There is a brotherhood formed in seedy airport lounges and over somewhat unappetizing powdered eggs – the kind that holds fast for decades.
Darvin Ham and Quin Snyder have that kind of relationship.
By now, the story of Ham commandeering Snyder’s 2002 Eurovan when they were both assistants with the Lakers in 2011 under Mike Brown is fairly well-known. When Ham’s car broke down, Snyder lent him the van, which had a built-in couch among other features, and Ham promptly made himself at home. After about a month, Snyder had to “borrow it back” from Ham, who had started thinking of it as his own.
Snyder remembered Ham telling him, “Q, the van agrees with me.”
It’s a charming anecdote, essential to understanding Ham’s powers of persuasion. But there’s another van story, one which Snyder brings up in the same breath that speaks to another trait entirely.
When both were coaches in the late aughts in the G League (then called the D League), Snyder remembered a snowstorm and flooding in the Dakotas that turned the already numbing commute along the I-94 from Sioux Falls to Bismarck into what felt like a dangerous trek. Ham went ahead, in what Snyder called “the recon van,” and Snyder called him every hour to make sure Ham hadn’t wound up swept away by the rising waters, or with his tires stuck in a snow bank.
Ham remembered being afraid as he drove the van through the elements, but that was part of G League lifestyle: “We had to do what we had to do, man. Not the most favorable conditions, but we were grinding it out.”
For Ham, 49, now 14 games into his head coaching career, that kind of perseverance and faith might be the most essential to understanding how he’s not only weathering the Lakers’ rocky start – but how he wants to bring others along for the ride.
UNDERSTANDING ROLES
Perhaps it’s the blue-collar nature of his Saginaw, Michigan, background. Perhaps the impermanence of life – and therefore the need not to waste one’s breath – was impressed upon him when he was shot in the face by a stray bullet as a teenager. But when he speaks, Ham has a way of getting to the point.
Longtime Golden State assistant coach Ron Adams was working on George Karl’s staff in 1999 in Milwaukee, and at the onset of camp, Karl was telling his locker room what players on his team needed to do to contribute. After he had listed his points, a stocky forward who had spent the previous season abroad raised a hand.
“At the end of it, Darvin kind of spoke up,” Adams recalled. “He said, ‘Coach, that sounded good, but if I do that, will I make the team?’ And that’s kind of who Darvin was. And of course he ended up making the team.”
The difference between being a floating journeyman to being a respected role player in Milwaukee, Ham would find, was carving out a role specific to his talents. Ham was never a good shooter, Adams said, but they worked on developing a 15-foot jump shot, and he made an impact as a defender and rebounder. It’s now well-known in Ham’s lore that the “Hammer” play, a now ubiquitous piece of NBA playbooks, was designed by Karl with Ham’s specific skills: Ham’s ability to make passes on post-ups gave him unique value out of the set.
While plenty of his contemporaries point to his personality as the strength of his coaching, they’re also quick to point out that there’s a strong X’s-and-O’s understanding, especially tailoring to players’ specific strengths the way his coach once did.
“Sometimes when you step into coaching, it’s hard to understand what the role players go through, but Darvin always understood his role as a player,” Lakers assistant coach Phil Handy said. “His strength as a coach is being able to identify those roles, being able to push role players at a super high level. Even working with him back in 2011, you could see his attention to detail, just wanting to learn.”
Basketball nerdiness is one reason why Snyder – a fastidious, Type-A personality who attended Duke and went to law school – and Ham – who carved out a workmanlike path through Texas Tech – get along famously. During late night work sessions, like one the two assistants had to pull for Brown when the Lakers were adjusting their pick-and-roll coverages, there are few people you’d rather have as company than Ham.
Snyder remembers one particular all-nighter in New Orleans for Brown. Snyder would do the typing; Ham would diagram all the plays. They worked until the sun rose over Bourbon Street: While the revelers scattered from wild nights of partying, Ham and Snyder were finishing their schemes for the Lakers.
“When you’re dug into something that’s important, that you feel strongly you want to get right for the head coach, that’s something that either of us could have done on our own,” Snyder said. “But that’s what the partnership was like for us. I think that’s where it’s always been.”
A lot of coaches come up when Ham talks about his influences and the people he turns to for advice. Obviously, Mike Budenholzer, under whom Ham worked for nine seasons, winning a championship in Milwaukee in 2021. But there are also Snyder, Adams, Brown, Memphis coach Taylor Jenkins, Portland coach Chauncey Billups and Charlotte coach Steve Clifford. After a recent game in Minnesota, Timberwolves president of operations Tim Connelly brought his young son back to the tunnel and introduced Ham as “daddy’s friend from the bubble.”
Even among those whom he now must view as rivals depending on the night, one gets the sense that Ham sees allies.
“I’m blessed, man,” he said in an interview with Southern California News Group. “I have a hell of a basketball family that’s helped me tremendously.”
Anyone who has spent this long in the game is going to be connected in myriad ways, but Ham seems to hold onto these connections longer than most. The first time he met Handy, in 1996, they were playing for the Florida Sharks in the USBL. More than 25 years later, the two have remained close. And Handy thinks one of Ham’s strongest traits is the warmth he can have for everyone in his orbit.
