Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

College Basketball

Pitino coaching tree may be the strongest yet

ORLANDO, Fla. — For the people who have watched Rick Pitino along the way, the calendar is a perpetual liar, a serial deceiver. Has to be. It simply isn’t possible that he will turn 62 years old in September. Sixty-two?

“To me,” Hubie Brown said a few months ago, “Rick is forever 30 years old, with more energy than any five people you know. With plenty to spare.”

Brown hired Pitino to be his assistant with the Knicks in 1983 at a curious time in Pitino’s professional development. He already had been something or a child prodigy at Boston University, made the Terriers into instant winners. He was one of Howard Garfinkel’s fair-haired sons at the Five-Star Camps.

Yet, as ascendant as he was, the passing lane to the top had stalled. He had interviewed for the Penn State job that spring, failed to get it. He already had done five years on Commonwealth Avenue. He needed to find something fresh, something new. He needed to find a coaching tree.

Brown’s isn’t extensive, but it did include Mike Fratello, who won a lot of games as an NBA coach. It included Jack McKinney, who would have become a Hall of Fame coach with the Showtime Lakers if not for a terrible bicycle accident that derailed him early in his first year there. And the most prominent branch is Pitino, because Pitino is now his own tree.

And, before he’s done, it might be one of the strongest, sturdiest of all the coaching trees in college basketball.

“What Coach Pitino did for me, and for all the other of his assistants who became head coaches, he constantly prepared us,” said Billy Donovan, the most prominent branch of the Pitino Tree, with two NCAA titles at Florida to match the two Pitino has from Louisville and Kentucky.

“I try to do the same with my assistants now. Our assistants are very active in practice. They’re very active with our players. They’re active in individual instruction. Their [doing] scouting reports, presenting in front of the team, all those things. Same as Coach Pitino was with me.”

Pitino had five former assistants — Donovan, Manhattan’s Steve Masiello, New Mexico State’s Marvin Menzies, Arizona State’s Herb Sendek, Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin — join him in the NCAA field. His son, Richard, coaches Minnesota, a No. 1 seed in the NIT. One of his exes, Tubby Smith, won a national title. And another, Pacers coach Frank Vogel, may well win the NBA title this year. In all, 13 men who either played for or assisted Pitino are head coaches in Division I.

It may not trump Dean Smith’s tree — and none ever might if you consider that while Billy Cunningham and Roy Williams alone would give it luster, adding Larry Brown and his own descendants (John Calipari, Bill Self, Gregg Popovich) just about retires the tree, its roots and all its branches. And if Bob Knight’s tree doesn’t have a lot of limbs, it does have one belonging to Mike Krzyzewski; that’s 1,882 wins on just a trunk and an arm. That’s a good tree.

Still, Pitino’s will make a run at both of them, for sheer numbers. If it’s hard for some to believe his birth certificate, he’s still youthful enough that there will be plenty of additions to the arboretum before it’s done.

“I’m proud of my guys,” said Pitino, whose Louisville Cardinals will play Saint Louis in a third-round game Saturday afternoon. We build bridges together. We’ll cross them together. It’s been awesome. I root for them all the time …

“When [Oklahoma State’s] Travis Ford (who played for Pitino at Kentucky) and Billy Donovan and Steve Masiello and [Morehead State’s] Sean Woods and all these guys coach, I sit at the edge of my bed and jump up and down like a cheerleader.”

Pitino also is still close enough to the young climber he used to be to know exactly the ambitions and restlessness that can drive a young coach forward and upward, and it’s his mission to help those dreams along.

“I think they make me more successful than I make them to be successful to be honest with you,” he said. “They work so hard for me, with me.”