Larry Shyatt is a longtime college basketball coach who spent the final three years of his career with the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA. He spent time as a head coach at both Clemson and Wyoming, making the 2015 NCAA Tournament with the Cowboys.

Shyatt was an assistant at Utah, Cleveland State, New Mexico, Providence College, Clemson, and Florida. Shyatt has worked with legendary coaches throughout his career including Rick Barnes, Billy Donovan, and Rick Carlisle.

Shyatt played two years of college basketball for the College of Wooster before deciding after his sophomore season that he wanted to go into coaching. He became a student assistant coach at Wooster under Al Van Wie. With the student assistant coaching experience on his resume, he landed a graduate assistant position at nearby Akron for the 1973-74 season, his final stop before his first full-time job at Utah.

On this episode Mike & Larry discuss the significance of trust, humility, and work ethic in nurturing young athletes. He reflects on the evolving landscape of college basketball, particularly in light of the recent changes driven by NIL agreements and the transfer portal, which have redefined the recruiting dynamic. Join us as we explore the enduring principles of coaching that transcend the complexities of contemporary basketball.

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I am the only basketball coach that I'm aware of in the history of basketball that worked as an assistant coach for three hall of Fame coaches in the Naismith hall of Fame and was older than all three of my bosses.

Rick Barnes, who will soon be inducted.

We were together nine years at Providence in Clemson, Billy Donovan next, who just got indoctrinated into the Naismith hall of Fame.

We were together seven years in Florida, we with a couple national championships and then last but not least, my last three years in coaching.

Rick Carlisle, who will soon also be inducted in the hall of Fame.

Larry Scheidt is a longtime college basketball coach who spent the final three years of his career with the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA.

Shiatt was an assistant at Utah, Cleveland State, New Mexico, Providence College, Clemson and Florida.

Shiat has worked with legendary coaches throughout his career, including Rick Barnes, Billy Donovan and Rick Carlile.

Shiatt played two years of college basketball for the College of Wooster before deciding after his sophomore season that he wanted to go into coaching.

He became a student assistant coach at Wooster under Al Van Wee.

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Have pen and paper ready as you listen to this episode with Larry Shy, longtime college basketball coach.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel this morning, but I am pleased to be welcoming in Larry Shiat, longtime college basketball coach, one time NBA coach with the Dallas Mavericks, and fellow Clevelander.

Larry, welcome to the Hoop Headspot.

Well, I appreciate it and I'm glad to be here and hopefully we'll have a good talk.

Absolutely thrilled to have you on.

Looking forward to diving into all the interesting things that you've been able to do in your career.

I want to start by going back in time to when you were a kid growing up in Cleveland Heights.

Tell me about your first introduction to the game of basketball.

What do you remember about what made you fall in love with it?

I'm so old it's hard to remember a lot of things, but I was a swimmer, competitive swimmer for many years as a real young kid and loved it until I got a little burned out.

I met a guy by the name of Jim Cappelletti who became the great hall of Fame high school coach at Cleveland Heights.

And so my indoctrination to basketball as an eighth grader was to play on the Wiley Junior High team and then soon to be at Cleveland Heights.

That was my indoctrination.

The people I looked up to most in those years seemed to be coaches who to me at least gave their heart and soul to something bigger than themselves and were the role models that I was looking for.

What do you remember about Coach Cappelletti?

What made him so special in your mind?

Well, he, like many coaches, as you alluded to, Jim McDonald, he was a tough guy on the outside and if you didn't know him and, and his family, you, you didn't probably get as close as I did.

But for some reason our families connected.

We had a great relationship.

Coach was actually in my wedding, so there was a, there was a, a relationship there that probably didn't exist in a lot of coaching player relationships, but it it carried on all through the years until Jim passed just recently.

When you think about your time as an athlete growing up and.

And trying to become a better basketball player, what were some of the things that you did?

Obviously, you're growing up in an era similar to me, where there is no YouTube, there are no trainers, there is no.

There's nobody telling you, hey, you should do X or Y.

So how did you get better as a player?

What was the playground pickup basketball scene like for you?

Just how'd you go about becoming a better basketball player when you were in high school?

Well, you know, work ethic is the first thing that comes to mind.

Humility and trust.

But realistically, in those days, your.

Your experience was what you did in the off season.

And there weren't a lot of the things that are available now to young people.

