Inside the ties that bind OKC Thunder and March Madness legend Rick Pitino
Mark Daigneault and Rick Pitino are connected. Well, sort of.
Their family ties are by suit and tie, just not directly. Pitino, the godfather of college basketball, has 51 years under his belt and has crossed paths with countless coaches. Daigneault, 40 years old, has received teachings from several of his predecessors.
“I think he’s maybe the greatest college basketball coach ever, if not one of them,” Daigneault said earlier this week. “It’s amazing what he’s doing again this year.”
Twelve years after a national title with Louisville, Pitino has revived the St. John's, coaching the second-seeded Johnnies to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Daigneault — knee deep into the NBA season with the first-seeded Thunder — admittedly had no clue that Oklahoma, the local NCAA tournament team, and Connecticut, his alma mater, were squaring off Friday in the first round.
Here are a few of the individuals that link the two:
Billy Donovan
Donovan, formerly head coach of the Thunder who now heads the Bulls, has been around the way — both as a player and a coach.
In the 1980s, he helped lead college basketball’s 3-point revolution as a marksman with Providence under Pitino’s direction. As a senior, he shot 40.7% from 3 on seven attempts per game, volume way ahead of its time.
When he hung up the threads, Donovan coached under Pitino at Kentucky from 1989 to 1994. And down the line, while head coach at Florida, Donovan’s teams dominated, winning back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007.
"He's quite unique and quite special," Pitino said of Donovan in 2012. "I think he's one of the premier coaches in our game, because he lets the players play. He teaches them. He's an extremely humble guy, still to this day. He has not changed one iota, except he talks more today than he did back then. He's one of my favorites of all time."
Donovan allowed Daigneault to assume a role as his unofficial assistant at Florida from 2010 to 2014.
“I really tried to give him a runway to be as creative as he could be inside of his job,” Donovan said.
Later, Donovan gave Daigneault his first shot as an NBA assistant, coaching under him with the Thunder in 2016 and then again in the 2019-20 season. Daigneault was named the Thunder’s head coach the following year.
Ralph Willard
Willard and Pitino have quite the history.
It started with the New York Knicks, where Pitino set up shop with for two seasons as head coach. Willard coached prime Bob McAdoo, Earl Monroe, Spencer Haywood, and some dude with bones for arms and a Yorkie for a moustache named Phil Jackson; perhaps he’d make a decent coach.
Willard was on staff for those couple seasons before Pitino dipped to coach Kentucky. He wasn’t long for UK, leaving Pitino to try his hand as a head coach at Western Kentucky. He later reunited with Pitino at Louisville as an assistant, and then as director of basketball operations.
Somewhere between Willard’s first head coaching gig and Louisville (his last job in basketball), Willard was chosen to turn around Holy Cross. And he did.
He won both Patriot League regular season and tournament titles four times, named the league’s Coach of the Year three times.
In the summer of 2007, Daigneault relentlessly chased a secretly vacant assistant position under Willard, which would become his first coaching gig. Upon discovering where HC would spend its foreign trip that summer, Daigneault mailed what he hoped would seal the deal.
“I sent them all these materials, which I’d probably be embarrassed to look at now,” Daigneault said. “I don’t even remember what the heck I thought was right back then, I was just sending them anything.”
Daigneault remained there for three seasons, a year past Willard’s departure, before taking his talents to Gainesville.
Richard Pitino
It’s in the name. Richard, son of Rick, was an assistant at Florida while Daigneault spent time there.
When they traveled, they dubbed whatever makeshift war room they had “The Hunker.” Plenty of Daigneault’s early philosophies were born in those quarters.
“We would sit around as a staff, like most staffs do, and we would talk about a million different things that had nothing to do with anything,” Pitino told The Oklahoman last year.
Richard would often wonder why Daigneault would squint so frequently. It was one of the quirks he picked up on during the year they spent together. Daigneault was just deep in thought, he quipped.
“Mark is the type of guy who thinks a lot,” Richard said. “He is very, very analytical. So I think the squinting works perfectly with just his overall personality.”
He added: “He did a great job of slowly carving out his niche, because he wasn't a — college is different, you only have three full time assistants, so his role was very open to whatever. And I think the more you were around him, he had so much knowledge to where he could help you in a variety of ways. Really a low ego guy who always wanted to help in any way that he could.”
For what it’s worth, Daigneault’s ego seemingly remains the same, even after two straight seasons of locking up the Western Conference’s top seed.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Inside ties that bind OKC Thunder and March Madness legend Rick Pitino
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