This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > March > 28
Friday, March 28, 2008
Pitino’s evolution makes Louisville dangerous
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte The former egomaniac Rick Pitino appears before us as a changed man, older and wiser but still as charismatic as all get-out. He changed college basketball two decades ago with his pressing and his 3-point shooting, and for the next few years he figured he’d outcoach everybody. Turns out nobody outcoaches everybody for very long.
“I’ve come to realize why you win and why you lose,” Pitino said Friday, the day before his latest team will face North Carolina in the East Regional final, “and it has nothing to do with me or with Roy [Williams, Carolina’s coach] — players win or lose. It’s less and less about what you know and more about what your guys do.”
We pause to reflect: In 1995 a Pitino-coached team played North Carolina in another regional final, and the day before that game Pitino compared his program to Dean Smith’s and said, “Both have great coaching.” Carolina beat favored Kentucky rather easily, and to his credit the self-described “great coach” used the bitter defeat as a life lesson.
“That loss was the pilot that helped us win a national championship [in 1996],” Pitino said. “We were disappointed in our shot selection.”
From that day forward, every Pitino team has sought to blend 3-point shooting with inside scoring, and we saw the results yet again as Louisville, his latest team, trashed Tennessee 79-60 in Thursday’s semifinal. The Vols were what a Pitino team used to be; the Cardinals are what a Pitino team is.
And what is Pitino himself? One of four coaches to take four programs (Boston U., Providence, Kentucky and Louisville) to the Big Dance. The only coach ever to guide three schools to the Final Four. He’s no longer the prodigy who sparked the epic Providence run of 1987 — Billy Donovan, that team’s star, has grown up to win more NCAA titles than his mentor — but he’s still among the two or three best in the business.
Said Louisville forward Juan Palacios: “Coach P, he knows what he’s doing. He’s been coaching 32 or 33 years — whenever you ask him how long, he always gives you a different answer.”
Said Pitino, speaking of a famous 150-95 loss he suffered against Williams and Kansas in 1989: “I have no feelings [about that game]. Like Tello [Palacios] said, I try to forget how long I’ve been coaching. I remember the good things and forget the bad ones. I don’t ever remember coaching in Boston.”
Here he laughed. If we’re looking for the reason Pitino at 55 isn’t half as full of himself as the 35- or 45-year-old model, we need only to recall those 3 1/2 seasons with the Celtics. Hailed as the savior of the NBA’s proudest franchise, he resigned midway through Season 4 having suffered the first real failure of his professional life.
Pitino: “I learned more from losing those four years with the Boston Celtics than I’ve learned at any time with the exception of my two years with Hubie Brown [as a Knicks assistant in the mid-’80s]. I learned patience.”
After leaving Boston, Pitino surfaced at Louisville, where he discovered something about human nature. The Kentucky fans who’d lionized him in the ’90s were now calling him Traitor Rick. But it must be noted that, for the Cards’ game against Tennessee, the man known as Mr. Wildcat — Bill Keightley, Kentucky’s equipment manager since 1962 and an avowed Cardinal hater — was seated in the first row of the Louisville section.
“I’ve learned a little about the game of life,” Pitino said. “[Keightley’s] never going to like Louisville — that’s not in his makeup. But he understands friendship and loyalty, and we’re friends for life. A lot of guys I thought were my friends, they weren’t my friends.”
Once the driven young ruler of college basketball, Rick Pitino is now the aging (but not yet graying) eminence. This isn’t the best team he has ever had, but because it’s his team it has a chance against anybody. Even Carolina.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment |
Rocky toppled: Volunteers exposed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte — Tennessee beat Memphis on Feb. 23 and became No. 1 in the land, and the Vols were never the same. The stakes got too big for them. Now they’re gone.
Gone in Round 3 of the Big Dance, gone after having a nervous time against American in Round 1 and nearly a nervous breakdown against Butler in Round 2. Gone despite being the RPI champion and, for one shining moment, the nation’s top-ranked team. Gone on a night when they were exposed by an opponent that does all the things the Vols did, only bigger and better.
Gone because they were outplayed by Louisville, but also because they were outcoached. Bruce Pearl, who never met a microphone he didn’t seize, made the silliest tactical decision the NCAA tournament has seen since Houston’s Guy V. Lewis went to his stall — the Loco-motion, he called it — with a lead against N.C. State. Maybe you recall how that turned out.
Pearl changed point guards 34 games into a season that had yielded an SEC regular-season championship, benching Ramar Smith and going with J.P. Prince. The Vols got away with it, just, against Butler despite Prince’s six turnovers. Louisville, as expected, made them pay. Prince had four more turnovers Thursday night, and Tennessee mustered just 19 baskets in 40 minutes.
The Cards and Vols pressed and harried one another with unbridled fury, as you’d also expect, and the result was an unsightly game that featured more deflections than crisp passes, more motion than artistry. But the chaos favored Rick Pitino’s team, largely because he pretty much invented this sort of thing 20 years ago.
Louisville led 24-8 after 11 minutes, and by then it was clear something was wrong with Chris Lofton, the pride of Maysville, Ky. The SEC’s all-time 3-point champ had scored only 14 points in Tennessee’s first two NCAA games, and he’d hurt his ankle against Butler. Against the school that once recruited him as a defensive back — Bobby Petrino, whom you might remember, was then the Cards’ football coach — Lofton managed two first-half points, those on free throws.
Lofton didn’t make his first basket (a 2-pointer) until 12:08 remained, didn’t nail a trey until 8:18 remained and his team was 10 points down. By then it was too late. He would finish with 15 points, a credit to his fighting spirit, but Louisville would win by 19. In his final game as a collegian, Lofton missed 12 of 15 shots and had four blocked.
In the end, its reliance a smallish shooting guard was Tennessee’s undoing. It had no half-court offense except to throw the ball to the Maysville flash and let him work some fallaway wonder. Once the Vols ascended to No. 1, they wilted under the accompanying scrutiny. They lost to Vanderbilt three days after beating Memphis, nearly lost at home to Kentucky and had to come from behind against Florida in Gainesville.
It took a Lofton trey, naturally, for Tennessee to fend off South Carolina in the SEC tournament, and then Lofton missed at the buzzer and Arkansas prevailed in the semifinals. That was the tale of Pearl’s team: If Lofton hit, the Vols had a chance. If not, they were just another bunch of guys who needed to steal the ball to score.
Louisville is somewhat better. Louisville has a half-court offense — Pitino learned in 1995, when Kentucky lost a bitter regional final to North Carolina in Birmingham, the folly of total dependence on 3-pointers — and has scorers inside. The Cardinals mightn’t be good enough to beat North Carolina on Saturday, but they at least have a chance. Tennessee would have had none.
Tennessee was a nice team in a weakened SEC. Tennessee was No. 1 in the polls for one fleeting week, but this was never the nation’s finest assemblage. And now it’s gone, clearing the stage for better squads.
Permalink | Comments (83) | Post your comment | Categories: UGA/SEC