But, you know, whether it was coaches, summer camp, or whether it was summer leagues in those days where you would play against the Warrensvilles and the.

And the Chagrin Falls and the different schools, and that's where you had to improve.

In my case, you know, at a very early age, some later than others, you figure out you're not going to be a professional basketball player.

All of us, it's a.

It's a unique experience, some at age 7, some at age 17.

In my case, very early, I figured I was not going to be in the hall of Fame in college or pro basketball, so I just want to be the best I could be the toughest guy.

That's probably where I got my defensive guru experience, because I really wasn't a very good shooter, so I couldn't do a whole lot else.

It's funny just how you say that again, that you come to this realization, right, at some point that you think, okay, you're kind of unrealistic.

At some point, hey, I think I can do it.

I think I can do it.

And then you eventually run into players like, yeah, I don't know if I can.

I don't know if I can get to that level that I thought that I could.

So.

So to go along with that, and the influence, obviously, of guys like Coach Cappelletti, and as you said, you looked up to a lot of coaches.

Was coaching something that you thought about as a career early on, as you were still participating as an athlete, or was that something that came later on after your playing career was over?

No, very good question.

And when I was at.

When I was at Worcester as a young player, and a not very good one at the time, although our team was incredible.

23 And one Tom Dinger.

Many great experiences.

But by then I was in the appearance that my junior year I stopped playing and went into coaching at Worcester as a volunteer coach.

And I loved the experience.

As I said earlier, the people who I thought embodied what it was important to me, trust, as I said, humility, hard work, those were the coaches that shaped my career.

And so at an early age I figured I wasn't smart enough to do anything else, so I'm going to coach.

And in those days, you had to figure like a high school coach made the same thing as a college coach.

What you had to decide was, do you want to teach, do you want your summers off, or do you want to participate in college basketball and recruit, maybe travel a lot.

And I chose that when I got married at an early age with Pam.

And thank goodness each experience led to the next.

So tell me a little bit about you and I have a personal connection of a guy in Dave Grube who was an assistant coach for me and was your head coach at Wooster and obviously had, I'm sure a big influence on you and your decision to go into coaching.

But just talk a little bit about your relationship with Coach Grub and how he helped to sort of guide you along the path of, of getting into coaching.

Coach Grub was my assisting coach at Worcester.

Alvan Wee, who was then the basketball coach, soon to be A.D. those guys really gave me and carved out a niche, didn't make predictable themes.

If you go into coaching, basically told them, look, it's not that easy, but you will reap the benefits if you really love the game, love trying to be a mentor, some young people.

And so that's where it started.

And so it wasn't so much the things they said as in our political framework nowadays.

It was more of what they did.

I observed what they did, how they did what they did, and for me that became the embodiment of coaching.

It's not what you do, it's not what you say, it's how you do what you do.

The preparation, the caring for others, putting something bigger than yourself above the game.

Those are some great lessons to be able to learn, especially to be able to learn those right as you're at the beginning of your career.

Right.

If you go into it with those ideas kind of as the foundation, then there's so many other things that you can learn along the way from a technical aspect and X's and O's and all that kind of stuff.

But if you start with that foundation of people first, for lack of a better way of saying it, right, that you go into it with the idea that, hey, I'm.

If I'm an assistant coach, I'm doing everything I can to help the other coaches on staff or my head coach to do the best job they can.

I'm pouring everything that I have into my players to help them to be the best that they can be on the court, off the court, as a student.

All those kinds of things I think go along with it.

So your first opportunity after you graduate from Worcester is at the University of Akan.

Tell me what you remember about getting that first opportunity.

What was that like?

What was the process for, for getting your first step into the coaching profession?

Right.

I'm a young athlete, sorta at Worcester.

I start applying for grad schools.

In those days, you needed to get an additional degree if you wanted to move forward.

So I actually, you know, I admired and still to this day, many of the things that Bob Knight had done and would soon do.

And so I was offered a GA job at Indiana for Coach Knight, but it would have to be teaching at Taylor University, a little school right near Bloomington, Indiana.

I, I chose to accept a GA job at the University of Akron for a lot of different reasons.

Worked for Dr. Wyatt Webb.

That's where I got indoctrinated to, you know, the recruiting aspect and all the different, really the different Division 1 necessities in those days that you needed to learn as a young coach.

I got married right after I got my degree, degree at Akron and my wife graduated Worcester.

A deal I had made with her parents.

I was 24, she was 21.

