Tucson native Jesse Mermuys reportedly to return 'home' as top Suns assistant

The continent-wide journey that is Jesse Mermuys’ coaching career reportedly will take the Tucson native and UA graduate back to his home state.

ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Thursday that Mermuys will leave the Orlando Magic to become the lead assistant in Phoenix under new Suns coach Jordan Ott, keeping Mermuys again on the cusp of becoming an NBA head coach.

A 2004 Arizona graduate, Mermuys began his coaching career while in college, serving as the head freshman coach and varsity assistant at Salpointe before spending 2003-04 as an assistant at Pima College. He moved on to roles at New Mexico State and Southern Utah before becoming UA’s director of basketball operations in 2006-07, and then shifting to the NBA track.

Mermuys, 44, jumped into the NBA when he became Denver’s video coordinator between 2008-09 and 2011-12, then worked as an assistant coach with the Rockets, Raptors, Lakers, Kings and Magic. He has worked under head coaches that include George Karl, Kevin McHale and Luke Walton, who was once his Tucson roommate.

Mermuys took his first head coaching job in 2015-16, taking over the Raptors’ G League affiliate, the Raptors 905, and also briefly led the Magic on an interim basis in 2021-22 when the head coach, Jamahl Mosley, was sidelined by the NBA’s COVID protocols.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Mermuys also served as a head coach during the 2017 NBA Combine and for the Kings, Raptors and Magic in the NBA Summer League. While coaching the Magic at the 2022 Summer League in Las Vegas, he told the Star that he was fortunate to be coaching for a living.

“It’s awesome,” Mermuys said. “It’s the greatest job, and when you have that type of environment — it’s a grind obviously, with travel and all of that — this is why we do it. Games like this, where there’s great energy and you get to compete at a high level, I’m just super grateful that I get to be a part of it.”

Though Mermuys didn’t play at UA, he absorbed the culture, rooming with Walton during their senior years in 2003-04 and finding a mentor in then-UA coach Lute Olson toward the end of Olson’s coaching career.

“Incredible,” Mermuys said of Olson. “That guy was presidential, he was an unbelievable person, coach, teacher — everything. He was everything for Tucson, Arizona. I had a rough go as a kid, with a lot of tough obstacles in my family life, and to have that role model and guy who I looked up to and aspired to be like, it was wonderful.”

Mermuys said he was a better soccer player than a basketball player as a youth, but loved basketball and yearned to make it to the NBA as coach if he couldn’t as a player. Even at age 36 in 2017, when he had become one of Walton’s top assistants with the Lakers, Mermuys said he didn’t feel he was ahead of schedule.

“I don’t because my dream and goal is to be a head coach in the NBA and I’m not really ever able to stop until that dream is realized,” Mermuys told the Star that year. “I don’t have time to smell the flowers. I’m just kind of, like, steamrolling it and doing the best I can.”