Tag: Rick Pitino

Rick Pitino and his son have an interesting bet on a WrestleMania 36 main event

The site of a future Iona-Minnesota basketball game is riding on the outcome of Brock Lesnar’s WrestleMania match.

WWE superstars Brock Lesnar and Drew McIntyre will battle for the WWE Championship in what will likely be the main event of WrestleMania 36’s second night on Sunday – which also now has a college basketball tie-in.

Rick Pitino, the new coach of the Iona Gaels, and his son Richard Pitino, coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers, agreed to a wager over the outcome of the WWE title match.

If Drew McIntyre wins the match and becomes the new world champion, the younger Pitino’s Golden Gophers will travel to New Rochelle, New York, for a road game against the Gaels. If former Minnesota national champion wrestler Lesnar wins, however, the Gaels will go on the road to play in Minnesota.

[vertical-gallery id=908586]

[jwplayer jNV2Zrnz-q2aasYxh]

Why Rick Pitino was ‘shocked’ Nets parted ways with Kenny Atkinson

Rick Pitino is back in college and back in New York now that he’s taken over as head coach of Iona men’s basketball.

Outside of the number of NBA players who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 — which includes four Brooklyn Nets players — one of the more surprising developments in the basketball world since play came to a screeching halt at the professional and college level was Rick Pitino’s return to college basketball.

The former New York Knicks head coach saw his tenure at Louisville end in 2017 in the midst of an FBI investigation into college basketball and expressed he was done coaching. Not long after, Pitino took a job coaching professionally in Greece.

Now he’s found his way back to the college game, taking the men’s basketball job at Iona. Being back in New York and a basketball junkie, Pitino has some opinions about what’s going on with the professional scene in New York.

For one, he was “shocked” the Nets and Kenny Atkinson parted ways, which he expressed to Steve Serby of the New York Post. Primarily because Pitino doesn’t think much of Brooklyn’s roster without Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving:

If you look at his roster right now, there’s no way they’re a playoff team, and he has them in the playoffs. He took guys with no reputation, and developed them into really good basketball players. Actually would have been one of my choices for Coach of the Year.

And while he thinks Durant could be an all-time great and he’s a fan of Irving, Pitino doesn’t seem fully convince the Nets will be championship contenders.

It all depends on how good they’re gonna be defensively. Are you gonna be Houston? Nothing wrong with that, if that’s the type you want to be, then that’s the type of team you will be. You’ve gotta develop an identity of what you want to be from a style standpoint, and once they develop that identity through their new coach, then we’ll see how good they’re going to be.

The Nets front office hardly got a chance to see what this team looks like with Jacque Vaughn in charge. Even then, the team will look different when Durant and Irving are both healthy, too.

Do you think you could mediate a …

Do you think you could mediate a sit-down between James Dolan and Charles Oakley and Spike Lee? Rick Pitino: (Chuckle) I would love to try, ’cause I love Oakley and I love Spike. … The best thing to do is just everybody in a room, hash it out, speak it out, and become friends, that’s the best way to do it. If I was Jim Dolan, call up Spike, call up Oak, put ’em in a room, “Hey guys, let’s leave this best friends and let’s move on.”

What do you think of Patrick Ewing as a …

What do you think of Patrick Ewing as a head coach? Rick Pitino: Patrick did a great job the year before at Georgetown. I followed him, I talked to him a lot on the phone, I’d call him after games and said what I liked and what I thought he needed to work on. I didn’t follow him this year because of being over in Greece. Q: How come he didn’t become an NBA head coach? Rick Pitino: I think that maybe a little bit of the stereotype of big guys, they don’t like to hire centers. It’s strange, but the only reason I say that is because there aren’t too many big guys being head coaches.

Former Celtics coach, GM Rick Pitino returns to college ranks at Iona

Ex-Boston Celtics head honcho Rick Pitino will return to the college ranks to coach Iona next season.

Former Boston Celtics head coach and president of basketball operations Rick Pitino has returned to the U.S. college ranks, reports CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein.

Pitino took over as head honcho for the Celtics at the end of legendary team president Red Auerbach’s era in 1997, serving as not only head coach but also general manager and president of basketball operations.

Pitino held the posts until 2001, and presided over one of the least-successful stretches of the NBA’s most successful franchises, causing him to be roundly criticized for his handling of the franchise during his relatively short tenure.

Pitino went on to have success returning to the college ranks, winning an NCAA championship with the Louisville Cardinals before scandal at that school forced his ouster in 2017 after an FBI investigation revealed a raft of NCAA violations and crimes committed during his tenure as head coach.

After swearing off the profession in 2018, the New Yorker returned to coach the Greek Panathinaikos B.C. franchise, which plays in the Euroleague.

Pitino will now return to the U.S. to coach at Iona, a small college in New Rochelle, New York that plays in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

While he won’t likely get many warm welcomes from Boston fans of that era n his return, the students and alumni of Iona will be getting one of the game’s better minds in Pitino.

Let’s hope the negative press that plagued the former Celtics GM in the past doesn’t follow.

[lawrence-related id=13793,13744,564,11124]