Neither one of us had a job.

This would never happen nowadays.

Neither one of us, we, we got married and we, we got a GA job again because I couldn't get any other job and drove from Cleveland, Ohio to Salt Lake City, went to the University of Utah under Jerry Pym.

She became a dental assistant for a buck 45 an hour.

We had a nice little apartment with our dog and life began until that Christmas when I came home, met your daddy and returned to Cleveland for six years at Cleveland State University.

Tell me about the experience at Cleveland State and what you remember about that time.

Because again, I was a young kid, I moved from Cleveland.

I moved from, I was born, I was born in Columbus and we moved up to Cleveland when my dad got the job at Cleveland State.

So for me that I moved in, I believe I came back up here shortly after.

But my dad was teaching at Cleveland State.

So a lot of my memories are of going down to games both at Woodland Gym and then I know you guys used to play, played some games at Public hall.

And I. I have memories of running around the sort of the stage area that was behind the one basket, throwing away the.

Throwing around the giveaway balls that the cheerleaders used to throw and my popcorn and all that stuff.

And like I told you when we called before, I. I have great memories of watching Frank Edwards, obviously, who was a tremendous, tremendous player, you know, during that era, and Darren Tillis and Mike Sweeney and Lee Reed and just a bunch of the guys that.

Again, I just grew up with Cleveland State basketball because my dad was.

Was around it all the time.

So just give me your recollection of what that time meant to you.

And as you said, you get an opportunity with.

With Coach Deringer and you're there for six years and it's your hometown.

Just what was that like with.

Just give me an idea of what that experience did for you and your career.

Well, first, Pam and I had left, as I said, and went to Salt Lake City.

We'd never been west of Ohio in our lives.

It probably helped our marriage more than anything.

Thank God it's lasted 51 years.

She could be a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but that's where I think things started.

Because we were on our own.

We knew nobody.

And for those several months that we were out there, it was a healthy experience.

But coming back home to our home, to our families who were there, that was exciting as well.

My first assistant coaching job with Ray Derringer and Tom McMahon.

It was really Fenn College engineering school that had converted to Division 1 status, which was unique in itself.

Had a swim coach as an athletic director, which was nowadays, it was absurd.

I mean, Ray had an impossible job working for a swim coach and trying to prepare to move into Division 1.

He did a heck of a job, especially with that guy in charge.

But I met Pops.

Please don't let him see this, because I don't think he was as high on me and some of the basketball coaches, because in those days there were no majors that an athlete that didn't have great academic background and skills could convert to.

And so the major basically, was physical education, which was more unique at that place than any I've ever seen.

So it was tough, but we loved it.

That's where our family began.

My.

My first son was Born in Cleveland and we enjoyed those six years.

We got better every single year.

We were fortunate to recruit at Cleveland State University in its infant stages, Division one, two first rounders, which is, it's, it's absurd nowadays to even think about it, but two great guys.

In fact, Darren and I, you know, we coached together for many years.

I hired him right out of.

Once he got his degree.

So those were great years.

Different years, but great years.

And they sort of set my career path at that point to unpredictability.

And the next 45 years of coaching would be completely unpredictable.

Sometimes up, sometimes down.

Sometimes we learn a lot more when things don't go well.

That's what happened in our career.

Did your wife know what she was signing up for back when you guys started this journey?

Did you know what you were in for?

Kind of in terms of the, just the amount of change and moving and all that stuff.

What were the conversations like between the two of you as your career progressed?

Yeah, that's a great question too.

Neither one of us were prepared because it was all new to us.

You know, marriage was new to us at 24 and 21.

But you know what?

Each adjustment.

I married a superstar to this day.

And so she was going to be a wife first, a mother next, and then she got hurt at Case Western Reserve.

She got her master's in social work and she would do some great things with people who needed her help.

So that sort of started our career.

Ray was about ready to fire me because we didn't get along with some certain things even after those really good years.

But I joined next.

Gary Colson, who was a phenomenal coach at the University of New Mexico, who had also just inherited a ridiculous, they called it the low Bow Gates scandal.

They were on a four year probation.

So I went out there to try to clean things up, work with Gary, who became a lifelong mentor.

And it was a unique change for Pam and I.

We had this young son.

Here we are going from our home, Cleveland, Ohio, to Albuquerque, New Mexico for us, in the middle of nowhere.

A great experience though.

I'm going to throw this one thing in.