“That’s the most important thing for us and coaches: Everyone thinks it’s X’s and O’s but it’s not,” Handy said. “There’s not much you can’t ask them to do, that they won’t try for you if you treat everybody the same. Everybody on our team shows respect.”
Snyder put it this way: “If he says he’s going to run through a wall for you, he actually will do it.”
WORK ETHIC
Maybe more than most, Ham knew his shelf life as a player. He joined the Albuquerque Thunderbirds for the 2007-08 season knowing it would be his last.
He had given his body to the game: Ham had broken his foot, his hands, his nose and had both knees scoped. As a player, he had seven surgeries in all. When he got to Albuquerque, he joined as “an unofficial player-coach.” Midway through the year, he asked for a trade to Austin so he could play for a championship – which is where Snyder was coaching.
G League travel is logistically … fluid. There are lots of inconveniences and unplanned downtime when traveling to smaller cities throughout the West and Midwest. Perhaps it was in Boise, Idaho, where Ham and Snyder really got to talking over drinks at the airport.
“Opposites attract, man,” Ham said of him and Snyder. “That’s my dude. Obviously, his swag is way different from my type of swag. But we just find the humor in certain things, and we have this bond, this connection that keeps life in perspective.”
Ham has given Snyder credit as his pro bono consultant working “on a Utah check” after Snyder stepped away from the Jazz this summer. They talk at odd hours, recapping games and talking about best practices. Said Ham: “That dude (Snyder) sends me some long-ass text messages, too.”
But Snyder, 56, downplays his role: “I mostly ask questions, try to help him think about stuff. He knows his team, and he knows what he wants from them.”
Even early in Ham’s tenure, some of his hallmarks showed up: They began the season as one of the NBA’s stingiest defenses, ranking second through their first six games. While those early returns have receded slightly, coaches he has worked with describe Ham as a “go-to guy” when teaching defensive schemes and rotations, someone who infuses confidence in the players he’s working with.
Handy said Ham earned Kobe Bryant’s respect as an assistant when he worked with the Lakers a decade ago. They had gone against each other as players in the 2004 NBA Finals (Ham’s Detroit Pistons prevailed), and when Bryant wanted to practice against a bigger player, he would pull in Ham: “They would get in the trenches and bang. Kob respected D-Ham’s work ethic.”
Now, Ham is trying to give his younger players a sense of purpose and aggression. Take Lonnie Walker IV, who is producing career-best marks in points (16.5) and effective field goal percentage (.542) while becoming one of the Lakers’ best perimeter defenders.
“I know what I’m capable of and all he wants me to do is get better and better,” Walker said. “But when you have a coach that has your back and trusts you through thick and thin, it goes a long way.”
SENSE OF GRATITUDE
In a recent press conference, Ham was a bit glib, calling his tenure “the so-called Darvin Ham era.” But while former head coach Frank Vogel was renowned for his work on the defensive end as well, the two have such distinct personalities, it’s hard to register that there’s been a shift – even though Ham presides over many of the same headaches that Vogel did.
There isn’t a problem that Ham doesn’t relish getting to tackle – “I’m not that type of human being that wants to wake up every day without a challenge in his life,” he said in one of his early press conferences – but there are some that are different from his time on the bench in Milwaukee. One of the biggest contrasts, even when the Bucks were making their title run, is the level of media coverage. Ham sees his team and players on the airwaves all the time, a running meter of feedback.
“Anything happens in Lakerland, they’re on it, they’re dissecting,” he said. “It’s the ultimate fish bowl. You just have to be prepared for all of it.”
But there are other pressures, too. One that Ham feels most distinctly is to take care of the legacy of 37-year-old veteran LeBron James. James is old enough that they played head-to-head at the tail end of Ham’s playing career – now he says he sees himself as one of the “protectors of a legacy” as James chases Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring record this season.
James’ career is marked by coaches who either haven’t lasted long or who he’s helped take to the top. Vogel, oddly enough, fell into both camps. Ham sees how fraught life has been for James’ head coaches, but he said it doesn’t weigh on him – perhaps even the opposite.
“That’s a part of it: I wake up and say, ‘Damn, an opportunity to add to a legacy.’ To add to the Laker legacy, to add to LeBron’s legacy, to add to my legacy,” he said. “It’s exciting. It keeps me level, keeps me thankful, keeps me humble. It also keeps that battery in my back just knowing all those things.”
Perhaps waiting for his shot helped add to Ham’s sense of gratitude, even though there are plenty of peers who would agree he has one of the toughest jobs in the league. Ham was a finalist for a few jobs in his last few years under Budenholzer, but he didn’t get hired. On media day, Ham jokingly thanked all the teams that passed on him.
But he told SCNG that he could have been an assistant for the rest of his coaching career and found happiness with it. There’s an evenness to Ham’s approach, a fortitude that Adams – himself a career assistant – thinks won’t change no matter what job he’s doing.
Whenever the storm passes, Ham will still be himself.
“I’m not saying you don’t change and become more nuanced, because the head coaching part of it will do that to you,” he said. “But more the man that goes into the job being the same man that comes out. He believes in people. He’s not afraid of tough circumstances. He’s the type of guy who will keep his integrity throughout.”