FAYETTEVILLE — To say Arkansas basketball assistant coach Clay Moser is settled in in Northwest Arkansas is probably a bit unfair.
Moser did not receive settle-in time after becoming the final on-court addition to Razorbacks coach Eric Musselman’s staff on May 25. Other coaches on the first-year coach’s staff didn’t either.
“Muss doesn’t operate that way,” Moser said Oct. 31 in his office on the second floor of the Basketball Performance Center. “I was here for the first couple of months without my family, and they were finishing up some things in Los Angeles.”
At the time of his hire, the 57-year-old’s little girl was part of an all-star softball team, and his son, too, was named to an all-star baseball team on the West Coast. Moser also took an unexpected recruiting trip to Greece, which for a time set back the organizational aspect of the impending move.
More than five months after the announcement, there is some semblance of normalcy. He and his wife, Angela, bought a home in Fayetteville, he said, and their children are in school. They picked up where they left off in California as well. His youngest daughter was selected to a traveling volleyball team, made her school volleyball team and a softball team, and his son made a fourth-grade baseball team.
Moser, who celebrated a birthday on Nov. 10, is also trying to persuade his oldest daughter to move to Arkansas from Idaho.
Prior to accepting a place on Musselman’s bench, Moser notably spent the previous seven-and-a-half years with the Los Angeles Lakers. He was initially hired as a head advance scout and concluded his tenure as an assistant coach and director of basketball strategy.
Mitch Kupchak, then the general manager of the Lakers, created the latter position for Moser, who he envisioned could bridge the gap between the analytics community and the NBA’s coaches and players. He held four main job responsibilities: apply the analytics to the team’s player development, apply the analytics to opponent preparation, apply the analytics to what was best for the Lakers, then apply the analytics to know the league inside and out.
And to a lesser degree, he said, he held front-office duties that pertained to the trade, free agency and draft markets.
“One of the things Mitch thought I could do was ease the minds of the coaches and players,” Moser added. “I’m not going to overburden you with things that don’t matter, because I think that’s honestly one of the dangers of analytics. It was my job to kind of glean out what was important to our team or to a particular player, or to the coaching staff. That’s exactly what I did. I never brought in a stack of papers or a report and said, ‘Hey, read this report. It’ll fix all your problems.’”
Moser would pick certain analytical battles and choose his moments after carving out strong relationships with fellow coaches and each player on the roster. He might take a player a piece of information only once every 3-4 days.
“I’d say, and depending on the guy, ‘Hey, do with this whatever you want, but this particular shot you like to take, you’re not very good at it. We’ve either got to improve it or you should try to carve that out of your repertoire,’” he said. “That’s really how I approached those guys.”
In addition to the Lakers, Moser has served as an advance scout for a number of other NBA franchises, including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Orlando Magic, Sacramento Kings and Golden State Warriors. Preparing statistical analyses of future opponents and readying his respective team, while gratifying, was a demanding trade.
Moser believes he has spent somewhere between 10-12 years of his life in hotel rooms. It is part of the reason why he carries a Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite card. He also recently received a notification from Delta Airlines that he is a million-mile flyer. Moser has nearly reached that milestone with American Airlines, too.
“A long, long time ago I just put it at ease in my mind - other than being away from my family and my children and now I have a grandson, too - that that’s just part of your work day,” he said. “If it’s taking me five hours to fly somewhere, even if I have to connect somewhere, I would be working for those five hours anyway, so what’s the difference if I’m on this plane or if I’m sitting in an office?
“It’s part of the work day for me.”
One part of the job, though, is even tougher than being on the road and away from loved ones.
“When you’re in the city you live in and you’re still working so many hours you don’t get home,” he said. “That’s actually worse. I know my kid is over there playing a baseball game and I have to be here and we have a game or a practice, or whatever. I reconciled that in my mind a long time ago.”
Moser did not have an All-American upbringing. Far from it, he says. He and his five siblings, of which he was the fourth, had to band together at an early age. Moser actually likens his childhood to the hit Showtime series Shameless, a drama that revolves around an inner-city Chicago family attempting to make ends meet largely without parental guidance.
"It was a little like that, without all the zaniness," he said.
Moser's oldest sister prevented the rest of the kids from being parceled out to foster homes. His father was a traveling salesman, and his mother was institutionalized. No one was around.
Moser has three sisters who currently live in a small farming community in Minnesota roughly four blocks from one another. One sister, Carmen, passed away around three weeks before Halloween, and he returned in early November to Minnesota for the funeral.
"They’ve never left," he said of his sisters. "Once we got up there they never left. My little brother and I are the ones that have left. I’ve been everywhere and I have a little brother that lives in Portland. We’re all over."
Moser was a gym rat as a kid. He was certain he would play big-time Division-I basketball and eventually make his way to the NBA, but as time ticked on he realized that dream might be a stretch. He knew from his sophomore year in high school that coaching was his avenue to get into the game he loved.
His greatest basketball influence hails from Minnesota and is a name few are familiar with. David Retzlaff, a long-time coach at Minnesota State Community & Technical College, had a lasting impact on Moser. In 2006, Retzlaff was inducted to the NJCAA Men's Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
"To this day a lot of my philosophical views of how the game is supposed to be played and how to run a program and how you treat people, those sort of things come from him," Moser said. "His ability to connect with people (stood out), and his Xs and Os. He was a good recruiter, and he’s got a national championship."
At 24, Moser began his coaching career in 1987 as an assistant at North Carolina State under one of the college game's most legendary figures - Jim Valvano, who led the school to the 1983 national championship. He died in April 1993 following a bout with cancer.
Moser cherished his time in the ACC. The Wolf Pack sent seven players to the NBA in his two seasons with the program, and he learned plenty from Valvano about what it takes to succeed in big-time college basketball and how to find the right people who work as one. Valvano's in-game adjustments were phenomenal, Moser said.
Being around him was like riding a roller coaster.
"What was interesting about Jim from his personality quirks was he expected you to be in the same mood he was in," he said. "It didn’t matter what kind of a day you were having. If he was having a crappy day then you had to have a crappy day. If he was having a great day and you were having a crappy day then you weren’t allowed to have a crappy day that day.
"You had to be wherever he was. He liked to have his guys around. He was interesting from a standpoint, like, if it was all fun and games and party mode, that’s what you did. But if he was down, that’s what you did. I’ve never been around anybody like that before or since."
Fast forward to the present, he and Musselman are together for the sixth time. Moser has been invigorated by this new challenge, charged with helping bring Arkansas basketball back to national relevance. He is constantly learning, everything from the rules to the recruiting game, which he says has changed a lot over the years.
He hates to lose and loves to win. About the only thing that has deviated for Moser is his bench demeanor. He used to be fiery, similar to Musselman in some ways. He controls his emotions a little bit better than he used to, he joked.
Most of all, he is ready to get rolling with the Razorbacks and see where the 2019-20 season leads them.
"One of the things you’ll find about Muss and the people he brings on is I know there’s a rabid fan base here and there’s expectations here and there’s hopes and dreams and all of that kind of stuff. Nobody will put more pressure on us internally as a staff than he will, or on himself," Moser said. "Whatever the outside influences are, we feel that in here and we work at it every day to try to make sure we’re doing our part and doing our thing.
"Let’s suit up, tip it up and let’s go."