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Post by rgs318 on Mar 15, 2020 10:37:46 GMT -5
Does the end now justify the means? God, I hope not.
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Post by thecrossisback on Mar 15, 2020 10:54:44 GMT -5
Wished we hired Rick Pitino. At least he is somebody with head coaching experience. For a fan, it's about basketball wins and national attention to the program. The other stuff I could care less about.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Mar 15, 2020 11:11:04 GMT -5
Wished we hired Rick Pitino. At least he is somebody with head coaching experience. For a fan, it's about basketball wins and national attention to the program. The other stuff I could care less about. I actually am glad we passed on Pitino. We are not in the entertainment business. Fordham on the other hand pretends to be a "high-major" basketball school and RP is the golden bullet that would have made them relevant again, at least for a short time. But as another poster pointed out, Fordham has not had a job opening.
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Post by sarasota on Mar 15, 2020 11:56:51 GMT -5
Yes, they are. As posted earlier - the Irish Christian Brothers no longer exist (and have not for years). They became "Brothers of the Christian Schools" - "Congregation of Christian Brothers" zand now - in North America - the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers. If bayou want to know the reason for all the name changes, just PM me. When I taught there in the late 60's they were the ICB. I haven't followed them since, but thanks for the update.
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Post by hc87 on Mar 15, 2020 12:06:23 GMT -5
Lest we forget, Iona also was once coached by Jim Valvano. Forget the exact details, but they were put on some sort of probation for their (Valvano's) recruiting of Jeff Ruland and others.
That being said, I wouldn't have minded Pitino on the Hill...but that was nevah going to happen with HC in the PL.
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Post by rgs318 on Mar 15, 2020 12:08:50 GMT -5
Valvano was the coach I referred to. It was not just Ruland's recruiting, but things he was given and allowed to do while at the school. It cast Iona in a really bad light...of course Valvano suffered no ill effects having moved on already before it hit the fan.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Mar 15, 2020 12:10:41 GMT -5
Lest we forget, Iona also was once coached by Jim Valvano. Forget the exact details, but they were put on some sort of probation for their (Valvano's) recruiting of Jeff Ruland and others. That being said, I wouldn't have minded Pitino on the Hill...but that was nevah going to happen with HC in the PL. Yeah, from following his comments when he was here in Louisville, I can confirm that Pitino was really anxious to get to the Metro Atlantic
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Post by hc87 on Mar 15, 2020 12:14:40 GMT -5
Point being, the PL is almost bound in its ovahall athletic philosophy, to "not" be in the entertainment biz....which Pitino very much represents.
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Post by Sons of Vaval on Mar 15, 2020 12:18:32 GMT -5
Lest we forget, Iona also was once coached by Jim Valvano. Forget the exact details, but they were put on some sort of probation for their (Valvano's) recruiting of Jeff Ruland and others. That being said, I wouldn't have minded Pitino on the Hill...but that was nevah going to happen with HC in the PL. It was Holy Cross, not the Patriot League, who decided not to hire Pitino last year.
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Post by hc87 on Mar 15, 2020 12:23:14 GMT -5
Again though, a Holy Cross that has now been playing hoop in the PL for around 30 years now. Hyperbolic perhaps, but men's basketball is just another sport like softball (apologies softball) in terms of importance to the membahs of the PL.
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Post by timholycross on Mar 15, 2020 12:30:38 GMT -5
If it was John Calipari who had been canned and wanted to come here, I'd say "yes". Major recruting violations occurring at Holy Cross, I think, are highly unlikely no matter who's coaching.
It's the other stuff with Pitino ("my indiscretion six years ago" and the strippers) I'd not want to deal with.
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Post by Sons of Vaval on Mar 15, 2020 12:31:59 GMT -5
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Post by hc87 on Mar 15, 2020 12:51:47 GMT -5
If nothing else, it would have been fascinating to see how Pitino would do coaching in the PL with its built-in restrictions.
When he was at BU in the early 80s, he bemoaned the fact that their win ovah HC was a huge program win but nobody there cared...I'm sure he was one foot out the door after that game.
Not sure he could deal with the small crowds and long bus trips that he would endure in the PL...at least at Iona, he's near NYC etc.
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Post by longsuffering on Mar 15, 2020 13:07:03 GMT -5
Iona has a 96% acceptance rate. Via transfers and recruiting he can have all the talent he needs to get them ranked in a couple of years. I don't have any purity tests for Iona or Pitino, everything seems straightforward and the compromise made clear to all. HC would have had more conflicts with admissions, making the program improvement in winning take longer and be less dramatic. He also would have stuck out more in the staid PL as the MAAC has schools that place emphasis on basketball, like Siena.
Not being associated with the affair and strippers is a relief but if he had been hired at HC I would have focused on the improvement in winning, and enjoyed the added buzz. We can still win at HC if BN's recruiting pans out.
