Minnesota's Richard Pitino isn't his father -- but he has the same aspirations
MINNEAPOLIS – The morning had started early for Richard Pitino. For him, mornings usually do. You could say he comes by it honestly, learning from his famous – and famously workaholic – father just how early the bird has to wake up to get the worm.
It was the middle of the September recruiting season for the 32-year-old, second-year head coach of the Minnesota Gophers, and Pitino’s night of sleep ended at 5:30 a.m. There were workouts to be planned, a visit to a highly touted New York recruit to be taken, a basketball program to be built, but on this morning Pitino didn’t wake up to visions of five-star recruits or to ideas for new wrinkles he should put into his up-tempo scheme.
Instead, the Big Ten’s youngest head coach by eight years awoke to the face of his 3-year-old daughter, standing at his bedside.
“Daddy!” Ava Pitino said, tugging at him. “Let’s go downstairs and watch cartoons!”
Less than two hours later, after three episodes of “Doc McStuffins,” several cups of coffee and a reasonable 20-minute Midwestern commute, the man who has injected new life into what had been a decent though stagnant Minnesota basketball program walked into his office in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis. Last season’s NIT championship trophy sat near a commemorative bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon. The bourbon bottle was emblazoned with images from his father’s 2013 national championship Louisville team – a team led by point guard Peyton Siva, the defensive wizard whom Richard Pitino recruited when he was an assistant to his father.
First things first when it comes to Richard Pitino: There will always be a giant, Hall-of-Fame-sized elephant in the room any time anyone is talking about him. Richard Pitino looks like his dad; Richard Pitino sounds like his dad; Richard Pitino’s basketball teams play the same frenetic, always-pressing pace as his dad’s.
So it was no surprise that before long, as I sat in his office and talked about his grand plans for his future at Minnesota, we were talking about his dad and his past.
“Everybody thinks I got this job – everybody thinks I get everything – because of my dad,” Richard Pitino said with a smile.
He said this by way of explanation, with no hint of bitterness. Father-son relationships are complicated. They should become even more complicated when the father is as charismatic and as successful as Pitino’s. But there seems to be little else here except mutual affection between these two, none of that rebellious desire to overcome a father’s shadow, none of that awful situation where a headstrong father pushes a son into a profession he doesn’t enjoy.
Sure, Pitino’s basketball mind was formed in the image of his father’s: From the times when he put up shots at a teenager in the corner of Kentucky basketball practices with his two older brothers, to the time last season when he coached his team to an NIT championship and his father sat in the stands directly behind him.
But he is not his father.
And Richard Pitino is also quick to point out that, no, everything he’s achieved as a basketball coach isn’t because of that famous last name. In fact, the man who made the crucial job recommendation to new Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague that got Pitino in the door wasn’t his famous father. It was Billy Donovan, Richard Pitino’s boss at Florida and the man who also recommended Teague’s heralded hire at his last job, at Virginia Commonwealth, former Donovan assistant Shaka Smart.
“The decision for me when I was an assistant coach to leave Louisville and go to Florida, I always knew it was the best thing for me growth-wise, but it just showed how much it paid off,” Pitino said. “I’m not going to sit here and say I deserve to be the head coach at Minnesota at age 32. I’m a realist. I understand (being Rick Pitino’s son) has opened up a lot of doors. But being Rick Pitino’s son isn’t going to help me beat Tom Izzo on the road or beat Thad Matta. Now it’s my opportunity, so I’ve got to do something with it.”
In his first year at Minnesota after one season at Florida International, Pitino did do something with it, beating three top-20 teams on his way to a 25-win season and an NIT championship. Look simply at the wins and losses and that might have seemed like a step backward for Minnesota basketball. After all, in Tubby Smith’s final season before he was fired, Minnesota made the NCAA tournament, and the Golden Gophers even won a game.
But what Pitino is attempting to do at Minnesota is something more long-sighted. He’s looking for a complete stylistic and cultural change in a basketball program that last made a Sweet 16 in 1997, the same season that an academic fraud scandal ended up derailing everything that had been building there. Like he had to do when he moved from being an assistant under his father to being an assistant under Donovan, Pitino knew he had to set things in a different direction in order to move forward.
It’s hard not to sound like you’re insulting Tubby Smith when you talk about where Minnesota basketball stood at the end of his six seasons there. And Smith is a hugely respected coach in his profession, a national champion at Kentucky, a guy who might be considered the single most likable man in coaching. He’s not a guy you want to insult.
