WHEN LINDSEY HARDING saw Stockton Kings assistant general manager Gabriel Harris approaching the practice court on Dec. 15, 2023, she figured he was the bearer of good news.
Harding, in her debut season as the first Black woman to be a head coach in the G League, had already learned to keep her cell phone ring on full blast so she could hear it above the din of sneaker squeaks and defensive rotation calls in case Harris was calling with word of a 10-day call-up to the NBA.
When Harris signaled for the 6-foot-10 Chance Comanche, Harding’s mind immediately darted to the center’s recent performance in the G League’s Tip-Off Tournament — 14.2 points on 62.8% shooting and 7.0 rebounds per game — as Comanche’s ticket to the top.
With Harris there to deliver the news, Harding’s instinct was to get Comanche off the floor immediately, to protect him from turning an ankle and spoiling the opportunity that awaited.
What Harding heard next still shakes her.
He told her law enforcement officials were there to arrest Comanche.
“My mind goes to: Did he get a DUI or hit-and-run or something? And they told me that he was arrested for kidnapping,” she told ESPN. “I was shocked because, ‘Not [Chance]. This is a joke, right?'”
Four days later, Comanche faced an extradition hearing in Sacramento Superior Court and was shuttled to Las Vegas.
There he was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in the strangulation death of a 23-year-old woman, Marayna Rodgers. Comanche was with the team on a Vegas road trip in early December when the gruesome incident he was allegedly a part of occurred.
Comanche pleaded not guilty in March and is expected to stand trial next year for his involvement in Rodgers’ death.
In the aftermath of Comanche’s arrest, Harding wasn’t just responsible for coaching basketball, but for trying to find meaning in something that suddenly seemed so trivial.
First, the team had to load into buses for a 2½ hour ride to Santa Cruz that same day for a game against the Golden State Warriors’ G League affiliate the following night.
There was so little tangible information, it didn’t surprise Harding that Santa Cruz beat Stockton. Her team was in a fog, she said.
After the game, the team flew to Orlando for the G League Winter Showcase — a leaguewide event — where seemingly every opposing coach and player had questions about Comanche that neither she, nor her team, had the answers to.
“I didn’t want to be in the hotel because everyone knows we’re Stockton,” Harding said. “They look at you.”
Harding did everything she could to try to revive her team’s shaken spirit. She organized a trip to an amusement park — to get away from the hotel teeming with curious G League colleagues. She coordinated with the NBA and the Kings’ franchise for crisis support for her players and staff. She appealed to the league to postpone Stockton’s games, to no avail.
The fact that her team even took the court was a coaching feat in itself. She wanted to set her remaining players up to have Harris come calling with good news the next time.
“Every NBA team, front office, staff member, GM, assistant GMs — they’re all there,” Harding said. “Of course, there was a lot of disappointment and anger and sadness, but then there was also opportunity, too. So you can’t let that take away from your opportunity.”
Harding and her team had unwittingly become characters in a true crime docuseries, playing out in real time.
“Everyone’s like, ‘You’re going to be on Netflix,'” Harding said. “It’s tough because I remember the trip. I remember the trip. I remember everything. I remember him getting on the bus that morning …
“I still don’t understand everything. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand.”
In Orlando, Stockton went 1-1, falling to 5-11 overall between the Tip-Off Tournament and Winter Showcase. From there, through the trauma, Harding guided the Kings to a 24-10 regular-season record and became the first woman named as the G League’s Coach of the Year.
“I don’t know if it all brought us closer together,” she said, “but honestly, I had to take the lead on all of that.”
Nearly two years later, she is an assistant coach on the Los Angeles Lakers — the first woman assistant in the franchise’s history — and she says her experience in Stockton prepared her for the challenges that inevitably come with the league’s most popular team.
“When people ask me, especially being a woman [in this field], ‘What is the hardest thing?’ Or, ‘How do you handle the adversity?’ I’m like, are you kidding? You kidding?” Harding said.
Navigating such an extreme season has only emboldened Harding to believe in what she is capable of handling.
Her mission is to build an unassailable résumé that can help her break the gender barrier that her predecessors in the game — women such as Nancy Lieberman, Stephanie Ready, Becky Hammon, Jenny Boucek and Dawn Staley — have chipped away at through their success in the sport.