I know we're talking about the infant stages of the career, but looking back now at 75 years of age, I don't know if you know this.

I am the only basketball coach that I'm aware of in the history of basketball that worked as an assistant coach for three hall of Fame coaches in the Naismith hall of Fame and was older than all three of my bosses.

Rick Barnes, who will soon be inducted.

We were together nine years at Providence, in Clemson, Billy Donovan next, who just got indoctrinated into the Naismith hall of Fame.

We were together seven years in Florida with a couple national championships.

And then last but not least, my last three years in coaching Rick Carlisle, who will soon also be inducted in the hall of Fame.

It's incredible, but I also think that because of the path we've been on all these years, I was sort of a. I had a servant's mentality.

I don't think I ever worked for Ray Derringer, for Rick Barnes, for Gary Colson, for Billy Donovan or Rick Carlisle.

I always felt like I worked for Cleveland State, Providence, Clemson, Wyoming, and obviously the Dallas Mavericks.

And I think that was the mindset that I carried throughout my career.

It makes sense, right, that you have to, and you mentioned it off the top, that humility is a big part of what you feel like makes a good coach and what made you successful.

And obviously, when you work for someone who's younger than you, there's a clearly a part of you, right, that looks at it and says, hey, this guy's younger than me, I'm older than him.

Maybe I have more experience, or maybe I know this or that.

And you really do have to be able to be humble and say, hey, I'm here to work for my university.

I'm here to work for that head coach.

I'm here to make that program my coaching staff, the players that I'm working with.

I'm here to make all those people better.

And you have to be able to take that step back and be able to have that humility.

And so I guess I'll throw all of those experiences with those hall of Fame coaches into one big giant question.

And that question is when you think about what you learned as an assistant working for the various different head coaches that you work in your mind, when you think of a great assistant coach, what are a couple characteristics that you think are non negotiable?

This assistant.

Great assistant coaches always have these couple of things.

What are those things, Larry?

Well, I think you first have to separate right and wrong.

That's probably the most important thing.

If you're asked to do something that you know is wrong, which is happening nowadays, we see it every day in our, in our political figures.

You have to make a stand.

You have to plant your feet, make a stand and do it without harming your relationship.

But saying, no, this is not right, this is hurting others.

I always, as an assistant or the 11 years I was a Head coach at both Wyoming and Clemson.

I always use this standard.

The people who love you the most, they make you do things you do not want to do, and they tell you things you do not want to hear, but those are the people who love you the most.

And as an older head coach, when I returned to Wyoming, which was the highlight of Pam and I's career, I mean, by then I'm 59, 60, I'm coaching guys 17, 18, and 19, and so I don't have a lot in common in terms of that age differential.

And I remember my son, who was my assistant those six years at Wyoming at the end of our college career, kept saying, dad, you don't have anything in common with these guys unless you stand your ground and make them aware of how important trust is, love of game.

But making sure they always learn that the most important thing is there is something bigger than yourself.

And if you don't care about others and you don't show them that, then they're not going to figure it out.

They're not gonna.

They're not gonna be the kind of guys you're gonna enjoy coaching.

And it was so true at that time in my career.

Yeah.

Finding that authenticity, right.

And finding your voice.

They always say that players can sniff out somebody who's not authentic.

It doesn't coach the way that their personality is.

And you can say, hey, I want to be like this guy, or I want to be like this guy.

But ultimately, I had to be Mike Cleansing.

You had to be Larry Shiat.

And.

And when you do that, then you're able to maybe forge those relationships and make them genuine.

And again, as you said, be able to relate to players who in your case were whatever, 30, 40 years younger than.

Than you were.

And again, that's always.

That's always a challenge.

And there's.

There's challenges at every stage of your career, right?

As the young coach, there's challenges, and then as you get older, there's challenges that come about there.

Let's talk about the transition from being a longtime assistant to your first stint at Wyoming.

Taking that, everybody always says, right, that when you slide over those 18 inches from being an assistant coach to being a head coach, that a lot of things change.

First of all, how excited were you to get that job initially, again, as your first head coaching opportunity, and then as you stepped into it, what did you quickly realize?

Like, hey, maybe there's some things that I didn't realize that as an assistant, that a head coach is maybe doing some things that I didn't think that they had to do.

So what was that first experience like at Wyoming, Mike?

I had been an assistant coach for 24 years and, and that became a plus in terms of working for people with completely different philosophies.

