Under heavy pressure, Richard Pitino has engineered an unlikely turnaround
On the heels of a scandal-tainted 23-loss season marred by the suspension or dismissal of five players, Minnesota coach Richard Pitino’s job appeared to be dangling by a thread.
The athletic director who hired him had previously resigned in disgrace. Frustrated fans who once cheered him clamored for him to be replaced. Even the university president stoked the flames of discontent last May when he declared himself “profoundly disappointed” with the state of the basketball program.
“You win eight games, you have to suspend some players, and you’re going to get a lot of criticism,” Pitino told Yahoo Sports. “That’s just the way that it works. Nobody is immune to that. With that being said, there was always an inner confidence among our staff that we were a year away from turning the corner. I felt we would have our most complete team this year. When you have an important season in front of you, it’s nice to know that.”
Pitino’s optimism no longer sounds delusional now that newcomer-laden Minnesota has emerged as one of college basketball’s most surprising success stories. The same Golden Gophers program that didn’t win a conference game until after Valentine’s Day last season upset 15th-ranked Purdue in West Lafayette last Sunday, improving its overall record to an impressive 13-2. (Now 14-2 after a road win at Northwestern on Thursday.)
It’s too soon to declare Minnesota an NCAA tournament team, but it’s abundantly clear the Gophers will exceed preseason projections that had them finishing near the bottom of the Big Ten for a second straight year. Not only do they own solid non-league victories over Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Texas Arlington, the only two setbacks they’ve endured all season are a narrow loss at surging Florida State and an overtime heartbreaker against Michigan State.
“More than anything, what I’m proud of with these guys is their resiliency,” Pitino said. “We had a very, very difficult season last year and they had to sit and hear about it all offseason. We deserved all the criticism we got, but it’s always challenging when you can’t do anything about it. They dealt with it, they worked extremely hard on and off the floor to improve and now they’re doing a lot of good things.”
Minnesota’s turnaround stems from the influx of talent Pitino recruited to bolster last year’s overmatched roster. Four of the Gophers’ top seven players are newcomers including impact transfer Reggie Lynch and prized freshmen Amir Coffey and Eric Curry.
It’s Lynch who has been the chief catalyst for Minnesota’s rise from 162nd nationally in points per possession surrendered last season to 17th this season. The 6-foot-10 Illinois State transfer is fourth in the country in blocks at 3.4 per game. His ability to alter shots around the rim has enabled Minnesota’s longer, more athletic perimeter corps to defend aggressively out to the 3-point arc without fear of giving up uncontested layups should they get beat off the dribble.
When Minnesota is most dangerous, it’s turning defensive stops into transition buckets. Leading scorer Nate Mason is the Gophers’ lone reliable outside shooter, but the team moves the ball unselfishly, makes good decisions in the open court and excels at getting to the free throw line.
“It all stems from our defense,” Pitino said. “If we make our opponent go against our set defense, I’m moderately confident we can get a stop. When we do get stops, we get out on the break. I think we’re pretty good out on the break, especially when we have certain lineups in.”
An aggressive, defensive-oriented team is what former Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague envisioned four years ago when he fired accomplished veteran Tubby Smith and hired the then-30-year-old Pitino.
It was an undeniably risky choice considering Pitino had only one year of head coaching experience, an 18-14 season at previously struggling Florida International. But the Pitino name carried clout in college basketball circles and Teague had faith in his ability to identify coaching talent, having hired a young unknown named Shaka Smart in 2009 at VCU.
Pitino led the veteran roster he inherited from Smith to the 2014 NIT title in his debut season and won a respectable 18 games the next year, but year three was one of the worst in Minnesota basketball history. The Gophers lost to South Dakota, South Dakota State and Milwaukee in non-league play and then dropped their first 13 Big Ten games before avoiding the ignominy of becoming the first team in program history to complete a winless conference season.
A rebuilding season wasn’t a surprise since Minnesota had lost leading scorers Andre Hollins and Maurice Walker to graduation, but the extent of the youthful Gophers’ decline was certainly a shock. Even more alarming was the pattern of players Pitino recruited making embarrassing choices off the court.
It started the previous season when transfer Zach Lofton was dismissed for “failing to meet the expectations and obligations of the team” and sophomore Daquein McNeil was kicked off the team too after allegedly committing felony assault against his girlfriend. The problems continued last season when guard Carlos Morris was also dismissed for “conduct detrimental to the team.”
The nadir arrived last February when Mason and fellow guards Kevin Dorsey and Dupree McBrayer were suspended for the rest of the season after a sexually explicit video starring Dorsey was posted to his Twitter account. Dorsey was granted his release after the season, while Mason and McBrayer were reinstated.
The combination of a 23-loss season and a string of off-court incidents could have gotten Pitino fired had the details of his contract been different. The extension Teague gave Pitino in one of his last acts as athletic director included a massive $7 million buyout if he was cut loose last offseason, far too rich for Minnesota to seriously consider.
Even so, the erosion of administrative support for Pitino was obvious by last spring.
In May, someone anonymously leaked to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune the results of an internal university audit showing that Pitino spent twice as much on private jet travel as his contract allowed. That same month, university president Eric Kaler singled out the basketball program during a news conference introducing Minnesota’s new athletic director, telling reporters he was “profoundly disappointed in the continuing episodes, poor judgment, alleged crimes, and it simply can’t continue.”
Asked his reaction to Kaler’s candor, Pitino described the university president’s criticism as painful yet fair.
“The president, the CEO of this whole university, he’s sick and tired of being blamed for our mistakes,” Pitino said. “It’s my responsibility to make sure we make him look good, so I took his comments to heart. Sometimes it’s tough when you hear that, but sometimes you need to hear that. Whenever we do something bad, it goes to him, so it’s my job to make sure we’re putting out the best possible product on the court and off the court. If we do that, it makes everyone’s life easier.”
The lone silver lining to Minnesota’s dreadful 2015-16 season was that its freshman- and sophomore-heavy nucleus played heavy minutes and gained motivation to get better. They channeled that into offseason workouts this summer and instilled the same work ethic and attention to detail into the team’s six newcomers.
Minnesota’s determination was especially evident in its response to letting a 13-point halftime lead slip away in its overtime loss to Michigan State to open Big Ten play. Pushed to overtime just five days later at Purdue, the Gophers scored 13 of the first 15 points in the extra session to ensure another stellar effort would not go to waste.
“I was a little worried with a young team how they were going to respond in that situation,” Pitino said. “Are they going to sit there in the huddle before overtime and say, ‘Here we go again’ or are they going to take this challenge head on? Well, they definitely took it head on. We were extremely confident, extremely poised and we just made big plays when we needed them. That’s what you want to see.”
Pitino hasn’t been told how many wins he needs this season to ensure he’ll get another, nor is that his focus for the next two months. All he can do is prepare his players for the next game to the best of his ability, keep them focused and humble and hope that wins continue to stack up.
Before the season began, Pitino called a meeting with his returning players and delivered an important message.
“Guys, as insane as this sounds, last season was very good for us,” Pitino told his veterans. “We don’t ever want to go back to that, so we have to learn from our mistakes.”
So far, so good.
In a win-or-bust season in which he faced immense pressure to show progress on and off the floor, Pitino is halfway to a remarkable turnaround.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
