As a coach and a salesman, don't sell Rick Pitino short

Sporting News, The, March 17, 1997 by Lonnie Wheeler

With NBA experience (coach of the Knicks) and an NCAA title on his resume now. Pitino had reason to believe that the players would buy into his line this year without any questions. "It's easy to sell them on being unselfish and sacrificing," he said, "because they won a championship and the guys who moved on are all millionaires. So they understand that their scoring averages did not win a championship and did not make them millionaires. The pros don't look at the scoring average."

When Anderson went down, however, the man in the Armani suit had an entirely different bill of goods to peddle. It wasn't about scoring averages anymore: Mercer was the only remaining player who really had one to speak of. Somehow, Pitino had to make his guys buy into the extra 20 percent. And this from a team whose full-court, full-time pressing already demanded that the players be in better shape than everybody else. Through some sort of stylized, personalized, hoop-kissed, Andrew Carnegie persuasive genius (the man just came out with a book called Success Is a Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business & Life), he managed to pull it off.

I here was an overtime defeat at South Carolina that may have helped in this respect. Prickett couldn't play that night (ankle injury), which meant the 'Cats were down to eight scholarship players and didn't have the manpower to press. The four easy wins after Anderson's injury might have suggested to the Big Blue that the team was invincible or destined or something, but South Carolina took care of that.

Less than a week later, Kentucky put on perhaps its most devastating performance of the season, burying a huge, highly rated Villanova team by 37. Pitino's press so discombobulated the Big Easterners that when Villanova took the ball out of bounds it seemed as though Kentucky was on offense. The smaller home team outrebounded 'Nova by a phenomenal 42-17. This happened in part because Kentucky's coaching staff, through creative editing, had put together a motivational scouting tape that made Villanova's front line look like Chamberlain, Russell and Rodman. Pitino's other little ploy that day was to suggest to Mercer that Villanova's terrific freshman, Tim Thomas, had pulled ahead of him on the NBA draft list. Playing with a purpose that had been previously unseen, Mercer pounded Thomas in points, 23-9, outrebounded him 11-1, and tossed in six assists for special effect. Afterward, he said, "Coach is a good motivator. He says things that you don't realize were just to motivate you until after the game. He was telling me about Tim Thomas being number two in the draft, and a person like me listens to that kind of thing. He's kind of sneaky about it. But usually what he tells us is true."

I think Coach P could take 10 people out of the crowd with reasonably good athletic ability and do the same thing he does with us," said Padgett. who was an all-state player in high school but not heavily recruited. "It's just his personality. All he thinks about is winning. Eventually, you sort of become like him."