If sentimentality matters (it doesn’t), Cavaliers should hire Jordi Fernandez as next coach

His first apartment in the United States was behind a McDonald’s and across the street from Five Guys, just a block away from Crocker Park, a cool part of this western Cleveland suburb where a bunch of pro athletes lived and hung out.

His first job was to coach then-Cavaliers coach Mike Brown’s son’s AAU team. Police in Westlake, Ohio, where he, and Brown, and all those Cleveland pros lived, came to know him well — not because he was a bad driver, but because he was always driving Brown’s Range Rover.

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And a 26-year-old Spanish kid looks nothing like Brown.

“They would always stop me and say, ‘You’re driving Mike Brown’s car, but you’re not Mike Brown,’ ” Jordi Fernandez recalls now, with a laugh.

Fernandez, now 36 and an assistant on Denver Nuggets coach Michael Malone’s bench, is one of four candidates to be the next Cavaliers coach who used to work inside the organization.

Nate Tibbetts, Alex Jensen and Jamahl Mosley were either assistants in Cleveland or coached the Cavs’ minor-league affiliate in Canton. Fernandez did all of those things, too, but only he among them can say if it weren’t for the Cavs, he might not be in the NBA or even live in the U.S.

Sentimentality isn’t going to have anything to do with whom Cleveland general manager Koby Altman hires as his coach, but if it did, Fernandez would be a shoo-in.

“We are so pumped for him just to be mentioned as a possibility of that happening,” said Brown, who coached the Cavs from 2005-2010, again in 2013-14, and is now the Warriors’ chief assistant. “Cleveland would be, in my opinion, foolish to not hire him because he brings so many things to the table.”

To be clear, this piece is not meant to campaign for Fernandez, though, obviously, if Brown had a vote (he doesn’t), it’d go to him. Other than the little nugget above about getting pulled over time and again in Brown’s Range Rover, you won’t see Fernandez quoted in this piece.

Now that he is formally a candidate (Altman asked for and received permission from the Nuggets last week to interview Fernandez), there’s a window to share his story of Cleveland ties that run deep.

During the summers while the Cavs competed in the NBA Las Vegas Summer League, Brown took Elijah to Impact Basketball, a training camp for current pros, college players and even high school players in the area. Elijah wasn’t even in high school yet (he was heading into seventh grade), but, obviously, his dad knew people.

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In the summer of 2009, Fernandez was visiting the U.S. from his native Spain as a counselor at Impact. He spoke English with a heavy accent and was assigned to the younger players at the camp, including Elijah Brown.

After sitting in the bleachers for five days, silently watching Fernandez work with Elijah, Brown was ready to take a leap. He wanted to invite Fernandez to Westlake for another week of private workouts. Fernandez accepted, but he didn’t realize he was saying yes to a tryout.

“That week, Elijah was like gung-ho, he was excited about working out,” Brown said. “They went twice a day. I didn’t have to tell Elijah, ‘Hey, you’ve got to get ready to go.’ Elijah was ready to go. They had a great relationship right off the bat. I loved Jordi’s whole approach.”

Brown was ready to make the offer. For a furnished apartment, $500 a month, and the Range Rover to drive, Fernandez could leave Spain, where he was working toward a doctoral degree at the National Institute of Physical Education of Catalonia, and come to Westlake. He would be Elijah’s personal coach and also the coach for the Ohio Basketball Club eighth-graders, Elijah’s AAU team.

Oh, one other thing. In Independence, Ohio, where the Cavs trained, Fernandez would have total access as Brown’s personal assistant.

“His responsibility was Elijah, but he would sometimes shuttle (younger son) Cameron to an event because he had one of my cars and it wasn’t like he was working 24/7,” Brown said. “One of the things I told Jordi, I said what I’ll also let you do is you can sit in on every single one of our coaches meetings, as long as you don’t have something to do with Elijah. You can come to every single one of our practices and watch. You’ve got carte blanche around here because you’re working for me.

“So he was excited about that, to be around an NBA team and LeBron James, and it was pretty exciting for him.”