Derringer and then Rick Barnes and then of course, Gary Colson.

And so it had been a blessing for me that I had seen different things.

And now this is exciting.

A year earlier, I'd been offered the job at Marshall by an AD and I turned it down because I just wasn't comfortable maybe with my three boys at the time moving into Huntington, West Virginia.

Pam and I just weren't comfortable.

But that AD became the new AD at the University of Wyoming six months later.

And when he fired Joby Wright at Wyoming, he called immediately, said, I'm flying in, I'm going to stay in Clemson as long as it takes to drag you out to Wyoming.

Which he didn't have to do.

Pam and I were ready.

We were excited.

And we had three young men that were also excited for their pops.

They were a little scared to go to that part of the country.

So off we went.

I think I was ready for all the different pieces.

Recruiting, public speaking, fundraising, practice and preparation, talking and being part of a staff.

The one thing I wasn't prepared for, which I had no idea until it happened, was the game.

Like, am I going to emulate Gary Colson at the game?

Am I going to stand up?

Am I going to crouch?

Am I going to wear a sport coat and tie?

Am I going to spend my time screaming at the officials like Gary Williams and Coach K?

Am I going to do all the special situations underneath, out of bounds situations, substitutions, and I wasn't quite ready for that.

We had a Cinderella year.

It was a joke.

We were supposed to be terrible.

We went 19 and 7 and shocked everybody.

Coach of the year out west in the Western Conference.

And then I go and return to Clemson.

Barnes, he calls, says, shy, you're not going to believe this.

Tomorrow night I'm getting on a plane at midnight.

I'm taking the Texas job.

What?

You got 48 hours if you want to come back.

They want you to come back.

I did.

I had a better job at Wyoming.

Wyoming is a better job for Larry Shiat than Clemson.

It's just a better fit.

I'm a, I'm a better underdog coach than I am at that level.

And I wasn't ready, but my three boys would have disowned me because they called that home.

So we went there.

It ended up being a blessing.

All three boys went to the high school they wanted.

All three boys went to Clemson, and all three boys graduated Clemson.

Two of them walked on.

For me, I was fired at the end.

It was the most demeaning, embarrassing point in my life.

Because you think the world.

I mean, the ACC was not head and shoulders better than every basketball conference.

And so, you know, that was a struggle at that point for all of us.

But you know what?

It probably end up a bigger blessing or we want to be living where we're living now.

Yeah.

It's amazing how, again, some of the things that end up being the biggest challenges in your life.

Right.

That those end up propelling you in a different direction or you end up learning lessons that you can apply moving forward and going through your career to be able to benefit from some situations that maybe weren't ideal in the moment.

And as you said, there were lots of ancillary things that you were able to benefit from from getting that opportunity at Clemson.

Talk to me a little bit about what it's like.

And again, this is more of a general question than a specific one, but you've obviously been at lots of different places with different levels of resources, let's say.

Right.

Obviously, the resources that you had as an assistant at Cleveland State, completely different than the resources that you had as a head coach at Clemson.

So as you're going through your career and you're sort of having to recalibrate at each spot, what are the resources that I have?

How do we go about that?

How do you look at that?

Or how did you try to navigate that piece of it as you went through your career in terms of just the resources that a particular program or university had for.

For.

For you as a staff?

Well, the now was always the most important thing, not yesterday and not tomorrow.

So it was the now.

So whatever you could do with what you had and how you did what you did was way more important.

My.

My best example at Clemson would be, look, I was naive in a lot of ways.

Barnesy and.

And Billy say that still to this day, and especially at Clemson.

But until I was in the eye of the hurricane with coach K. Gary Williams, Bobby Kremens, the people at the time that I most admired, I thought.

And then I found out, wide open eyes, what's going on?

How are people getting to those places?

Why are they getting to those places?

Most importantly, with whom are they rubbing elbows with?

And a dear friend of Mine, before he passed away had told me Tate Lock, who was a great basketball coach but before he passed away many times, told me shy I hated what I did.

And we were very close friends.

And when I left Wyoming to go to Clemson, he called me immediately, said, shy, you kicked tail.

You've been one of the best assistants in America.

You turned around Wyoming in nine months.

Please don't do it.

Clemson, what I did, I know, and you're going to learn what's going on in that league, but don't do it.

They're going to get rid of you in three or four years anyways.

