INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — Last summer, the Cleveland Cavaliers made headlines when they hired Lindsay Gottlieb as an assistant coach.
It didn't take long for her to receive her first promotion.
After spending her first 54 games with Cleveland sitting behind the bench, Gottlieb will be sitting on the Cavs' bench when they face the Washington Wizards in their first game back from the NBA All-Star break on Friday night. Gottlieb's promotion, of course, comes as the result of John Beilein's resignation from the team, with former associate head coach J.B. Bickerstaff now taking over as the Cavs' head coach.
According to Bickerstaff, Gottlieb and fellow assistant coach J.J. Outlaw will rotate bench duties based on the staff's scouting assignments. Cleveland won't make a hire to fill the opening on its staff created by everybody else moving up a spot.
The Cavs' arrangement dictates that Gottlieb will be on the front of the bench on Friday night.
"She is extremely intelligent and perceptive," Bickerstaff said of Gottlieb on Thursday. "She sees things from a vantage point that's extremely helpful. I tend to see things from a straight forward bonehead way and she takes that same situation and she gives me the opposite side of it in a way that was always helpful."
Prior to joining Beilein's coaching staff in Cleveland, Gottlieb served as the women's basketball head coach at Cal-Berkeley, where she amassed a 179-89 record and one Final Four appearance in eight seasons. In coming to the Cavs, she became the first female assistant coach to make the jump from the college ranks and the third full-time female assistant coach in NBA history.
In 2018, San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon became the first female assistant coach to sit on the front of an NBA bench. Bickerstaff said that should he get ejected from a game, assistant coach Antonio Lang would fill in as the team's head coach for the remainder of the game.