NEW YORK — Dan Hurley moved with purpose through the corridors of Madison Square Garden this week, the ‘it’ coach in a building crawling with Hall of Famers. In his seventh season at UConn, Hurley is at the zenith of his career, the top of the game, and in coaching, the mountaintop is where the footprints are permanent.
“He is, at least, a tremendous coach — with a chance at greatness,” said Jim Calhoun, the Hall of Famer who won three national championships as UConn men’s basketball coach “I don’t think we’re going to have to speculate. He’s on his way to greatness.”
After wins over Xavier and St. John’s, the latter his fourth victory in less than a year over Hall of Famer Rick Pitino, Hurley made his way quickly through the hallways to his locker room, enjoying the mark he is leaving, but not yet ready to contemplate it.
Dom Amore: In an electrified Garden the UConn men captured the moment … Boy did they ever
On Sunday night, Hurley’s Huskies will get their assignment for the NCAA Tournament, and it’s highly expected they will be the No.1 seed in the East Regional, with games in Brooklyn and Boston between here and another Final Four.
At the end of this corridor of March 2024 is Phoenix, where the national championship will be decided in April. If Hurley, who sees his career as an “Usain Bolt sprint,” and the Huskies get there and repeat as champions, something that has not been done in men’s basketball since 2007, he would reach a plateau where the air is so rarified, Hall of Famers are just about the only coaches who breathe it in.
“Yeah, I talked to (Billy Donovan, the last coach to repeat) a couple times in the offseason and leading up to the preseason,” Hurley said. “Coaches like Coach Calhoun and Tom Izzo and Coach Donovan are like
my college coaching idols, coaches that I idolized. Yeah, he said, really, like, don’t make it about that. Don’t chase a repeat. Improve in the offseason as a coach, serve your players well, stick to the formula.
“Don’t pursue the achievement, just do a great job, improve as a coach and let the chips fall where they may. But don’t obsess over that accomplishment or else it’s going to make you crazy.”
As he moved down the hallway Hurley was asked about the possibility this crazy ride will eventually lead him to the Naismith Hall of Fame, to join his father, Bob Hurley Sr., inducted in 2010 for his long and meritorious work as a high school coach in Jersey City.
And Dan Hurley cringed a bit.
“Ahhhhh, I don’t … things like that, it’s just not something that enters into your mind,” he said, “especially when you’re in the fight, when you’re in the season, and you’re preparing. That’s maybe something you think about when you’re sitting on the beach at the Jersey Shore … in the postseason when you’ve accomplished everything, reached your goals.”
Dan Hurley was NOT HAPPY WITH THIS FAN🤬 pic.twitter.com/vcRL5iGJxa
— The Field of 68 (@TheFieldOf68) March 15, 2024
Close to criteria
There are roughly 100 Hall of Famers who are there primarily for their coaching careers, and dozens who are enshrined as college men’s or women’s basketball coaches. Most of those are the legends, the ones who coached a long time and accumulated a lot of games, though not championships. Others are there for their part in the early development of the college game.
There are only 16 coaches who have won multiple NCAA championships, and 14 of them are in the Hall of Fame — John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, Adolf Rupp, Roy Williams, Calhoun, Bob Knight, Denny Crum, Dean Smith, Hank Iba, Phil Woolpert, Jay Wright, Bill Self, Branch McCracken and Pitino. UConn’s Geno Auriemma is among the women’s basketball coaches in the hall, enshrined in 2006 at age 52 after the fifth of his 11 national championships.
Only Donovan, who won twice with Florida, the last to repeat, and Ed Jucker, who won back-to-back with Cincinnati in the early 1960s, are not in. Donovan, 58, who now coaches in the NBA, figures to be in sooner or later. Calhoun, now a member of the Naismith Hall’s Board of Trustees, was inducted in 2005 while still coaching UConn, after his second championship but before his third. Wright, too, was inducted while still active at Villanova, after his second championship. He retired two years ago.
So this is the kind of history Dan Hurley is on the cusp of making, the kind of journey on which he is making excellent time, maybe just six wins away from being regularly called a “future Hall of Famer.” And always, he has rode on the edge.
“Let the kid enjoy his career,” said Bill Raftery, the long-time coach and TV analyst. “He’s going to be coaching a lot of years. Of course, they are putting guys in at a younger age who are still coaching. Just the background he’s grown up in, the atmosphere he’s been in, he’s got extraordinary knowledge and he puts it together well, modifies it so the kids grasp it.
