CLEVELAND — Before Lindsay Gottlieb accepted the Cavaliers’ offer to become their first female assistant coach, she wanted to vet it. She wanted to talk it through with her friends on the Golden State Warriors.
Let’s back up for a minute. Gottlieb, 41, worked for the past eight years at a college and a general place on the map where what she’s doing now in Cleveland isn’t that big of a deal, conceptually.
A woman can coach in men’s basketball if she knows her stuff because the game is the game and we’ve evolved as a human race to the point where if there’s a person who can make a player better, regardless of gender, then it’s a smart hire and advantageous for the man who’s about to be coached up. Or so the thinking goes.
Gottlieb was coaching the women’s team, not the men’s, at the University of California-Berkeley, but, more broadly, she was working in a community (the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, Calif.)…
