INDEPENDENCE, Ohio -- On Thursday night, Lindsay Gottlieb was in what she described as "basketball heaven."
Only in this case, she wasn't at the Hall of Fame in Springfield, the NCAA Final Four or even the NBA All-Star Game, but rather a draft war room set up in a still-under-semi-construction Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
Less than two weeks ago, Gottlieb was trying to acquire players the only place she knew where to: the recruiting trail. But after accepting an assistant coaching position on John Beilen's Cleveland Cavaliers staff -- becoming the first woman to make the jump from the college ranks to the pros -- the former Cal-Berkeley women's head coach didn't have to wait long for her first NBA experience.
"Better," Gottlieb told reporters with a smile when asked if the Cavs' draft war room was what she expected on Thursday. "I was texting people last night, 'This is basketball heaven.' It was so cool... there's just a team of people here working at a really high level and you saw that in the war room. How connected everyone is. So it was cooler than I even imagined and I imagined it would have been pretty cool."
In some ways, Gottlieb feels right at home. "The basketball's the basketball," she noted. And considering the current youth movement the Cavs are currently undergoing, Gottlieb feels especially comfortable given her 11-year resume as a college head coach.
"The young women I coached in college, that's the age of [Cavs draft picks] Darius [Garland] and Dylan [Windler] and [Cavs point guard] Collin [Sexton]," she said. "It's pretty neat to see how that will translate."
But she also admitted: "I'm sure some things will be different."
That goes without saying for any coach making the jump from college from the NBA -- man or woman. And Gottlieb doesn't have to look far for an example, given that Beilein is preparing for his first season coaching in the NBA after 37 seasons as a head coach in the college ranks.
And then there's the matter of Gottlieb's gender, as she becomes just the third full-time female assistant coach in the NBA. Asked if he felt like a trailblazer for adding Gottlieb to a staff that also includes J.B. Bickerstaff and Antonio Lang, Beilein laughed, simultaneously downplaying any notion that his hiring of her was one of novelty.
"No, I feel really smart," he said. "After spending a few weeks with Lindsay right now, it's actually a home run for us. She's really outstanding. She sees some things that I may not see... you put the puzzle together of your team and you put another puzzle together of your staff. And they're just as important. And so you're trying to fill those pieces to see who can give us the most to be the best in the long run. And she's been perfect for it."
For Gottlieb, too, her unprecedented transition simply comes down to basketball.
"A lot of the things I think, they just flow across the board. Coaching is about relationships," she said. "When guys -- or women -- know that you care about them, that you know what you're talking about, that you can make them better, they're going to be more willing to run through a wall for you."
