Dun and Dunner

Emily Dunleavy will look on from a unique perspective, and with a bemused interest, whenever the Clippers play the Golden State Warriors this season, starting with tonight’s exhibition at Oakland.

“It’ll be fun,” she says.

Her husband of 26 years, Mike, is the Clippers’ new coach.

The couple’s 23-year-old son, Mike Jr., plays for the Warriors.

Only once in NBA history has a father coached against his son in a regular-season game. On Nov. 9, 1976, at New Orleans, Butch van Breda Kolff coached the New Orleans Jazz to a 110-99 victory over the New York Nets, who got six points, four rebounds and an assist from forward Jan van Breda Kolff.

It will happen again Nov. 14, when the Clippers face the Warriors at Oakland. The Pacific Division rivals will meet again three more times in the regular season.

Which would seem to leave Emily Dunleavy in a difficult spot.

Whom to root for?

“I’ll never tell,” she says.

As she sees it, unlike her husband and the oldest of her three sons, she can’t lose: “One way or the other, somebody’s going to win, right?”

To the Dunleavys, this is not an awkward situation, nor an unpleasant development. Awkward would have been if father were coaching son, which nearly happened and would have been an NBA first.

In the spring of 2002, a year after he’d been fired by the Portland Trail Blazers, Mike Sr. was talking to the Warriors about their coaching vacancy at about the same time Mike Jr. was contemplating an early jump to the NBA from Duke.

“There was great interest on their part,” Mike Sr. says of the Warriors, whose general manager, Garry St. Jean, is a longtime friend. “And I had great interest in their team.”

But then came the monkey wrench: With the third pick in the draft, the Warriors planned to take Mike Jr., who had decided to leave school.

“At first, in my mind, I kind of thought it could be done,” the elder Dunleavy says. “We’ve got a great relationship, and he’s the type of player, most players love playing with him because he’s so unselfish....

“But then, as you start getting into it, you start chalking up all the pluses and minuses -- the dynamics of running a team and managing a team, the potential of dealing with fans. You put your son in, you take him out. He’s playing his son over me; it’s not deserved, whether it’s right or wrong.

“Basically, it came down to, why would we want that extra pressure at the start of his career? It just made no sense at all.”

So Mike Sr. pulled out of the running and was out of coaching for another year. Mike Jr. was drafted by the Warriors and, after a promising second half of his rookie year, is projected to be a starter this season.

In July, the Clippers set up the father-son matchup, hiring Mike Sr., who says he would not be opposed to coaching his son later in his career, after he is more established as a player.

For now, “obviously, we’ll do what we’re supposed to do,” the coach said. “We’ll cover plays the way we’re supposed to cover plays.

“I’m not going to put a coverage on him that’s going to make it easy for him, but I’m not going to over-cover him to stop him, either. I’m just going to play him like I should play him.”

His son is more apprehensive.

“I haven’t given too much thought to it,” he said, though he was quick to laughingly point out that he is sure his mother will be pulling for him. “But it will be a little weird preparing and then going out there and seeing him. But I think once the game is going on, it will be back to normal and I’ll forget about it.

“But I really don’t know. It’s just kind of wait and see.”

Though the stakes will be higher, this won’t be the first time the former NBA player and his namesake son have squared off.

“They used to play each other constantly,” says Emily, whose other two sons are Baker, 20, a sophomore basketball player at Villanova, and James, 15, a freshman basketball player at Harvard-Westlake. “I think that’s one reason Michael has gotten where he’s gotten, because he loved it and Mike taught him a lot. He wanted to learn; there was never any animosity or resentment.”

She’s confident she’ll be able to say the same after tonight.

“It will be fun for them,” she insists.

For the Van Breda Kolffs, it was memorable, at least, though neither was involved at game’s end the night they faced off in New Orleans.

Butch was ejected in the third quarter and Jan fouled out.

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Forward Elton Brand and rookie Chris Kaman are not expected to play against the Warriors tonight. Brand has a sprained left ankle and Kaman a strained lower left leg.