“I would love to be a head coach in the NBA,” Harding said.
It’s a goal the Lakers are helping position Harding for.
“She’s a professional, she knows the game, she is a great communicator, she brings a level of energy, positivity. She is just great,” Lakers acting governor Jeanie Buss told ESPN. “I’m just thrilled that she is part of our staff.
“But I understand if people are going to try to pick her off because she’s just that good.”
HARDING’S TIME AS a player at Duke University culminated in being named the women’s Naismith College Player of the Year and becoming the No. 1 pick in the 2007 WNBA draft.
But it started more simply — as one of five freshmen on the women’s team reporting for a summer session, at the same time as the five freshmen on the men’s team.
One of those men would also go on to be named the men’s Naismith College Player of the Year and become the No. 11 pick in the NBA draft in 2006.
“We literally moved onto campus in June of 2002, the very same day,” JJ Redick, now the head coach of the Lakers, told ESPN. “We were all in the same dorm building together. We did track workouts and agility workouts. There’s a bond that forms when you’re 18 years old. So she’s been a friend a long time.”
Their careers took them in different directions, with Harding playing nine seasons for six different teams in the WNBA, with international play interspersed in between, before retiring in 2017 after a final season in Turkey.
She was 33 and wanted to stay close to the game. So she enrolled in the NBA’s Basketball Operations Associates Program — a glorified internship that works as a feeder system for various jobs in the league, giving former players firsthand experience in different aspects of the business.
Through the program, she made a connection with current Chicago Bulls general manager Marc Eversley, who was an executive with the Philadelphia 76ers. He hired her as a pro-personnel scout — the first woman in that position in Sixers franchise history — and she eventually served in a player development role with the team.
“Everywhere I’ve been in the NBA, I’ve always been a first at something,” Harding said.
By that time, her old friend JJ was playing for Philadelphia.
“I saw him and it was very comforting to me because I had never coached before,” Harding said. “And to have a vet that just immediately gave the respect, the young ones saw it. It made the transition very easy. And lo and behold, he’s my boss now.”
WHEN REDICK WAS hired to lead the Lakers, he hired Harding to be an assistant on his staff.
In addition to his long-standing relationship with her, and the trust they’d formed, Harding had already made strong impressions on two other franchise stakeholders — Lakers president of basketball operations and GM, Rob Pelinka, and Buss.
Pelinka had met her years before at a middle school gym in Orange County when he was there to watch his daughter Emery’s team play. One of the other dads was Harding’s business manager, and Harding had come to see his daughter play.
“She didn’t need to show up to this ratty, old gym for an eighth grade girl’s basketball game,” Pelinka said. “So you’re struck with, this is just a really quality person.”
Buss, for her part, got to know Harding when she played for the L.A. Sparks and, as the first woman to be a controlling owner of an NBA team, had long considered what it would be like for a woman to be on the Lakers’ coaching staff. It’s something she and her former boyfriend, 11-time championship coach Phil Jackson, even talked about, she says.
“Phil always said, ‘I would love to have a woman on the staff someday because the female energy would be a positive for any staff,'” Buss said. “And so I’m just thrilled that it’s turned out that Lindsey is our first female coach on the coaching staff. … Really, I appreciate having her to talk to, and I hope that she feels the same way about having a supportive person in management, in the front office, or upstairs or whatever you want to call it, that she can come and talk to.”
The appreciation goes both ways. “I’m going to say this, they’re probably going to get mad at me, she’s a bad b—-,” Harding said about Buss. “She dealt with all the criticism … and she not only did what she wanted to do, she succeeded. She won. That’s amazing. And when you do that over time, no one’s talking about her. It starts to get quiet. … It’s just inspiring to work for her.”
With the Lakers, Harding’s responsibilities are varied.
She puts together the scouting report for a third of L.A.’s games, splitting the task with assistants Beau Levesque and Ty Abbott, and presents the information to the team.
She is in charge of their scout teams — running plays in practice that an opponent runs. Like, for example, helping Dalton Knecht run plays as if he is Devin Booker before a game against the Phoenix Suns.
