“[He] “He is one of the best, most innovative minds and leaders in basketball. He has a unique ability to create a culture of excellence that fosters the development of young players and provides a solid structure throughout our program.” [he] He wins wherever he goes.”
That’s more or less the framework for the argument that the team should give up the moon, the stars and the Blinkers truck to hire Dan Hurley out of the University of Connecticut to manage the Los Angeles Lakers, a move first reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski early Thursday morning.
And if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that was the framework used by Dan Gilbert and Koby Altman exactly five years ago when they poached John Beilein from Michigan and gave up the moon, the stars and a five-year contract with an “average annual salary of more than $4 million” to take the reins of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“He is regarded as one of the elite offensive tacticians and leaders in basketball,” Wojnarowski wrote about the Cavs’ pursuit of “culture driver” Beilein in 2019.
“He’s a lottery pick right out of high school,” a source close to Beilein’s recruiting told cleveland.com’s Chris Fedor. “He’s a lottery pick right out of high school.”
“It’s no surprise that Kobe and his team selected John Beilein. Great cultures attract people who have the same values as the foundation of everything they do,” Cavs owner Gilbert said in a team statement. “We can’t wait for next season to get started.”
Dan Hurley had no trouble winning in Connecticut (Photo: Mitchell Leighton/Getty Images)
In the end, he would have been fine with waiting.
Beilein lost 15 of his first 20 games as a pro, losing more games by mid-January than he had in his final three years in Ann Arbor. The tactical excellence that led to so many wins during his 27 years on campus didn’t translate at the next level, and he finished with the NBA’s sixth-worst offense and second-worst defense at the All-Star break.
As a college freshman, he struggled to fit in with the young players he was hired to develop, and had “several public and private skirmishes with them.” Most notably, during a film session in January, he said the players no longer played “like a bunch of thugs.” He later claimed he misspoke and meant to say “slugs.” “They didn’t play hard before, but they play hard now. I meant it as a compliment,” he said, and apologized to the team.
But morale and play didn’t improve, and “Miserable” Beilein, a March mainstay for decades as a college coach, didn’t finish until late February. He resigned during the All-Star break with the Cavs in last place in the Eastern Division at 14-40. In the four coaching changes since Beilein’s departure, no NBA team has ever returned to the college leagues to fill a vacancy at the top of the league.
But that doesn’t mean Hurley wouldn’t be successful if the Lakers were to go that route. At 51, Hurley is 15 years younger than Beilein was when he signed. With Connecticut coming off back-to-back national championships and multiple draft lottery picks and top-10 picks on the roster, Hurley’s ability to connect with NBA talent is well established. His whiteboard acumen has been praised by a variety of sources, including some he’s famously poised to coach and others reportedly keen for the job.
But if Hurley were to compete for an NBA championship to match the NCAA titles he has in his trophy case, it would be the exception rather than the rule.
Rick Pitino won 52 games and a playoff series in 1988-89 after joining the Knicks from Providence and then Lexington shortly after. He tried to repeat the feat when he moved from Kentucky to the Celtics but didn’t fare as well, never winning more than 37 games in any of his four seasons with Boston before returning to college.
Pitino’s former point guard and assistant, Billy Donovan, won 55 games and two postseason series in his first year in Oklahoma City, a dream job he’d been waiting for after winning back-to-back championships with Florida nearly a decade ago. But since blowing a 3-1 lead against the Warriors in the Western Conference finals and losing Kevin Durant soon after, Donovan hasn’t had a big win and has managed good-but-not-great teams in Oklahoma City and Chicago that never made it past the first round.
Donovan took over as head coach at Chicago after a brief, highly entertaining and disastrous stint under Jim Boylen, who had struggled to recruit from college to the pros. Bulls officials targeted Fred Hoiberg, who had spent four years as a player in Chicago after building Iowa State into a top-10 team. (Then-Bulls general manager Gar Forman was an assistant on the Silencers’ coaching staff when Hoiberg was a star player at the school and later bought Hoiberg’s Chicago-area home.)
But Hoiberg, who was known as a very approachable guy throughout his playing days and earned the nickname “The Mayor,” didn’t win the vote of the most important member of the Bulls’ roster in the mid-2010s…
…and then after just one .500 season and one playoff appearance, he left early in his fourth season. (But we’ll always have the Three Alphas.)
Hoiberg wasn’t the first Iowa State head coach to fail in Chicago. Fresh off three NCAA Tournament appearances with Ames, Tim Floyd was offered the Bulls’ head coaching job in the summer of 1998 and handed a poisoned chalice… but only if Phil Jackson didn’t return after his third consecutive championship season (the one depicted in “The Last Dance”). Jackson never returned. So did Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. Floyd’s Bulls went 13-37 in the severely shortened 1998-99 season, their best winning percentage in his three-plus seasons in Chicago.
John Calipari, Reggie Zass, Mike Montgomery and Lon Kruger didn’t make it past three seasons. Leonard Hamilton and Mike Dunlap didn’t make it past their second season. Hall of Famer Jerry Tarkanian, God bless him, didn’t make it past Christmas. This leap is dark and full of fear.
The only legitimate success story in memory? Brad Stevens, whom Danny Ainge recruited from Butler in 2013. He led the Celtics out of the Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Doc Rivers era and into a new era of sustainable competition. Everyone involved expected this project to take a while, as Stevens was given the equivalent of a six-year contract to launch the program. In the end, it didn’t take him that long. Stevens got the Celtics back to the playoffs in his second year, and in his third year, they won 50 games and reached the Eastern Conference Finals. Under his watch, Boston was back to being a serious and consistent contender for the NBA championship.
But while Stevens left the team in 2021 as the fourth-winningest coach in franchise history behind Red Auerbach, Tommy Heinsohn and Rivers, he left without ever appearing in the NBA Finals and his championship quest ended in a conference final where the team fell to LeBron James and Jimmy Butler. Stevens has coached the team to two Finals appearances in the past three seasons, including the one that begins Thursday night at TD Garden. But Stevens took over from Ainge’s former position as Boston’s president of basketball operations.
It’s unclear whether Hurley will have a similarly long career with the Lakers. The pressure to perform in Los Angeles, one of the league’s perennially glamorous franchises led by one of the NBA’s greatest players of all time, is immense. And failure to meet expectations could quickly lead to dire consequences. After all, if Hurley takes the job, he would replace head coach Darvin Ham, who was fired the season after reaching the Western Conference Finals. Ham himself replaced head coach Frank Vogel, who was fired two seasons after winning the NBA championship.
Hurley may have exactly what it takes, both tactically and temperamentally, to succeed where his predecessors failed, but if he can pull it off, it will be astonishingly, historically rare: Only one coach has ever won both an NCAA championship and an NBA title, Larry Brown, at the height of his powers with the University of Kansas and the Detroit Pistons.
Those titles took 16 years, three resignations and one firing to earn, proving that even the most talented and innovative players in basketball can’t win everywhere they go.