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Post by timholycross on Mar 15, 2020 13:10:55 GMT -5
BU cut the capacity of The Roof by 20% or so by installing chairs...and they're still not coming close to filling it up. Average crowd in the 700s. For the friggin league champs!
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Mar 15, 2020 13:36:41 GMT -5
If nothing else, it would have been fascinating to see how Pitino would do coaching in the PL with its built-in restrictions. When he was at BU in the early 80s, he bemoaned the fact that their win ovah HC was a huge program win but nobody there cared...I'm sure he was one foot out the door after that game. Not sure he could deal with the small crowds and long bus trips that he would endure in the PL...at least at Iona, he's near NYC etc. There aren't small crowds and long bus rides in the MAAC? Maybe they Amtrak or fly to Buffalo but thats 8-9 hours by bus.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Mar 15, 2020 13:40:41 GMT -5
BU cut the capacity of The Roof by 20% or so by installing chairs...and they're still not coming close to filling it up. Average crowd in the 700s. For the friggin league champs! College hoops doesn't draw in metro Boston, period. Too much of a Celtics/college hockey town. Northeastern may have beaten us by 70 this year in our own building but we averaged higher attendance this season. Let that sink in -- the Huskies have been an upper-echelon CAA team for a decade now, they have 10x the enrollment and we were 3-29 this year. BC has never drawn well either -- maybe for Duke, Syracuse and UNC.
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Post by purplehaze on Mar 15, 2020 13:59:22 GMT -5
Let’s get Iona on the schedule for next season (preferably home) and that game would out-draw any PL game - and I might take the 2 hour ride to the Hart
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Post by gks on Mar 15, 2020 15:03:15 GMT -5
Point being, the PL is almost bound in its ovahall athletic philosophy, to "not" be in the entertainment biz....which Pitino very much represents. Of course the Patriot League sports are entertainment. Would you say performances at the new Performing Arts Center weren't entertainment either? You charge admission it's entertainment. The quality of this entertainment will dictate audience size.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Mar 15, 2020 21:07:07 GMT -5
Point being, the PL is almost bound in its ovahall athletic philosophy, to "not" be in the entertainment biz....which Pitino very much represents. Of course the Patriot League sports are entertainment. Would you say performances at the new Performing Arts Center weren't entertainment either? You charge admission it's entertainment. The quality of this entertainment will dictate audience size. The difference is that none of the schools in the Patriot League view as athletics from a lens where winning takes priority over academic and institutional integrity. The overall goal of interscholastic sports, among member schools, is not centered on winning at all costs or using the athletic department as an essential source of revenue.
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Post by td128 on Mar 16, 2020 8:42:29 GMT -5
In the spirit of full disclosure but not that it matters, I worked with Jay Twyman on Wall Street. nypost.com/2020/03/15/bond-with-first-recruit-shows-the-rick-pitino-iona-is-hoping-for/Bond with ‘first recruit’ shows the Rick Pitino Iona is hoping for By Mike Vaccaro March 15, 2020 | 9:16pm
Jay Twyman was a hotshot high school star at Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School in the early spring of 1978, weighing his college options. One that appealed to him greatly was Syracuse, mostly because of the rapport he’d developed with the assistant coach who’d been recruiting him.
One day, right around April Fools’ Day, Twyman’s phone rang.
“Well,” the voice said, “I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is, Syracuse is no longer recruiting you.”
Twyman let that sink in for a beat.
“The good news,” the guy on the other end of the phone, a fast-talking 26-year-old man with a voice landscaped by Long Island named Rick Pitino, “is that I just accepted the head coaching job at Boston University. And you’re the first guy I called.”
All these years later, Twyman laughs at that memory, mostly because all these years later Pitino still refers to him as “my first recruit.” The really funny part is, Twyman turned Pitino down. He had another offer, from South Carolina, where the legendary coach Frank McGuire was winding down his Hall of Fame career.
“I had a higher opinion of my skills than reality,” Twyman says.
The next summer, after playing only 10 games as a freshman, Twyman was weighing his options. He called the basketball office at BU. A familiar voice picked up on the first ring.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” Pitino said. “The scholarship is yours, if you want it.”
And thus did Jay Twyman see, firsthand, the opening chapters of what has become a most fascinating basketball tale, the Rick Pitino Story, a chronicle that includes two NCAA championships and 770 college wins, NBA pit stops in New York and Boston, a shingle at the sport’s Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. — and, lately, relentless ignominy.
Now, he has returned the grassiest of his grassroots, to a mid-major in Iona whose ambitions and place in the college basketball pantheon aren’t all that different from Boston University in 1978. He seeks, at 67, a proper conclusion to a one-time fairytale whose plotline sputtered horribly off track.
