He is an elder statesman in college basketball without being old. Rick Pitino's first of four trips to the Final Four came 18 years ago, but he is still only 52, looks at least a half-dozen years younger, and just put together what he calls his best recruiting class ever. There seems to be so much less Pitino-bashing than there was in the 1990s, perhaps because it is abundantly clear now that March is so much less fun without him. Whatever happened or didn't happen in Boston with the Celtics, Pitino is fabulous when it comes to running a college basketball program.
Providence is a small school whose basketball program was operating in the shadow of Syracuse, Georgetown, St. John's and Boston College until Pitino took the Friars to the Final Four in 1987. Proud Kentucky had been given the NCAA death penalty, but not only did Pitino take the Wildcats to three Final Fours, he won the whole thing in 1996. Louisville was in disrepair at the end of Denny Crum's tenure, yet Pitino had the Cardinals in the NCAA tournament in his second season and in this, his fourth season, he has them in the second round of the tournament and quite capable of going to the Final Four.
And if Louisville can get past Washington and one more team in the Albuquerque Regional Final, Pitino will be the first coach ever to lead three schools to the Final Four. Mike Krzyzewski is never going to do that. Bob Knight is never going to do that. And if Pitino isn't their equal now, it certainly appears he has time. The Cardinals aren't as good as they're probably going to be in year or two, but they're 31-4 now with a wonderful tandem of Taquan Dean and Francisco Garcia, and they certainly have more talent than that Providence team had 18 years ago.
Billy Donovan, whose Florida Gators play the early game here against Villanova, was the lead guard for Pitino's Providence Final Four team and still calls him "Coach Pitino." And Pitino still calls Donovan "Bill the Kid."
Back in '87, the Friars had defeated Georgetown in Providence, then were simply crushed by Georgetown in both Washington and the Big East tournament. Pitino on Saturday recalled telling his team after that second lopsided Georgetown victory, "Look, we can beat anybody else in the country. We're not going to see Georgetown again."
Lo and behold, Providence did have to see Georgetown and its smothering defense one more time, in the regional final in Louisville, of all places. The great majority of coaches would have preached sticking with what got the team that far, with executing better to make the coach's system work, which in this case was a guard-based offense starring Donovan and Delray Brooks that stressed shooting three-pointers the moment the players stepped off the bench.
But Pitino decided that his Friars, with their one day of preparation, would do a 180-degree reversal and attack Georgetown by tossing the ball inside to big men of no particular distinction and completely forget about shooting three-pointers.
I still remember, covering Georgetown at the time, thinking Pitino was out of his mind. Pitino was busy trying to beat Georgetown, not make his system work.
"Coach Pitino sat me and Delray down and told us, 'If you take one shot, we'll lose,'" Donovan recalled. "I don't know if it was radical as much as he was saying to us, 'Here's what we have to do to take advantage of the way Georgetown is playing."
And as it turned out, Donovan and Brooks rarely shot, and Providence blew Georgetown's doors off. When I asked Pitino on Saturday if it was the most radical strategy he had ever employed as a coach, he nodded and said: "Everything was going to feed the post. We used Donovan as a decoy."
Donovan, thinking about the lesson learned, said: "He was teaching us that sometimes less is more. Less of myself was more that day."
It's easy to listen to Pitino now. Kids who come to play for him have been watching him at Kentucky and with the Celtics for 10 years or more. They watched him cut down the nets in 1996. They've seen the string of players he has prepared for NBA life, including Antoine Walker. But then? In 1987 Pitino had no such status. He had been to the NCAA tournament once, as coach of Boston University.
Even so, Donovan says: "I believed in everything he was doing. He had a certain relationship with the players. Back then there was no 20-hour limit rule regarding practice. And I was a gym rat. As long as I wanted to be there, he was there. If you didn't love the game he was the wrong guy to play for. And he gave us so much time. We were starving for more. And we bought into what he was doing because of the amount of time he gave us. Our passion matched each others' very well."
Pitino has rebuilt Louisville to the point that the Cardinals are once again a constant threat. They should have been a No. 1 seed in this tournament, certainly no lower than a No. 2. But he has taken the philosophical approach that "if you can beat a Georgia Tech you are good enough to get to the Final Four."
Sooner rather than later, history tells us Pitino is going to arrive at the NCAA tournament with a team so talented and accomplished it will be a force that cannot be resisted by the selection committee nor another team. Eighteen years removed from his first Final Four and eight years removed from his most recent one, indications are everywhere that Pitino is gearing up to make another long run.
