Scott Brooks, shown at right on the New York Knicks’ bench in the 1997 playoffs. Brooks played for 10 seasons in the NBA as a reserve point guard after going undrafted out of UC Irvine. (Ray Stubblebine/Reuters)

Eric Musselman was watching a few summer pro league games in Los Angeles in July 1987 when he made an urgent call to his father. He had to tell him about an undrafted player named Scott Brooks who had just dropped 30-something points against a team featuring members of the Soviet Union’s national club.

“I just saw a guy flying around banging three-balls, diving head-first on the floor, taking charges,” Musselman said. “I didn’t know who he was.”

Then the coach of the Continental Basketball Association’s Albany Patroons, Bill Musselman was in Florida preparing for the league’s draft. A few days later he selected Brooks, a 5-foot-11 point guard out of UC Irvine, in the second round. The Patroons would go on to win the championship in a league considered superior to today’s NBA D-League. The following year, Brooks was a rookie on the Philadelphia 76ers living with Charles Barkley. He appeared in all 85 games including the playoffs.

Nearly three decades later, Brooks is a hot commodity as an NBA coach, having agreed last week to a five-year, $35 million contract with the Washington Wizards before another team with a vacancy could snap him up. But his career in professional basketball was built from the grit of a fringe prospect, and a key to his coaching success is the ability to relate with current players learned from 10 seasons scratched out as an NBA player himself.

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“He’s a guy players love to play for,” NBA veteran Caron Butler said of Brooks, above. (LM Otero/Associated Press)

“He’s a guy players love to play for,” said NBA veteran Caron Butler, who played for Brooks with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014. “That’s something in its own right that’s very unique. And there’s only a handful of coaches like that. Those are the names that jump out at me when you talk about coaching, where guys that really get it and listen to the players’ opinions and their bodies and receives the information. Guys just love playing for him. You hear nothing but good things.”

Brooks was hired because of his accomplishments over six-plus seasons as coach of the Thunder. He inherited a roster stocked with young talent after replacing P.J. Carlesimo 13 games into the franchise’s first season in Oklahoma City and oversaw the Thunder’s rise to title contender. He didn’t win a championship but is credited with helping develop Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Serge Ibaka while posting a .620 winning percentage with three trips to the Western Conference finals and an NBA Finals appearance in 2012 before he was dismissed last year.

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Years ago, Brooks was a lightly recruited point guard at East Union High in Manteca, Calif. He began his collegiate career at TCU before transferring to a junior college back in California and completing his eligibility with two seasons at UC Irvine, where he averaged 23.8 points his senior year. His name wasn’t called at the 1987 NBA draft, so he considered other professional options. Going overseas was one. Playing in a league for players under 6-4 was another. He chose to play for Bill Musselman’s CBA team in Albany, where teammates included future NBA coaches Rick Carlisle, Sam Mitchell and Sidney Lowe.

After two seasons with the 76ers, Brooks reunited with Musselman with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1990. Eric Musselman arrived as an assistant on his father’s staff.

“He had great energy, great enthusiasm, toughness,” said Eric Musselman, now coach at the University of Nevada. “That group of guys was known for their execution. There were a lot of low-scoring games. They were a low-turnover team. They grinded games out, and he was one of those key figures that gave the team their identity or style.”

Brooks’s NBA playing career lasted until 1998, and included a championship with the Houston Rockets in 1994, though he never averaged more than 6.3 points over a season. He began his coaching career in 2000 in a dual player-coach role for the Los Angeles Stars, a franchise in the failed American Basketball Association’s eight-team resurrection. He was one of two assistants under Paul Westhead and was limited to coaching at the start of the season after injuring his leg in one of the team’s first practices.

“It was to his advantage” to be able to concentrate on coaching while he recuperated, Westhead said in a phone interview.

But the itch to play was still there. Westhead recalled a game a month into that season when the Stars entered halftime trailing by 15 points. Brooks was unavailable to play, or so Westhead thought: When the coach entered the locker room at halftime he found Brooks changing into a uniform.

“He’s like Superman, pulling his suit off and putting his uniform on,” Westhead said. “And he goes out. I started him in the second half, and the first play there’s a loose ball. He dives on the floor and knocks three guys over and comes up with the ball like holding onto it like he had just scored a touchdown, like,‘I got the ball.’ And we turn around and won the game and it was absolutely because of his tenacity.”

Brooks didn’t play much that season. Sensing he was nearing the end of his playing career, he deferred minutes to teammates and focused on coaching, Westhead said. He was intense and a quick learner, picking up everything from practice drills to player evaluation over the course of the campaign. He became head coach of the ABA’s Southern California Surf the next season, leading the team to a 23-14 record, before landing his first NBA coaching job as an assistant with the Denver Nuggets in 2003.

After three seasons, he joined Eric Musselman’s staff with the Sacramento Kings. A year later he was in Seattle working alongside Westhead under Carlesimo in the Super Sonics’ final campaign, joining the franchise in conjunction with a rookie named Kevin Durant. Eight years later, Brooks is in Washington and many are wondering if Durant, a Washington area native and impending free agent, will join him because of their relationship. But to those that have witnessed Brooks’s unlikely rise, there is much more to him than that.

“Everybody in NBA circles has unbelievable respect for the job that he did with Oklahoma City,” Musselman said. “His record speaks for itself. He’s a winner and he’s going to win in Washington as well.”