But the truth is, Minnesota basketball had been stuck in some form of neutral ever since that 1997 scandal meant forfeiting the school’s only Final Four appearance. Things hadn’t gotten demonstrably better under Tubby. Under Tubby, Minnesota basketball was … fine.
Not great. Not bad. Just fine.
Minnesota isn’t a talent-rich state in basketball, and its practice facilities have fallen behind the times. (A $190 million facilities campaign for all sports ought to change that.) The program had become stale and directionless, content with NCAA tournament appearances instead of striving for NCAA tournament success, always competitive but never resembling anything great.
Winning an NIT championship in his first season at Minnesota was nice, but Richard Pitino has his eyes set on bigger goals.
Pitino, with his youth, energy and pedigree, immediately changed the feeling around the program. Instead of worrying about the lack of talent in Minnesota, he trumpeted that this was the only Division I basketball school in a state of 5 million – compared to nine Division 1 schools in similarly sized Indiana. The Barn, Minnesota’s historic basketball arena, wasn’t a detriment to players looking for NBA-like facilities; it was the Wrigley Field of college basketball. One of the most symbolic moments of his first season was when, instead of waiting for the new practice facilities to be completed in the next few years, Pitino took an old cinder-block gym near the basketball offices and turned it into an interim – though very workable – practice facility.
“He’s incredibly driven and incredibly bright, and you couple that with the insight he’s gained from sitting at the knee of a legend, he was the perfect guy,” said Minnesota executive associate athletic director Mike Ellis, who helped hire Pitino and who founded Villa 7, an incubator and networking event for college coaches.
“This is a sleeping giant in many ways, and Richard is just beginning to wake it up.”
At a fast-paced September workout, Pitino’s voice echoed through that practice gym, trying to wake up his team from its offseason break. A rough-and-tumble, Big Ten-style rebounding drill ended with one player heading to the trainer to jam cotton in his bloodied nose; he quickly rejoined practice. When defenders forgot to switch on a pick-and-roll, Pitino had the same exasperated look you’d expect from his father. Close your eyes and the son’s throaty shouts – “Don’t let him grab that ball! Squeeze it!” – could have easily been the father’s.
It’s a scrappy, energized style of basketball he’s brought here, the type of basketball that affords players to have individual freedom within a structure. It also can take a long time to learn. When players seemed a bit fed up at that recent, relentless practice – rolling eyes, shaking heads – Pitino lit into them.
“Did we win the Big Ten last year?” Pitino shouted to a now-silent gym. “Did we make the NCAA tournament last year?” The gym somehow got more quiet. “No! So all the head-shaking stops.”
The intensity ramped up. After practice, Pitino kept on that theme: Don’t settle.
Work harder.
“What I saw there was constant bitching,” he said to his players. “What is that? Stop doing it. I can understand that if we just had been to the Elite Eight or the Sweet 16. But we weren’t.”
The expectations for this team are to make the NCAA tournament. (Ten of the past 14 participants in an NIT final have made the NCAA tournament the next season.)
Point guard Deandre Mathieu is one of the key's to Pitino's fast-paced style of play.
And they’ll have the pieces. Four likely starters will be seniors; a fifth, juco transfer Carlos Morris, averaged 15 points and 5 rebounds last season. Senior big man Maurice Walker transformed his body to fit this fast-paced system in the year-plus since Pitino was hired, dropping 65 pounds. Pitino favorably compared 6-11 freshman Bakary Konate of Mali to former Louisville center Gorgui Dieng. Senior point guard Deandre Mathieu might be the quickest player in the Big Ten, a Russ Smith-like dynamo who has been a huge asset in the Pitino system.
“Our brand of basketball we want to play, plus the home-court advantage we have here, it’s a nuclear combination,” assistant coach Dan McHale said.
After the workout, as players worked on free-throw shooting in small groups, Pitino wandered over. He knows his success will be forged as much in these hard-charging practices as in the games: “The more I coach, the more I realize that day of the game, you don’t have much control.”
Winning the NIT was an accomplishment, sure. But he knows that’s not the accomplishment any of these players grew up dreaming about. Pitino wants his players to know this program can be something more. That Minnesota basketball, a place where greatness has never sprouted, should aim for it anyway.
And in so doing, it’ll help him forge an image that’s his own – an image that owes a huge debt to the father, sure, but is very much the son’s.
“If I went out there and tried to operate like I was Rick Pitino and tried to command the same respect from these guys that Rick Pitino gets or Billy Donovan gets, I’d fail miserably,” he told me. “What my time with Billy taught me was to be your own man – you’re not going to be your dad. Run things the way you’re comfortable running them.”
He gave me a smile that was spookily like his father’s, then he walked back onto the court.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