“All I can tell you is what it was like to play for him,” says Twyman, a successful Wall Street executive who lived for many years in Westchester County and now lives in Florida. “It was the most demanding, the most difficult, the most challenging and ultimately the single-most rewarding thing I ever could have done. And I’d do it all over again if I could. And most guys I know who played for him feel exactly the same way.”
Twyman recalled the first day of practice at BU when he and his teammates, knowing their new coach was a tad on the obsessive side, showed up five minutes early for 3 o’clock practice. Pitino threw them out of the gym, pointed them toward the track, told them to put in five miles for being five minutes late according to “My Time.”
Decades later, Pitino invited Twyman to his home in Miami for a round of golf. Around 5 in the morning Twyman awakened and heard a ruckus in the basement; it was Pitino, attacking the treadmill, his face a pulpy mess. Of course, there was only one thing Twyman could do.
“I joined him,” he says, laughing.
This is what Iona hopes it is hiring. Throughout all the bluster and all the blind ambition there was always an earnestness about Pitino, one built out of an insatiable work ethic that never left him. A few years ago, on an off-day at the NCAA Tournament in Albuquerque, Pitino relaxed with a couple of familiar writers and spoke about coaching.
“Honestly, at this point, what I dream of is coaching somewhere out of the way and doing it for the pure joy of the job again,” he said.
One of us called him on that: “You have more money than God. Why not quit now?”
He smiled that last thought away.
This is what he sells now, to Iona, to its fans, to future recruits. He talks like a man who knows Iona took a chance on him, and wants to honor that. But Iona took more than a flier on him, of course. Forget whatever looming penalties the NCAA has in store for Louisville, or for Pitino. Those are secular consequences.
Tim Cluess rewarded Iona's faith by being true to himself Iona was founded by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. We must presume the school takes that legacy seriously, and understands how the various tawdry dramas that sideswiped Pitino’s career will be weighed, and balanced against its Mission Statement.
Of course, the Christian Brothers’ motto is “Facere et docere” — “to do and to teach.” At his best, that has always been what their new basketball coach was all about. And there are a lot of guys like Jay Twyman, old players and old friends, who will back that up into eternity.
“He’s not a guy who stands behind you telling you where to go,” Twyman says. “He’s in front of you, showing you what to do. You can’t ask for a better leader in your life.”
That, too, is what Iona hopes it is hiring.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Mar 16, 2020 9:00:10 GMT -5
Presumably Jay is Jack Twyman's son?
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Post by hchoops on Mar 16, 2020 9:05:29 GMT -5
In the spirit of full disclosure but not that it matters, I worked with Jay Twyman on Wall Street. nypost.com/2020/03/15/bond-with-first-recruit-shows-the-rick-pitino-iona-is-hoping-for/Bond with ‘first recruit’ shows the Rick Pitino Iona is hoping for By Mike Vaccaro March 15, 2020 | 9:16pm
But Iona took more than a flier on him, of course. Forget whatever looming penalties the NCAA has in store for Louisville, or for Pitino. Those are secular consequences.
We shall see. A show cause order would be a bit more than a secular consequence. Journalists call this a puff piece.
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Post by td128 on Mar 16, 2020 11:53:43 GMT -5
Presumably Jay is Jack Twyman's son? Yes. Jay is Jack's son. I was not aware but Jack Twyman was very close with a teammate Maurice Stokes. That relationship led to the Twyman-Stokes Award: www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/59493/the-story-behind-the-twyman-stokes-award:Maurice Stokes was paralyzed by a hard fall at a time when there were no safety nets for NBA players.
Earlier today the NBA announced the creation of the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award in honor Jack Twyman and Maurice Stokes. The league couldn't have picked a better duo to illustrate the extent and power of being a good teammate.
Stokes was a burly, fast and exciting power forward with the Rochester and Cincinnati Royals back in the mid-1950s. In his brief three-year career, Stokes made the All-Star and All-NBA second teams in each season. In 1956, Stokes ranked in the top 10 in points per game, rebounds per game and assists per game. That kind of all-around excellence easily earned him the rookie of the year award and left contemporaries, like former Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most, awestruck:
His quickness, passing ability, and court awareness were just unbelievable. When I first saw Magic Johnson play, it brought back memories of Maurice. You have to understand that Stokes was 6-foot-7 and weighed 240 pounds. He could handle the ball like a point guard and rebound like a center.
Stokes' career was cut short, however, due to a terrible fall he suffered against the Minneapolis Lakers in the spring of 1958. Landing on his head, Stokes was knocked out and slowly drifted back into consciousness. In today's world, such a frightening spill would have a player carted off the floor, but back in the 50s Stokes was practically given a pat on the butt and sent back into the game.
Just days later, Stokes suffered a series of seizures while aboard an airplane to Cincinnati to face the Detroit Pistons in a playoff game. The ordeal left Stokes permanently paralyzed.