Maybe because you're a good person, maybe you get the fifth year.

It's not going to work.

And if you get in the game with the game that they're in, you're still not going to get better players than Duke, Carolina, wake, you're not going to.

And so he begged me that and he says, I'm going to tell you something.

I'm going to give you the name of the dentist, the pharmacist and the blankety blank who are going to get to your assistance, Darren Tillis, Scott Duncan at the time and try to talk you into getting in the game.

Don't do it because you're never going to get in the hall of Fame.

You don't want to put those three boys and Pam in the hall of Shame.

I never forgot that.

Yes, it ended tough.

I would have fired me because I realized where we were, where they were and I did not want to head in that direction.

And there's a lot of people that question that.

But it ended up being a blessing one year later when I joined Billy.

So let me ask you this in relation to college basketball today and the landscape of nil, the transfer portal, all these things that have come online since you last coached in college basketball.

And I hear you talking about the situation when you're at Clemson, right?

And obviously there were things I always think back to now, Larry, this is the thing that cracks me up more than anything is I think about the huge college basketball scandal of the Dwayne Casey, Chris Mills, 700 falling out of the FedEx envelope.

$700.

And now I look at the situation of how much money that kids are being offered by schools through again, nil, which has changed from what the initial interpretation right of nil was.

Hey, if the school is selling your jersey, you can get a cut of that jersey sales that there it wasn't meant to be a salary, which is essentially what become in today's world.

So when you think about the environment that you were coaching in in Clemson, right.

When you're there, and then you think about the environment today and the way that those two are different, I'm just curious to get your take on kind of where we are in college basketball today.

And you can juxtapose it if you want to, against that situation back when you were coaching at Clemson, or just focus on what we see today.

But just what's your thoughts on where we are in college basketball and college sports in general with the way the landscape has changed?

You can't live a lie.

There's a lot of people, very wealthy, well, to do, even in political situations that have lived a lie for a long time and they'll find out at some point right from wrong.

But I remember Coach Patino saying, this is maybe eight or nine years ago.

Oh, only 5 or 10% of college coaches are really breaking all these rules.

I could not believe that statement.

And I'm living proof that I would say it was closer to 85 to 90% the other way.

And what we're finding out is power and money change a lot of people.

You know, greed becomes a piece more.

I want more.

If you think of yourself as a fan now, a Kent State fan, Ohio State fan, you want more.

You don't want a national champions.

You want two.

If you get two like Urban Meyer had, then Florida wants four.

People want more and they're willing to do things sometimes.

It's a lot, a hell of a lot more than 700.

And so things change.

And now this landscape's changed.

I would say this.

That's why you're seeing a little less of the blue bloods winning all the championships in football and basketball, because they don't have to lie.

They don't have to live a lie.

You know, whatever money they can get.

Yeah, there's people that are going to take advantage of that.

They are now.

But that's sort of made the ground nowadays a little more even, because, hey, you get what you have, and then you try to put your roster together.

And we missed on guys in the past.

You know, we might recruit a guy for two and a half years, get him and miss and still have misevaluated either his character or his ability.

But you got a better chance missing nowadays.

So I remember Saban and Urban saying about three years ago when this thing was really changing and fast, and they said, hey, guys, I get it.

Get as much money as you can and get the best players you can.

But they both said the same thing, be careful, because if you buy the wrong shit, look out.

And that's happened to a lot of football and basketball schools the past couple of years.

If you look at the, the analysts and the statistical or analytical cast of characters that say they were number one, they should win it all, they.

It doesn't always work that way.

And so I think that's the biggest change is that the denials at the high levels, especially in basketball.

No, you know, so and so chose our school because of the culture, the campus or the major or.

Yeah, right.

So that's changed.

They don't have to lie as much.

You know, the guy comes from Alaska and moves the Durham.

Do you know how much it costs to.

To move?

Because we move 14 times.

It costs a lot of money every time you move.

So that's less of a component now.

Like, we raised 27 million.

We put this team together and we expect to be extremely good.

All right, they raised 29 million.

They might have better players, but it's more out in the open than it used to be.

It definitely is more out in the open.

And I think that there's a part of me that I've always.

If I go back to the era that I played in or the era that you mostly coached in, there was always a part of me that again.

And I played in a program, obviously with Coach McDonald, where there wasn't any of the things that you talked about going.

I always say that I was so excited over Christmas, Larry, when I lived in an apartment my junior and senior year and we'd get $300 worth of meal money, right?

