John Blanchette: NBA’s Raptors pluck Hughes from clutches of Sasquatch

Our pipeline to the National Basketball Association has yet to run dry, it seems.

Early entry draft picks such as Rodney Stuckey and Adam Morrison are one thing. Now the league is dipping into the local junior college pool – just not for players.

The Toronto Raptors announced Wednesday that they have added to their staff Community Colleges of Spokane coach Eric Hughes as basketball development consultant, responsible for individual skills coaching – which means he’ll work this winter in places like Madison Square Garden and Staples Center instead of riding shotgun on a bus to, oh, Blue Mountain or Treasure Valley.

That’s some promotion. By way of context, you don’t see the Mariners plucking the guy at Green River CC to be their pitching coach, right? Although at the moment that doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

In any case, professional ball – any ball – tends to be a closed society, and basketball is no exception.

“I would think maybe 80 percent of the assistant coaches in the NBA are former (NBA) players,” said Hughes, “so it’s very difficult to get into for obvious reasons.”

But since arriving at CCS in 2001, Hughes has been moonlighting every summer as a for-hire skills coach for Goodwin Sports Management in Seattle, in which capacity he’s created workout programs for most of their clients – most notably Gary Payton, but also Dwight Howard and most recently Stuckey, Kevin Durant and Al Horford, who you may recall as being prominent in the 2007 NBA draft.

So that was a foot in the door. Another came when he called upon a friend – Marc Eversley, the assistant general manager of the Raptors – to help him try to land the skills coaching job with the Seattle SuperSonics – which, as it happened, didn’t work out.

“The day I called him to thank him for his help, I get an e-mail from him an hour later saying their skills/development coach had resigned that morning,” Hughes said. “He said to send a resumé. About a week later, I interviewed with (general manager) Bryan Colangelo in Las Vegas at the FIBA championships. I took Tre Simmons, the former Husky who is a client of mine, and worked him out, and about a week later they offered me the job.”

Which didn’t mean he leaped at it with no regrets.

A former assistant coach at the University of Washington, Hughes won 87 games in six years at CCS, with 24-win seasons in 2005 and 2006, when the Sasquatch finished third in the NWAACC tournament. With a team of mostly sophomores, he thought CCS could make another run at the championship this year.

“Really, I had the best of both worlds – a great program to coach during the school year and the summers free to help some of the best players in the world,” he said. “There were a lot of rewards here. Spokane is the best athletic program in the NWAACC, with great facilities and administration. The high school basketball here is great and obviously it’s an outstanding basketball community. I’m great friends with Mark Few at Gonzaga, and Ray (Giacoletti) and Mike Burns – we’re all guys who started coaching about the same time and have gone on different paths, yet we’ve somehow all ended up in Spokane.

“And the timing was a little tough. School starts Wednesday. I’m sure the team was a little shocked, but I would hope if North Carolina called a player like Eric Beal on Sept. 1 and offered him an open scholarship that he’d take it.”

Hughes’ entrée into this second basketball life came when Payton was finishing his tenure with the Sonics. They developed “a great friendship” and Payton asked Hughes to make himself available for workouts during the summer. As the Goodwins’ stable of clients grew, Hughes found himself this summer jetting from Payton’s home in Las Vegas – he hasn’t yet decided to retire – to Durant’s in Washington, D.C., and back to Seattle, where he worked out Stuckey, Horford and Durant for two weeks prior to the draft.

“The thing you learn very quickly is how good these guys are,” Hughes said. “People really don’t realize how athletic they are, how well they shoot and play and how smart they are – how high their basketball IQs are. I know there’s a lot of disdain for the NBA game and people look at college ball as ‘the real game,’ but that’s a mistake. These guys are in the NBA for a reason.

“You look at all the great college players and see how many don’t make the NBA and you wonder why. Well, it’s because you just have to be incredibly good to make it – and you have to work incredibly hard. You watch Richie Frahm in the summer at Gonzaga’s camp and he’s dripping wet from shooting and running to spots over and over, and some of the kids there are bitching at having to practice for a half hour. And I know people get upset with the salaries, but these guys are entertainers – and by the standards of that industry, they’re worth every penny.”

And Hughes will earn his, too – just as he did on those bus rides to Blue Mountain.