WBRS Sports Blog

Monday, March 19, 2007

Kruger and Floyd: Sweet Redemption

Hello friends. This is a guest post, by the guy who writes here and occasionally some other places. Feel free to holler at me at any time.

"As a head coach in the NBA," Tim Floyd once admitted, "I wasn't very good at it."

The numbers speak for themselves: while he had some successes - taking the Miami Heat to a full seven-game series as head coach of the New Orleans Hornets in '03-'04, for example - Floyd finished his professional coaching career with a record of 93 wins, 235 losses, and one or two entertaining press conferences. The highlight? Proclaiming "I'm not Jerry's boy!" in reference to his owner with the Bulls, Mr. Krause.

Lon Kruger had a similar story. As head coach of the Atlanta Hawks, he once promised season-ticket holders a refund if the team didn't make the playoffs; seeing as how they are the Hawks, they didn't, and Kruger was fired midway through the next season.

But now, as the 2007 Sweet Sixteen is set, Kruger and Floyd stand out as two central storylines in a Tournament that has gone a bit too predictably for our likings, especially as spoiled as we were last year with the "Mid-Majors Stick it to Billy Packer Once and For All" run to the second weekend. Kruger is even leading the lowest seeded team into the second weekend, albeit a No. 7, and not a double-digit dandy.

Sports history is littered with guys who couldn't necessarily hack it at the professional level, but absolutely dominate at the collegiate one - hell, Tim Floyd's office is down the hall from possibly the main example of that trend, Mr. Carroll. And, you can make the argument that Floyd and Kruger aren't coming back from the utter depths of the coaching world, seeing as how they both got raw deals to an extent. No one could have succeeded following Jordan, Pippen, and Jackson in Chicago, and frankly, no one has found a way to succeed professionally in Atlanta basketball-wise for quite some time.

Floyd and Kruger were always good college coaches - Kruger helmed the '94 Gators team (DECLERQ!) that ran to the Final Four in an upset-laden way back when Duke and Arkansas and UCLA and teams of that nature seemed to win everything, and Floyd began the renaissance at Iowa State that crashed and burned with the loss to Hampton and Larry Eustachy's general career curve - so their success isn't necessarily surprising.

Still, Floyd has engineered a resurgence at USC. In a school completely dominated by football headlines for the past half-decade, he's made basketball relevant, arriving as he did to coincide with the opening of the Galen Center, and going out and capturing O.J. Mayo for next year, who can't help but fortify the program even further. Kruger has changed the entire culture associated with UNLV basketball, even if the rest of America hasn't realized it yet: the point guard, Kevin (who happens to be Lon's son), said to SI yesterday, "The biggest issue we had off the court this year was a player falling asleep in class." Remember "Richie the Fixer?" He seems a distant memory.

Next Friday night, both Floyd and Kruger will be on display: the former at the Meadowlands, battling arguably the deepest team in America, North Carolina, in a game everyone was salivating over because it was supposed to be Kevin Durant vs. UNC. The latter will be at the Edward Jones Dome, locking horns with the most maddeningly inconsistent team capable of potentially reaching the Final Four - Oregon - in a game most brackets submitted nationally had listed as Notre Dame vs. Wisconsin (or Georgia Tech).

A funny thing happened when we were making those plans, though: we overlooked these guys. And now, we're paying for it - but we're also rewarded, because Floyd and Kruger might represent the two most compelling coaching storylines of next weekend.

// posted by Ted @ 9:29 AM