The Royals were obscenely quick to remove Maurice and his $20,000 salary from their payroll. There was no pension or medical plan for NBA players back then, which left Stokes and his family unable to endure medical bills that would approach $100,000 a year. Facing financial peril, Stokes was saved by his Royals teammate Jack Twyman. The hot-shot small forward filled a void few would, and he did so for the duration of Maurice's life.
Twyman became his teammate's legal guardian and undertook all kinds of fundraising efforts to round up the money and save Maurice. A benefit game of NBA All-Stars was played annually in New York to raise funds. Twyman, who worked for an insurance company during offseasons, successfully sued under Ohio law to have workman’s compensation awarded to Stokes.
The never-ending assists from Twyman helped keep Stokes alive until 1970. In 2004, Stokes was inducted to the Naismith Hall of Fame. Twyman had the honor of inducting his old friend but, as always, the humble Twyman insisted the honor was all his to have cared for such a class individual as Stokes.
The award the NBA is naming in their honor will acknowledge the bond they shared, but it also doesn't quite measure up to what Twyman did. He wasn't just a good teammate who rallied and cheered on his fellow Royals. He continuously saved the life of another person for 12 straight years. That's a hard act for any Twyman-Stokes Award winner to follow.
Fortunately, with the benefits players receive today -- protections not afforded to Stokes during his short tenure in the league -- it's one they won't have to.
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Post by Tom on Mar 16, 2020 12:16:54 GMT -5
Presumably Jay is Jack Twyman's son? Yes. Jay is Jack's son. I was not aware but Jack Twyman was very close with a teammate Maurice Stokes. That relationship led to the Twyman-Stokes Award: www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/59493/the-story-behind-the-twyman-stokes-award:Maurice Stokes was paralyzed by a hard fall at a time when there were no safety nets for NBA players.
Earlier today the NBA announced the creation of the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award in honor Jack Twyman and Maurice Stokes. The league couldn't have picked a better duo to illustrate the extent and power of being a good teammate.
Stokes was a burly, fast and exciting power forward with the Rochester and Cincinnati Royals back in the mid-1950s. In his brief three-year career, Stokes made the All-Star and All-NBA second teams in each season. In 1956, Stokes ranked in the top 10 in points per game, rebounds per game and assists per game. That kind of all-around excellence easily earned him the rookie of the year award and left contemporaries, like former Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most, awestruck:
His quickness, passing ability, and court awareness were just unbelievable. When I first saw Magic Johnson play, it brought back memories of Maurice. You have to understand that Stokes was 6-foot-7 and weighed 240 pounds. He could handle the ball like a point guard and rebound like a center.
Stokes' career was cut short, however, due to a terrible fall he suffered against the Minneapolis Lakers in the spring of 1958. Landing on his head, Stokes was knocked out and slowly drifted back into consciousness. In today's world, such a frightening spill would have a player carted off the floor, but back in the 50s Stokes was practically given a pat on the butt and sent back into the game.
Just days later, Stokes suffered a series of seizures while aboard an airplane to Cincinnati to face the Detroit Pistons in a playoff game. The ordeal left Stokes permanently paralyzed.
The Royals were obscenely quick to remove Maurice and his $20,000 salary from their payroll. There was no pension or medical plan for NBA players back then, which left Stokes and his family unable to endure medical bills that would approach $100,000 a year. Facing financial peril, Stokes was saved by his Royals teammate Jack Twyman. The hot-shot small forward filled a void few would, and he did so for the duration of Maurice's life.
Twyman became his teammate's legal guardian and undertook all kinds of fundraising efforts to round up the money and save Maurice. A benefit game of NBA All-Stars was played annually in New York to raise funds. Twyman, who worked for an insurance company during offseasons, successfully sued under Ohio law to have workman’s compensation awarded to Stokes.
The never-ending assists from Twyman helped keep Stokes alive until 1970. In 2004, Stokes was inducted to the Naismith Hall of Fame. Twyman had the honor of inducting his old friend but, as always, the humble Twyman insisted the honor was all his to have cared for such a class individual as Stokes.
The award the NBA is naming in their honor will acknowledge the bond they shared, but it also doesn't quite measure up to what Twyman did. He wasn't just a good teammate who rallied and cheered on his fellow Royals. He continuously saved the life of another person for 12 straight years. That's a hard act for any Twyman-Stokes Award winner to follow.
Fortunately, with the benefits players receive today -- protections not afforded to Stokes during his short tenure in the league -- it's one they won't have to.There was a fill in TV show on ESPN Saturday, Basketball: For the Love of the Game. Basically a bunch of short stories, kind of like 30 for 30's. Anyhow there was one about Stokes and Twyman. They were not friends prior to Stokes injury. No animosity, but just not friends. Twyman stepped up even though he wasn't pals with Stokes.
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