UCLA coach Mick Cronin joked during a press conference last week that if he had Rick Pitino’s money, “I’d be on a private plane for Cabo right now.”
Well, Rick Pitino has Rick Pitino’s money and he’s not on a plane to Cabo. On the contrary: He’s about to win the Big East in Year 2 at St. John’s.
At 72 years old, Pitino’s contemporaries are pretty much gone from college basketball. Jim Boeheim talks on television. Mike Krzyzewski does a podcast. Roy Williams sits in the stands at North Carolina games like a fan. Leonard Hamilton announced Monday he’s calling it a career.
And here’s Pitino, about to take a sixth school to the NCAA Tournament and maybe make his case as the best college basketball coach of all time.
St. John’s, ranked No. 10 in this week’s USA TODAY Sports men’s basketball coaches poll, beat No. 11 Marquette 70-64 on Tuesday to establish a clear lead in the Big East regular season race. And it was classic Pitino, his team running and hustling and guarding like maniacs, winning with grit and pace and 21 offensive rebounds even when 3-pointers (3-for-16) and free throws (17-for-31) weren’t falling.
Watching the game on television, it struck me that I don’t remember any part of my life as a sports fan that doesn’t include Pitino coaching big games and being a relevant figure in March. I had just turned 12 years old when Pitino’s Kentucky Wildcats lost to Christian Laettner and Duke on arguably the most famous buzzer-beater in NCAA Tournament history.
Next month, I’m going to celebrate my 45th birthday, and Pitino will bring yet another team to March Madness with a legitimate chance to make the Final Four.
Sometimes you have to take a step back and appreciate the sheer improbability of such a long, productive run. As much as college sports have evolved, as big as the generation gap has grown, one thing hasn’t changed at all. No matter what, Pitino is going to win — and win big — even as his contemporaries have mostly decided that they’re incapable of navigating the modern era.
For a guy who’s won national championships at Kentucky and Louisville, getting St. John’s to 20-3 with a Big East championship in sight may be as impressive as anything he’s done.
And if you’re an administrator at any major conference school that had an open coaching job over the last five or six years and passed on the chance to hire Pitino, you have to ask yourself: What were you doing?
Yes, Pitino was fired in the fall of 2017 when the sport of college basketball was consumed by fears of an FBI investigation into illegal recruiting that ensnared Louisville recruit Brian Bowen among others. And coming on the heels of another scandal at Louisville, where a female escort claimed she was paid by a staff member to have sex with recruits, it’s obvious why Pitino had to be fired and held accountable — even if it was never proven that he had involvement in, or knowledge of, those misdeeds.
But right after the Final Four in 2019, I wrote that UCLA should hire Pitino, who at the time had gone to Greece to coach a pro team in Athens. Yes, there were issues and never-ending controversies. But he had paid his penance, and it was obvious he still had more to give.
The only school willing to give Pitino a chance was Iona, and he rewarded that faith with two NCAA Tournament bids in three seasons.
Even then, it’s not like he was a hot commodity. College administrators largely viewed him as too old, too toxic, too much of a novelty at a time when the sport was looking toward a name, image and likeness future and the coaches in Pitino’s generation were headed toward retirement.
Whoops. Hate to say it, but I told ya so.
Credit St. John’s for being ready to capitalize on the moment.
For all the 1980s romance around the Johnnies and the allure of playing in Madison Square Garden, it has been a pretty terrible program with a clueless administration for a very long time. Over the last 20 years and five coaches, it has made the NCAA Tournament just three times, never advancing beyond the round of 64. The last time St. John’s won a tournament game? It was 2000 — before anyone on its roster was born.
Now the Johnnies are 20-3, having just won their ninth game in a row. Only a couple teams in college basketball are on a more impressive streak. Not only is St. John’s a postseason lock now, but it’s playing for the kind of seed that could position it for a very, very deep run in March — even with a roster that may not have a future NBA player.
New York City is invested. The Garden is rocking every night. Something special suddenly seems possible.
And only Pitino could have made that happen.
You can relitigate all the controversies and personal embarrassments in his long life and career if you want, but none of those things are relevant to the bottom line here. Nearly every great college coach we’ve seen from Nick Saban to John Calipari has either lost a step or walked away as they’ve reckoned with changes in the sport and their own level of hunger to keep going.
Pitino, by contrast, is still pulling off miracles, still turning around programs, still showing that he’s got a unique ability to pull the absolute best out of players who are tough and well-conditioned enough to play in his system.
And if somehow he can get a fourth school to the Final Four — which suddenly looks like a realistic possibility — he will have an excellent case as the best coach in the history of college basketball.