Clifford relishes job on Rockets coach Island Falls native is assistant coach

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Basketball players attend summer camp to develop their skills, and typical by-products of that experience are some long-lasting friendships.

Steve Clifford followed a similar path early in his coaching career, and one long-lasting friendship developed while working the summer-camp circuit has led the Island Falls native to the pinnacle of the sport – sharing a bench with the likes of Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady.

Clifford, 45, is in his fourth year as an assistant coach with the NBA’s Houston Rockets after three years with the New York Knicks, both jobs on the staff of head coach Jeff Van Gundy.

“There’s a very limited number of jobs in this league,” said Clifford, “and to have the chance to coach under Jeff is something I never take for granted, because it could end at any time. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ve learned a lot.”

Being a basketball coach at the NBA level is just that, coaching.

“There’s a lot of individual work with players, and game plans for future opponents,” Clifford said. “There’s a lot of time spent traveling, but it’s all basketball. There’s no marketing, and you don’t have to be worried about recruiting.”

The 45-year-old Clifford likely would have been content to teach and coach high school basketball in Maine, but connections forged through the sport led to opportunities at a much higher level.

The son of Gerald Clifford, a Wytopitlock native who cut his coaching teeth at now defunct Mattawamkeag High before becoming a fixture at North Country Union High in Derby Line, Vt., Steve played for his father before returning to his native state to play at the University of Maine at Farmington.

After graduating from UMF in 1983, Clifford took his first teaching and coaching job at Woodland High School, where he guided the Dragons to a pair of tournament berths in two seasons.

During the summer after his second year at Woodland, he was working a summer camp at Syracuse when he met his future NBA boss.

“Jeff was a GA [graduate assistant coach] at Princeton back then, and we got to know each other,” Clifford said. “We stayed in touch.”

Clifford moved from Woodland into the college coaching ranks, first at Division II Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., initially as a volunteer under current Cheverus of Portland coach Bob Brown.

After four years at Saint Anselm, Clifford moved up to Division I Fairfield University in Connecticut before rejoining Brown at Boston University.

Clifford stayed at BU for four years, then went to Siena College in upstate New York for a year before landing his first college head coaching job at Adelphi University on Long Island in Garden City, N.Y.

There he compiled an 86-36 record, guiding Adelphi to four appearances in the NCAA Div. II national tournament and becoming the first coach in school history with four straight 20-win seasons.

Clifford then spent one year at Div. I East Carolina before Van Gundy called with an invitation to join the Knicks.

“He offered me a job scouting that first year, not scouting players but scouting the other teams,” said Clifford. “But one of his assistant coaches left after that first year, and he hired me.”

Clifford spent two more years on the Knicks’ bench before joining Van Gundy when he took the Rockets’ job at the start of the 2002-03 season.

“There are so many different aspects of coaching, and each of them is challenging,” said Clifford. “At Woodland I worked to be a better high school coach, and at Saint Anselm I had a chance to recruit with scholarships, so that was somewhere where you really worked on making contacts.

“Coaching at the Division I level at Boston University and Siena was a different level of recruiting. Then by the time I was 35 I realized I needed more head coaching experience, so I went to Adelphi as a Division II head coach. After four years there I felt I had to get back to Division I, so I went to East Carolina.

“Then Jeff called.”

Houston has a 43-25 record after Tuesday night’s 86-76 victory over Indiana. But while that record is the sixth-best in the NBA, it is only fifth-best in the Western Conference, meaning if the playoffs began today, the Rockets would be on the road for its first-round series.

But with 12 games left in the regular season, the Rockets are just 11/2 games behind No. 4 Utah in the West, so there is still time to snatch the homecourt edge from the Jazz.

“Obviously the hope would be to get to fourth, but that would require Utah to lose some and they haven’t done a lot of that lately,” he said.

“The big thing for us is to focus on the games we have left and to go into the playoffs playing well.”

While Clifford’s coaching resume includes many destinations, he’s hopeful this current stop will be long-lasting, just like his relationship with Van Gundy.

“I’ve never done the same thing for seven or eight years in a row except for what I’m doing now,” said Clifford, who spends time each summer at a family camp in Lincoln and whose younger brother Dan is former boys varsity coach at Ellsworth and now is the athletic administrator and assistant principal at Sumner of East Sullivan.

“I never really had any plans of getting to a certain place at a certain point in my career, I just kind of worked to keep improving at what I do.

“But this is something I’m really enjoying.”