Re: What Do You Think Will Happen First?

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

At 03:50 AM 1/4/01 +1100, W wrote:
>While Pitino might be stupid enough to go to a pro team because they have a
>chance to get a certain star, no future collegiate star is going to join a
>poor collegiate team with a chance to be coached by a coach who absolutely
>failed miserably in his former job.

Well, I believe the way it usually works is that Pitino takes over a bad
program to start with.. maybe because of the challenge, but also maybe
because it's easier to work up from. And then he gets the existing players
to overachieve. The program gets publicity and excitement and it's only
then that he starts getting the top recruits. I think that if Pitino goes
back to college, he's not going to have problems with his recruiting
efforts. Because as we all know very well and like to repeat on this list,
the college game and the pro game are very different. Four years of
mediocrity in the pros, with much of the blame on his GM moves, isn't going
to suddenly make him a bad coach after 20+ years of success and numerous
Final Fours in college, as well as a pretty decent list of college players
now succeeding in the pros.

As for whether he was stupid for taking the job because of the "Tim Duncan"
factor: What he's said that, "If I knew [for sure] that we weren't going to
get Duncan, I wouldn't have taken the job." Well, why would anyone be
"stupid" enough to be motivated by an uncertain payoff, right? Have you
ever heard of stock options? You can bet that a lot of pretty bright
dot-com executives would tell you, "If I knew [for sure] that the startup
that I joined wouldn't go public, I wouldn't have taken the job." Sometimes
you take the chance for the opportunity for a big reward. Pitino wanted to
wait until after the lottery to take the job, but Gaston made an ultimatum.
And that 35-40% chance of getting Duncan surely made the job more enticing,
as well as the opportunity to get Van Horn. I'm sure he thought that he
could succeed even in the worse case, but that it would be much more
difficult to have that "miracle success" that would be enough of an
enticement to pry him from a dream position at Kentucky.

Alex