How fire, an AAU coach and a game of H-O-R-S-E connected Clippers

Skip Robinson remembers the moment Bones Hyland first met Marcus Morris Sr. with vivid clarity, because seeing a middle-schooler issue a challenge to an NBA player 11 years his senior, before so much as saying hello, is not something that is easily forgotten.

It was nearly a decade ago and Robinson, as the coach of Hyland’s Philadelphia-based Amateur Athletic Union team, asked the guard about his goals. The response was matter-of-fact, and assured: the NBA. Robinson happened to know someone who understood what that would take: A decade before then, Robinson had coached an AAU team featuring Morris and his twin, Markieff. He brokered a meeting.

“We were in the gym getting prepared for a tournament and I had the twins come up and Marcus is like, ‘Who’s the best kid right now?’ I’m like, ‘I think Bones has the most potential.’

“But at the time he might have weighed 115 pounds, was probably like 5-9. Marcus was like, ‘Which one is it?’”

Said Morris: “He like came out from the back and he was like, long, scrawny, like he didn’t say much.”

Said Robinson: “Bones wouldn’t shake his hand until Marcus agreed to play him one-on-one.”

“I wanted to let him know,” Hyland said of the meeting, “I got some tricks up my sleeve.”

Hyland and Robinson recall settling on the shooting game H-O-R-S-E — an early display of the raw confidence that has never dissipated for Hyland in the near-decade since that eventually led to the two becoming Clippers teammates.

It was self-belief that helped Hyland endure a life-altering fire that left a hole in his family and wrecked his knee to reach the NBA just four years later. It was a quality the Clippers treasured as they learned more about him before the 2022 NBA draft. It drove his quest for a bigger role in Denver, and his trade when it didn’t materialize.

When Hyland arrived in Los Angeles after February’s trade deadline, the Clippers put his locker, at home and on the road, next to the person who knows what…