Frank Lloyd Wright took a cockeyed view of La-La Land.
“Tip the world over on its side,” the famed architect once said, “and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
Brian Shaw, the point guard who led UC Santa Barbara to Division 1 basketball relevancy, has been tipped back into the City of Angels. The Los Angeles Clippers hired him as an assistant coach last week.
It will be his third turn in L.A. as a coach. The first two came in separate stints as Phil Jackson’s assistant with the Lakers — the team that expected to get him with the 25th pick of the 1988 NBA Draft.
Their hated rivals, the Boston Celtics, beat them to the punch with pick No. 24.
“That just about broke our hearts,” said Bill Bertka, a Santa Barbaran who has coached and scouted for the Lakers since 1968.
It was the start of an odyssey that would take Shaw to seven NBA cities in 14 seasons. The Lakers finally got him at the end of that journey, signing him as a free agent after a young Kobe Bryant broke his wrist at the start of the 1999-2000 season.
Shaw wound up playing a key role in the Lakers’ run to the world championship. He saved them in Game 7 of the semifinals against Portland, rallying them from a big deficit with four three-pointers.
He made several more critical plays during the overtime win against Indiana in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, prompting Jackson to gush, “You sparked us again.”
Shaw hugged his coach and replied, “Now all you’ve got to do is bring me back so we can feel this again next year.”
Jackson did just that. Shaw won three championship rings as a Laker player … and then entered the three-ring circus of NBA coaching. Everyone from Kobe to Shaquille O’Neal, and from Bertka to Jackson, predicted his greatness.
“B Shaw is definitely a reason why I got three championships with the Lakers,” Shaq said. “I don’t get a lot of chances to tell my favorite players thank you publicly. He deserves a thank you because he kept us out of trouble, and he was the buffer between me and Kobe.”
O’Neal promoted Shaw’s candidacy to succeed Jackson as the Lakers’ head coach in 2011. Mike Brown got the job instead and Shaw was kicked to the curb with nary a thank you for applying.
He was so embittered that he did the same to all of his Laker gear — filling two boxes with his shirts, sweats and shoes and plopping them onto the street corner outside his home for public distribution.
The next stop for Shaw was the Indiana Pacers as Frank Vogel’s top assistant. His tough love, in fact, played a crucial role in the development of Paul George.
Shaw even took the young Pacers’ star and his father out on a fishing trip to motivate him with tales of Kobe’s legendary drive and work ethic. He said George could have the same effect on the Pacers as their “X-factor,” and that they would only go as far as he could take them.
“He doesn’t hold back on anything, and I mean anything,” George said at the time. “I like that. It’s good to hear that.”
By 2013, Shaw had interviewed a dozen times for a head position in the NBA. He went for the Clippers job, only to have them choose Doc Rivers instead.
Shaw wound up accepting an offer from the Denver Nuggets, a team fractured by the egos of malcontents who wanted none of his tough love. He went 36-46 in his first season and was fired after starting 20-39 in his second year.
He restocked his closet with Lakers’ gear in 2016 when former teammate Luke Walton brought him back to the Staples Center as his associate head coach. He was out the door again, however, when Walton was cut loose just three years later.
Shaw coached in the NBA’s G League last year, guiding an unaffiliated team of elite high school graduates and veterans. He was planning to do so again when Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue — another teammate from his Laker days — summoned him back to L.A.
The job reunites him with George, who now teams with Kawhi Leonard to give the Clippers one of the best one-two punches in the NBA.
The Lakers tried to trade for George a few years earlier, when Shaw was still on their staff, but the deal fell through because of tampering charges. Shaw was absolved of all improprieties when NBA investigators determined that he only meant to catch bass — and not a basketball star — during his frequent fishing trips with him.
The Lakers — coached by Vogel, of all people — are now forced to look over their shoulders at the Staples Center. Their former assistant coach knows all their secrets.
Shaw, now 55, has been around the basketball block many times since that glorious 1988 season when the Gauchos beat UNLV twice and North Carolina State once en route to their first Division 1 Tournament appearance. He put UCSB basketball on the map.
And now he’s back in the City of Angels, looking for some more of that after-life.
CLARK KENT IMPERSONATION: Former Dos Pueblos High baseball star Gabe Speier doesn’t need a map for the drive from Omaha to Kansas City. The Royals summoned him from their Triple-A affiliate last month to pitch in the big leagues for the third year in a row.
The call-up on Sept. 15, however, was something straight out of Disneyland’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
The 26-year-old lefthander was warming up for a game in Omaha when the Royals sent out a distress call. They had burned through much of their bullpen the night before and then lost reliever Wade Davis to a sore shoulder during warmups for their game against Oakland.
The game was to start in less than an hour when they summoned Speier to make the three-hour drive to Kauffman Stadium. His wife, Megan, gathered up their belongings and their dog, Dax, and they hit the road for K.C. just 20 minutes before game-time.
He stretched in the car as he drove, “going as fast as I could … while being safe.”
Speier threw on a uniform when he arrived in the seventh inning and then sought out manager Mike Matheny in the dugout.
“He said, ‘I need you to run down after this hitter and start playing catch,’” Speier recalled.
Before he knew it, he was facing slugger Matt Olson — who ranks fifth in the American League with 39 home runs and fourth in RBIs with 111 — with one out and a runner on second base.
Megan and Dax, who was let into the game as an “emotional support” dog, cheered and barked wildly as Speier struck out Olson.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like the Gabe Speier appearance,” Matheny said. “I don’t know if you all noticed but it was out of his car, into the clubhouse, he had to pull a Clark Kent in his locker and run out straight to the bullpen, get hot and get out one of the better left-handed hitters in the game.
“It was really, really remarkable.”
Speier has made six other relief appearances since then, allowing just one earned run over 7⅔ innings for a stellar ERA of 1.17.
And maybe now he’ll no longer have to make that drive from Omaha.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.