She coached the Lakers’ summer league team in Las Vegas. And she works closely with Gabe Vincent and Lakers rookie Adou Thiero.
Vincent said Harding is a welcome personality added to a staff with coaches such as Redick and Greg St. Jean, who only half jokingly refer to themselves as “basketball sickos.”
“We have some coaches who are very loud and very in your face, I don’t think that’s necessarily her,” Vincent told ESPN. “She’s more likely to pull someone to the side, have a conversation. Or, to just get you in a workout and say, ‘This is the situation that you were struggling with. This is what we want you to do. This is what JJ is really looking for.’
“She really just does a good job at trying to help her players. And I think she has her way of leading.”
It’s a leadership style she wants to test out at the next level.
LAST SEASON, BEFORE the Lakers found their stride, going 27-14 in the second half of the season, L.A. was struggling to create separation against a plucky opponent it was supposed to beat.
Harding doesn’t remember the exact team or the exact date, but she remembers a lesson she learned when the Lakers called timeout and LeBron James and the rest of the team came to the bench.
“We were just going back and forth. Offense, defense, offense, defense. Really weren’t scoring. And [James] turned around, he looked at me, he was like, ‘OK, so you want to be a head coach, right?'” Harding said. “And I was like, ‘I do.’ And he’s like, ‘Look in these situations, I like to slow it down, let me post somebody up.’ He just kind of offered his thoughts … And I kind of took that and I told him, ‘Noted.'”
It’s interactions like these, with all-time greats in James and Luka Doncic, that also has her in no rush to leave.
She has head coaching experience in the G League and for both the Mexico and South Sudan women’s national teams. She was pursued aggressively by the Sparks for their head coaching vacancy last year, sources told ESPN, and has mulled over other WNBA opportunities, wondering if WNBA head coaching experience would accelerate her path.
“I am in an amazing position right now,” she said. “Would I go to the W? I absolutely would. Every box checked, right? I want to be a head coach. I know I will be a head coach, and I don’t feel a rush at that because I’m still learning every single day.”
Staley, who has coached the South Carolina women’s team to three national championships and seven Final Fours, interviewed for the New York Knicks this summer before they hired Mike Brown.
She told reporters at SEC media day last month that she is skeptical about an NBA team hiring a woman head coach anytime soon.
“No, I don’t [believe it will happen in my lifetime],” Staley said. “And I hope I’m wrong.”
Harding feels differently.
“I’m an optimistic person,” she said. “In my experience being in this league, I have been heavily supported. I have been given opportunity, I have been given responsibility, equity in this. Are we saying that these men just won’t hire me because I’m a woman? I’m going to give them more credit than that because I haven’t been treated that way.
“Because, the men here treat me like everyone else here. They give me the same responsibilities. If I do well, they cheer me on. If I do a poor job at something, they’ll let me know, too. … I really hate when they say, ‘Oh, take a chance.’ I mean, I can do what 29 other coaches do every year and not win a championship. But yet you keep recycling or you keep [going with] the same type of people. Is that a risk or not? So why is this a risk?”
While Harding is awaiting an opportunity, others in her profession already see the requisite qualities for her to make the jump.
“She connects well, communicates well,” Trajan Langdon, the Detroit Pistons’ president of basketball operations told ESPN. “I think those are characteristics that are important for a head coach to have.”
Brown agrees.
“It’s about, can she build relationships? Hell yeah. Is she going to tell you the truth? Hell yeah. Does she have a presence? Hell yeah. So all that stuff bodes well for connecting the group in a lot of different ways.That’s why I think at the end of the day, she is just a basketball person.”
Her boss does too.
“There’s no bulls— to her,” Redick said. “Just watch her coach. There’s no bulls— to her. But her approach to one-on-one interactions is different. … How she does it is different, and it’s better.”
Still, Harding recognizes societal hurdles remain.
“Why is it a challenge? Because a woman’s never done it?” she said. “Why is that an issue? Because [being a head coach in the NBA] really wasn’t made for a woman to do it, because it wasn’t accepted for a woman to do it.”
Despite the walls or the ceilings that might slow her, she says she leans on her most unusual path, one that inspires her confidence within.
“I can deal with anything,” Harding said.