Brown’s offer was a no-brainer for Fernandez. He flew back to Lleida, Spain, where he was studying, to drop out of school. He said goodbye to his family in Badalona, his hometown, and was back in Westlake by September of 2009, shuttling Brown’s boys in the Range Rover and staying in the apartment behind the McDonald’s.

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A few days before the start of the Cavs’ training camp, forward Danny Green, some draft picks and non-roster invitees were looking to get in a workout. Most of Brown’s assistants and player-development staff couldn’t be found, so Brown suggested that Green go find Fernandez.

The shades were drawn in Brown’s office, so he wasn’t watching Fernandez put Green and the aspiring Cavs through drills. But then-general manager Danny Ferry was watching, and he was impressed. Ferry came out of his office, stood and watched, and barged through Brown’s door.

Who’s the Spanish guy working out our players?

“I’m thinking Danny’s going to be like, ‘He can’t be working out with the players,’ ” Brown said. “Danny goes, ‘He’s really good, do you want to hire him?’ I’m thinking, ‘hire him? That’s going to save me some money. Hell, yeah, I want to hire him.’ ”

The workout concluded and Fernandez stopped in to see Brown. There was a ringing in his ears as Brown spoke, he only half heard Brown say that he’d just earned a job with the Cavaliers. The gig, as Brown explained, was to work in the video room and as an assistant player development coach. Fernandez was still to coach Elijah and the AAU team, and he’d catch up on his work with the Cavs later if the two were in conflict.

The relationship as Brown explained it lasted one year. Brown was fired the following summer after the Cavs were knocked out of the second round and just before LeBron left for Miami. Fernandez kept the job, though, remaining a player development coach under Byron Scott.

In the meantime, Fernandez met his wife, Kelsey, who was from Rocky River, next to Westlake. He was roommates with Trent Redden, who would go on to become the Cavs’ top assistant general manager under David Griffin.

Fernandez was there when Altman was hired in 2012; same for Mike Gansey, who is now Altman’s chief assistant. Gansey and Fernandez still talk on the phone as friends.

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Fernandez worked with Mosley (now a Dallas assistant) and Tibbetts (now a Portland assistant) in Cleveland. They are up for the same job now.

When Brown was rehired as coach in 2013, he convinced Fernandez to go to Canton to be Jensen’s top assistant coach. Jensen (who’s now with Utah as an assistant) left that job after one year, and Fernandez gained his first and only head-coaching experience in the U.S. (well, other than Elijah’s team) coaching the Charge for two seasons.

Jensen or Fernandez could be the Cavs’ next coach.

“I’ll never forget when we told Jordi that he should go coach the ‘G’ League team,” Brown said. “At first he fought it, he really didn’t want to do it because he thought it was a step down. We were telling him it’s really a step up. You’re too young to see it and understand it now, but it’s going to increase your profile and it’s going to give you an opportunity to be looked at in a different light.

“Him having the opportunity to be a head coach, and people seeing him be a head coach was the thing that in my opinion got him over the hump in terms of possibly getting interviews or being looked upon as being one of the next young head coaches in this league,” Brown said.

Fernandez and Jensen. Mosley and Tibbetts. David Vanderpool and Wes Unseld Jr. Spurs assistant Ime Udoko and Juwan Howard. All are Cavs coaching candidates who fit the mold, never-before an NBA coach with a wealth of experience mentoring younger players.

This is what the Cavs want in their coach. They want someone who can connect with Collin Sexton and Cedi Osman and whomever they draft in June (Zion Williamson, anyone?).

Among those candidates listed above (J.B. Bickerstaff is also a candidate, but he was a head coach in Houston and Memphis), Fernandez is on the younger side with perhaps less experience on an NBA bench. This is only his third season as Malone’s No. 3 assistant.

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But otherwise, he fits. As they all do.

So when Brown says of Fernandez — “It would be a home run in my opinion, especially where the Cavs are right now in the development of their team going forward as an organization” — the sentiment could be applied to any of them.

Except, Brown knows Cleveland. He knows the Cavs’ history and he knows Fernandez’s history in Cleveland and with the Cavs.

He thinks it’d be a cool story if they hired Fernandez. And he’s right.

(Top photo: Garrett Ellwood / Getty Images)