Julius Randle wanted to get to work. This didn’t surprise Tyler Relph a bit. Relph helped Randle coach him for more than a decade, returning to Randle’s days at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Dallas. Even then, at 15, Randle understood the value of sweat equity.
But that was something else. It was different.
When the NBA ended its season in March, Randle flew to his hometown and continued to train, thinking it would be a temporary break. He and Relph fell into an old routine: exercise, conditioning, staying sharp when the call came for Knicks to play again.
He never did. It would be a balloon in Orlando and most of the league would go there, but the Knicks were left out. Their season is over. And something clicked inside the man who averaged 19.5 points and 9.7 rebounds in a largely forgotten season.
“Can’t he play while all the other guys in the league have played?” Relph says with a laugh. “That drove him crazy.”
Not long after, Relph received a phone call on his cell phone. Randle.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
“Of course,” Relph said. “Just tell me where and when.”
“Stay where you are,” Randle told him. “We are moving back to Dallas. We’re buying a house. Come to you. Let’s go.”
Relph chuckles in memory.
“I’ve known Ju for many years,” he said. “He wasn’t kidding.”
He wasn’t. In the past, out-of-season work usually happened in Los Angeles or New York, wherever Randle was divided, a few weeks here, a few weeks there. Sometimes they spent their vacation together and he invariably got up until 6 in the morning to go to the gym, then his weight trainer FaceTime, then went on a 20-mile bike ride through Miami.
“At one point I thought he wanted to catch a cold,” says Relph. “It simply came to our notice then. Not once. It was different. That was every day. “
A few days, which meant the two would meet at a gym at 6 a.m., drilling for work on their feet, working on Randle’s blow, 90 minutes of continuous grinding. Three or four times a week, it was only the second stop on the route, with Randle opening his old gym at 5 a.m. to trigger single jumpers, the first pack of 1,200 he pulled every day, every week. , every month for nine months.
Soon, Relph introduced him to a weight trainer named Melvin Sanders, and the two men hit him instantly.
“Ju likes it when you’re not just training him, you’re working with him,” says Relph. “This is Melvin. And that’s me. Thanks to Ju, I’m in better shape now than I was in college. I have no choice; otherwise I would never keep up. “
Relph, originally from Rochester, NY, played two years in West Virginia and two years in St. Louis. Bonaventure also caught his coaching bug after injuring his knee after graduation, serving as an apprenticeship under Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt. In 2010 he decided to become a personal basketball coach and moved to Dallas.
There he met Randle, who was already an early talent, who had a great freshman year in Kentucky before heading to the Lakers with his seventh pick in the 2014 draft. He played in LA for four years. , moved to New Orleans for an extremely productive 2018-19 season, then signed a three-year, $ 63 million contract with the Knicks.
“He’s the hardest worker I’ve ever seen,” says Relph. “From afar. You know, it’s not easy to mediate 20 and 10 and 3 in the NBA. You don’t just do that by introducing yourself. But even by that standard, it took it to an incredible level this summer.”
Every day, Randle showed up at the gym. Sometimes they had three separate workouts, and these did not include weight sessions with Sanders.
“I only had time,” says Relph, “and he didn’t want to lose any of that. I was nine months old. So I said, “Let’s be an all-star. Let’s try to make you one of the best players in the league. ‘We went back to what we used to do. Work on your feet, things to make sure you get to the places quickly. Countless times. Daily.”
Relph stressed the importance of using a dribble or two in order to get a shot whenever he needed to; when he saw Randle twice using that move to get rid of Giannis Antetokounmpo in the third game of the Knicks season, he screamed excitedly on TV.
For all the hard work, the most important moment of the summer came on July 30, when the news arrived, the Knicks had hired Tom Thibodeau. Relph immediately thought this would be a perfect marriage.
“I knew what that was going to be,” says Relph. “I told him, ‘You’re going to play for 40 years [minutes] Every night. If you play hard, Thibs will let you go. I didn’t know he would want to be a point ahead, but once they talked and said it was perfect. Play at all of Ju’s strengths.
“It was phenomenal because Julius and Thibs have the same mentality. They are workers. None of them were ever given anything, they had to win everything. They are both the first boys to work every day. They see things exactly the same. “
The reward, of course, is this season, with the Knicks starting with a surprising 5-3 start, Randle averaging 23.1 points, 12.0 rebounds and 7.4 assists. The All-Star game has already been canceled, but Randle’s goal of pushing his game to an all-star level has been played perfectly so far.
That delighted Knicks fans. And he brought 1,300 miles to the west, where his friend and coach will officially open this weekend’s Tyler Relph Basketball Lab in downtown Dallas, where his current clients – RJ Hamton, Willie Cauley-Stein and Skylar Diggins-Smith, among them – they will have a house. And where Julius Randle can always go to get a good workout. Although it probably won’t stop at just one.