How LSU basketball assistant coach Cody Toppert is transforming the Tigers' program

BATON ROUGE - Walk into Cody Toppert's office and the first things that stick out are the two whiteboards on his walls.

No, those aren't doodles; they're basketball plays. There are at least 30 on the left board and 20 on the right. A television streaming NBA TV centers the bigger board but the rest of both boards are littered with small vertical rectangles surrounded by arrows, numbers and dotted lines, the clarity of it all depending on one's basketball acumen.

"I like to write on my walls," LSU basketball's first-year assistant coach said, lamenting how he wishes he had more whiteboard space. "All four walls were covered in Memphis."

This is Toppert's "lab," his hub for trying to fix the stumbling Tigers, losers of their last 14 games. It's a skid LSU will try to break when it hosts Vanderbilt on Wednesday (6 p.m., SEC Network).

But despite the results, Toppert is sticking to his process. It's the same process that made him a prized assistant coach and led him to Memphis, the NBA's Phoenix Suns and the G-League.

Now, he brings that same process to an LSU program attempting to work its way back to national prominence.

"When I was at Kansas, in a two-year period I had RC Buford, who's now the president of San Antonio (Spurs), Alvin Gentry, Ed Manning, Gregg Popovich, Bill Bayno, John Robic, Bill Self, John Calipari, to name a few," said former Memphis assistant coach Larry Brown, the only coach to win an NCAA national championship and an NBA championship as a head coach. "They were all curious. They all wanted to learn. They all cared about the kids. They all never looked at going to the office or going to the gym (as) being work.

"Cody checks those same boxes those guys had."

"Follow where the ball bounces"

Basketball runs in Toppert's blood. Not figuratively, literally.

His mother and father played college basketball at New Mexico. His brother, Chad, also played for New Mexico and led the Mountain West Conference in 3-point shooting percentage twice.

His wife, Brittany, didn't play basketball but played an eerily similar sport as a soccer star at Arizona State. Toppert says she's "disgusted" by how often they talk about the overlap between the two sports.

"They're just free-flowing games," Toppert said. "And really, they're three-man games within the subset of the whole."

The bottom line: Basketball is Toppert's calling. It's why when his playing career started to come to an end in Europe, Brittany suggested that he get into coaching.

When his career ended, Toppert moved to Dallas to begin his own player development company, training players of all ages and levels before leaving for Florida and helping launch Elev8 Sports Institute with Ganon Baker, "one of the godfathers of player development."

That opportunity eventually led to Toppert's time in the G-League, a season in the NBA helping develop Suns stars Devin Booker, (now Brooklyn Nets forward) Mikal Bridges and Deandre Ayton, his stint at Memphis and now LSU.

Toppert didn't force any of it. He just let the basketball determine his fate.

"You could have never dialed up in a million years that a dude from Albuquerque, New Mexico, would be living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana," Toppert said. "...This just goes back to like, follow where the ball bounces."

"Bones over cones"

Toppert's overarching view on player development is twofold. The first element is simple: skill development. His players need to be able to shoot, dribble, pass, etc.

But that doesn't excite him as much as the second element.

"Inherently, the game comes down to a series of decisions," Toppert said. "To shoot it or not to shoot it. What move to use and when, right? If you can do a crossover at a cone but you don't know the right time to use it against an actual human being, you might as well not be able to do it."

Despite LSU's offensive struggles, Toppert has seen progress with this second element – decision-making – as the season has gone along. To demonstrate, Toppert turns to the television and starts showing clips on offense from LSU's home matchup against Alabama projected from his laptop.

Toppert shows three clips. The first clip is a successful handoff, screen, roll and alley-oop finish from Shawn Phillips. The second clip was a "teaching" clip, a mistake in which KJ Williams' inability to roll quickly enough off of the screen he set resulted in a turnover.

The third clip is similar to the second, but this time Derek Fountain successfully rolls soon enough toward the rim to receive the pass from Justice Williams before finding Cam Hayes for the wide-open three.

"So the game is actually about decision-making. Cam needs to be able to shoot this shot but just as importantly, Derek needs to be able to make this pass," Toppert said. "Just as importantly, Derek needs to be able to make this read on the roll. Just as importantly, Justice Williams needs to be able to make this pass.

"Well, those are all skills. But when these skills all come together in a series of consecutive decisions, that's what creates the open shot."

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Toppert then shows another set of clips, but these ones aren't from a game. They're from practice. It's the Tigers practicing situational concepts that had played out in the Alabama matchup.

In each practice rep, Toppert would act as the defender, sprinting around the court and forcing his players to make snap-second decisions with the basketball. With each rep, a different action would be played out.

But most importantly there was a pace to it all. There was no pause or break in between plays. It was "practice how you play," personified.

"We've got to do that 10,000 times," Toppert said.

The next clip he showed didn't involve any LSU players. This time it's Booker – two seasons before he would be leading the Suns to the NBA Finals – and an array of Suns players running the same drill with Toppert in the middle defending the free-flowing sequence of actions.

It's bones over cones, even in the pros.

"The game is not played five on zero, the game is played five on five. And that's why I say bones over cones because a cone can't move. A cone can't randomize the coverage, right?... but a dude can," Toppert said.

"War and Peace"

When Suns general manager Ryan McDonough showed him the book, Igor Kokoskov thought he was holding Leo Tolstoy's literary epic "War and Peace."

"Every player was in it. (There) were a lot of diagrams, different numbers (and) different colors," Kokoskov, the former Suns head coach and current Brooklyn Nets assistant, said.

Of course, the book was Topperts, littered with ideas and concepts about how the Suns staff could help develop Phoenix's young core of players.

That level of detail coming from Toppert isn't extraordinary from him. Brown noticed the same work ethic from when he worked with Toppert at Memphis. He remembers Toppert showing him video clips from European games and showing how certain concepts and plays had trickled over into the college game.

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Toppert's willingness to borrow those clips stems from his strong sense of curiosity. It's something former Charlotte Hornets head coach and Albuquerque native James Borrego has noticed from Toppert.

"We're texting one or two times a week things we see offensively and defensively, things that piqued our interest in the basketball world," Borrego said. "Cody is a very creative (and) innovative coach and individual."

But, in Brown's eyes, a coach can find video clips and come up with creative ideas, but if they can't connect with the players and effectively relay information to them, then it's all for nothing. However, Brown believes Toppert excels at just that.

Toppert has power points diagraming his concepts and philosophies. But every slide isn't just bullet points, there are video clips and screengrabs showing the importance of offensive spacing; bits of humor sprinkled into the occasional slide to help drive home the point; words of wisdom from the late Kobe Bryant on slide two.

Toppert's goal is for LSU to become a program that consistently makes deep runs in the NCAA Tournament. And as far away as it may now seem, he believes that reality will come sooner rather than later.

If it does happen in the near future, it will be because his players followed his process.

"As we continue to develop these guys, it's going to yield big-time results on the backend and that is what I'm most looking forward to, is seeing those results," Toppert said.

Koki Riley covers LSU sports for The Daily Advertiser and the USA TODAY Sports South Region. Email him at kriley@theadvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter at @KokiRiley.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: LSU basketball: Assistant coach Cody Toppert a major boost for Tigers