson said. “I don’t really talk to the media like that. I don’t really like to be on cameras or any of that stuff. They’ve seen me go through a lot. A lot of processing. Me growing up, me becoming a man, becoming a father, stuff like that. They’d been through it all. They’ve seen everything behind the scenes.”
They’ve seen him rise to becoming a main cog on a team that has deep postseason aspirations. Before dedicating himself to basketball full-time in ninth grade, Clarkson was a star track and field athlete in San Antonio. There were days when the track was so hot in the south Texas sun that his feet would blister. Back then, he was running track, playing football and playing in church basketball leagues. He laughs about life pre-basketball now. Those things were easy for him. But basketball? Basketball has always been easier for Jordan Clarkson. It’s freeing. And that impact is felt elsewhere, beyond the ink on Clarkson’s body or on the beads on his left wrist or in the sold-out stands inside Vivint Smart Home Arena in Salt Lake City.
So much so that even nearly a decade later, Wojcik recalls the night Clarkson helped Tulsa beat Memphis in Memphis. The only time the Golden Hurricanes beat the Tigers. In true Clarkson form, he had 15 points off the bench.
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“I never beat John Calipari, but we won at Memphis and that, for me, as a head coach, is as good as Memphis was in those years? For me, my memory of Jordan and those guys, beating them and then jumping in the swimming pool with all of them in the downtown Marriott in Memphis.”
They splashed. Kind of like the nets when Clarkson is on a much-needed scoring spree.
The Athletic’s Bill Oram contributed to this story.
(Top photo: Alex Goodlett / Getty Images)
