Ty Lue Calls LeBron James 'Easy' To Coach Before Meeting With Lakers' Coaches

Leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Los Angeles Lakers means LeBron James will have a new coach in the 2018-2019 NBA season. He’ll play for Luke Walton, who has been the team’s head coach for the last two seasons.

Coaching the league’s best player and arguably the biggest name in all of sports comes with it’s set of challenges. Walton will look to learn how to handle some of those difficulties when he and Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw meet with Cavs head coach Tyronn Lue this week in Las Vegas.

“I’ll just tell them LeBron’s easy,” Lue told the Los Angeles Times. “People get this whole thing built up like he’s hard to coach. It’s not. LeBron’s not the problem. It’s the outside tension that’s the problem. Just put added pressure immediately on the coaches, on his teammates. Now everything you do is under a microscope. … So it’s going to be a totally different change for the Lakers. They’ll be able to handle it.

“LeBron is easy to play with, very unselfish. LeBron can bring guys along, make sure they’re doing the right thing. It’s going to be good. The outside is what you’ve gotta be able to block out.”

Other coaches might not agree with the assessment that James is easy to coach. Lue took over as Cleveland’s head coach from David Blatt in the middle of the 2015-2016 season. Blatt was fired after just a year and a half in Cleveland, despite going 83-40 with a trip to the NBA Finals, and he didn’t always have the best relationship with James.

Lue seemed to have a better handle on how to coach the NBA’s top star. Less than five months after Lue was named the Cavs head coach, Cleveland won their first championship in franchise history. James was named the 2016 NBA Finals MVP as the Cavs beat the 73-win Golden State Warriors.

“He’ll try anything once,” Lue said of James. “If it don’t work, he might be like, you know. But overall it was great. He made my job, made my life easy. Turned me into a championship coach.”

The Cavs have been defeated by the Warriors quickly in each of the last two Finals, but not because James has lost a step. The three-time champion seems to somehow be getting better after putting up historic numbers in the 2018 playoffs.

James is still the NBA’s best player as he enters the 16th year of his career. Walton was selected No.32 overall by the Lakers in the 2003 draft, the same year in which Cleveland picked James first overall.

The Lakers have gone 61-103 in two seasons under Walton, though Los Angeles had a 12-win improvement last year. He was an assistant coach on both Warriors’ teams that played James in the 2015 and 2016 NBA Finals. Walton went 39-4 as Golden State’s acting head coach in 2015-2016 as Steve Kerr recovered from back surgery.

Walton will be the seventh head coach of James’ career. James played for Paul Silas, Brendan Malone and Mike Brown in his first stint with Cleveland. Erik Spoelstra was James’ only head coach with the Miami Heat.