In 2004, Clippers assistant coach Kim Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The surgery that could save his life came with a bill around 70,000 dollars, and the team's insurance would not cover it. Four players, Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, Chris Kaman and Marko Jaric, found out and quietly split the cost. No cameras, no announcement, no credit asked for. The story did not become public until 2011, when Hughes himself told it.
What happened
Hughes was a basketball lifer, a former ABA and NBA big man who had spent decades as a scout and assistant. When the diagnosis came, he faced the kind of math that ruins lives: a procedure he needed and coverage that would not stretch to it. Within the walls of the practice facility, word reached the players.
Think about who they were at the time. Brand was the franchise player on a team going nowhere. Kaman was a second-year center. Jaric was a young guard barely two years off the plane from Serbia. Maggette was a sixth man fighting for a bigger role. None of them owed a middle-aged assistant coach anything. They paid for the surgery anyway, and then they kept quiet about it for seven years.
"They didn't want any publicity for it. That's what makes it so special," Hughes said when the story finally surfaced in 2011. He called the gesture the reason he was alive.
Why this story leads this whole site
Clippers history gets told as a punchline: the losing, the curse, the owner. This site tells that part honestly too. But the truest thing about this franchise is not the losing. It is that the people inside it kept being decent to each other in ways nobody was watching. A locker room on a lottery team, in the middle of the Sterling years, produced one of the quietest acts of generosity in league history.
The surgery worked, by the way. Hughes recovered, kept coaching, and even served as the Clippers' interim head coach in 2010. Every time he walked the sideline after 2004, he was walking on his players' gift.
The Good Clip
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- ESPNClippers players paid for surgery, the 2011 report that broke the story.
- MoreMeet Elton Brand in the player spotlights. This story is half of why he is the most respected Clipper of his generation.
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