“He’s got a youthful way about him and he’s a character, so the kids relate to him. The mark he has made is not finished he’s got a long way to go. If he keeps getting the kids he’s getting, getting them to buy in, willing to sacrifice, the Hall of Fame’s going to happen.”
Pitino, too, can see the day as inevitable. Like ESPN’s Seth Greenberg, he sees Hurley, who has been collecting coach of the year awards all month, as the “complete” coach.
“Outside of fighting the fans, he’s about as good a coach as there is in basketball,” Pitino said, joking about one possible Achilles. “Danny is a great technician. I don’t know what he’s better at, his players all get better offensively and they get better defensively. Some coaches have one thing they do really, really well, he does everything well as a coach, so my respect level for him is out of this world. It’s interesting, his Dad was a fabulous coach and he’s rivaling his dad, which is something really, really special.”
A future Hall of Famer? “I hope so,” Pitino said.
In addition to his body of work in seven seasons at UConn, Hurley had 10 years of success as a prep school coach in New Jersey, and then turned two programs into winners: Wagner in two seasons and Rhode Island in six.
He came to UConn after the Huskies had fallen on hard times, with back-to-back losing seasons, and spelled out a schedule for success. There was a difficult but encouraging first season, a much improved second season with “excruciating losses,” then a return to the postseason and steady progress from his third season forward. He has delivered on that almost to the letter.
How long can the fire last?
About the only obstacle in view is Hurley’s own volatility. His intensity on the sidelines during games has not only led to some confrontations with fans — at Omaha, Providence and this Friday night in New York — even he wonders how long he can last on the sidelines given his almost maniacal ways.
The intensity comes from being raised, playing for and coaching with his father at St. Anthony’s High. It also comes from a playing career at Seton Hall in which he was always compared, usually unfavorably, to his brother, Bobby, who played on Duke’s back-to-back champions and later played in the NBA.
“I’m haunted by the way my playing career went, the fact that it wasn’t elite,” Dan Hurley said. “I didn’t max out my career as a player. It has created a mentality in me where I want to max out my coaching career. I don’t think it’s going to be a long one, not the way I do it. It’s going to be a ‘Usain Bolt sprint.’
“The one thing I learned from my Dad is how you pour every part of yourself and your family, every part of your lives into a program and that’s like the secret sauce. I don’t know if you can do that when you hit the mid 60s or late 60s. So I say that a lot, but who knows? I keep myself energized and I can’t imagine what it would be like to not be part of this.”
So Hurley, 285-163 going into Saturday night’s Big East final against Marquette, may have decades left to pile up victories, or he may be on a fast track to accomplish as much as he can before this intense fire burns itself down to embers. The fire drives his teams, most particularly his current one. There is that much method to his madness, when he can keep it at least somewhat reined in.
“I get a certain amount of criticism, and rightfully so,” Hurley said. “For the intensity and some of the things, but this team rarely has games where we don’t show up and compete like we’ve won absolutely nothing. So as crazy as it looks from the outside to people who grew up on the West Coast, or other places where they can’t relate to a guy from North Jersey who coaches the way I do. My Dad, if he were out there, would be doing the same stuff, trust me.”
Bob Sr., in fact, was sitting courtside, right near his son when he drew the technical for complaining to officials about the fan in the loud red blazer, a friend of Pitino, who was heckling him during the victory over St. John’s.
“My father’s obviously got tremendous pride,” Dan Hurley said. “I think he looks at me and, obviously it has crossed his mind a bunch of times in his life that he didn’t make the college move. In some ways he lives vicariously through me and sees me as what he would look like in college, only just a little worse. … A little worse.”
There is not a father-son coaching duo in the Hall of Fame, so as Dan Hurley sprints toward Springfield, there would be a unique piece of history at the finish line.
“The Hall of Fame, basketball in general, has been a big part of our lives every day,” said Andrew Hurley, who is finishing his career as a walk-on player for his father at UConn. “Growing up in Jersey City, for him, basketball has been his life every day and he’s made phenomenal career out of it, so I think that would be special thing for him. I don’t know if he’s too focused on it, he’s getting a lot of satisfaction out of the work he’s doing right now.”
.