I'd be like, well, if I only spend 150 of this, I can get myself a pair of shoes.

And man, this is, this is unbelievable.

If I eat ramen noodles and Cheerios every day for breakfast, this is going to be fantastic.

I'll be able to.

I'll be able to bank this 100 bucks or whatever and get a pair of shoes.

And so I always looked at it and said, you know, it always felt like with the amount of money that was in the game that it was somewhat unfair that the players never got a chance to have a part of that.

And it always felt like it was unfair that a coach could leave and go to a new school and a kid who maybe had gone to that school then would have to sit out a year and transfer.

So those rules again, as a young guy, always felt like that was unfair.

And now we've gone to this system where it just is.

I mean, it's just completely.

Any, any vision that I had of what would be positive about this has completely gone the other direction.

And I was at, I was at the Final Four this year and I talked to a coach in the Mac and he basically said that there's, there's no more.

Like you talked about recruiting a kid for two and a half years and still sometimes making a mistake on their talent or their character or whatever.

And basically this coach told me the relationship that I build with a player, the relationship that I build with a family, the time that I put in recruiting a kid, pretty much none of it matters.

Pretty much the only thing that matters is how much money am I offering that player to come to my school?

And if somebody else offers them more money, they're going to go there and if I'm the best offer, then they're going to come here.

And to me, that's just.

When you think about, I go back to what you said about why you got into coaching, right, and building relationships with people and having that humility and having an impact.

And the system that we've set up now just feels like all those things that made you want to get into coaching, all those things are way, way more difficult to be able to do as a college coach than they were 10 years ago, if that makes any sense.

It makes a lot of sense.

And that's why my last years, when I was able to return to Wyoming and try to do the one thing that I hadn't been able to do, win a championship, there was way the highlight of Pam and our family's career because I was able to bring in your fellow, you know, Larry Nance and Chad Benz and, and I, we were able together to grow and wait till they were juniors and seniors, be one of the best, if not the best team in the Mountain west, deliver the first conference championship tournament championship in the history of Wyoming in any sport.

And to do it with five seniors, all who graduated on time, and one first rounder who wasn't even recruited by but one Mac school, Bowling Green, for an older coach, it was like a beer commercial.

It doesn't get any better than that for me.

And I'll tell you this, although I don't like telling the story too often because my wife is still a little bit pissed at me.

I stepped away at that time because I felt like it doesn't get better than this.

I had about five years on a contract worth a lot of money, which would have been Pam's, and I stepped away and I said, okay, I'm going to make a deal.

The ad was one of my best friends.

And I said, here's the deal.

I'm exhausted.

I got black circles under my eyes.

What we just did, I don't know if we can ever do again.

So here's the deal.

You hire one of my assistants.

I should have said, which one?

And I'm no idiot.

I know you're only going to pay them half of what you paid me.

So you get money for the program, they get security because they're going to get additional years.

And I can walk out with Pam with our chins up.

Well, wouldn't you know, we pulled it off.

She's still not happy to this day.

And that's when I got a call from Rick Carlisle and talked to Cuban and Carlisle and he said, shy.

I've never heard of anyone doing.

We've known each other years.

I've never heard of anyone doing that for their assistance and leaving that much money on the table.

Come with us, you'll love the NBA.

I know you, you sort of be a fish out of water.

At first I wasn't going to do it.

And then she decided, look, we know where we're going to retire, near Clemson, because that's where the boys are always going to want to be.

Give it a shot.

So we did a three year deal with the Mavs, actually Dirk's last three years, which was pretty cool.

And in my last year, we had this young guy named Luka Doncic.

So we had a 41 year old and a 19 year old.

To put that in perspective, if you were at Kent and you were a junior at 20 years of age, you'd have had a three year old on the team.

It was crazy for me, but it was a unique experience.

They wanted to do another three year deal and by then, you know what?

I owe her too much.

We've been together now 51 years.

Let's spend time with the people we love the most.

We have five grandkids now.

So that's when we walked into the new Sunset, South Carolina.

All right, let's talk a little bit about the NBA experience.

Obviously a different ball game than college.

There's a bunch of different directions that we can go with some Questions.

But let's, let's start here with the two names that you mentioned, Dirk and Luca, obviously two all time greats in the game.

You get an opportunity to be around both of them.

And obviously throughout your college career you had an opportunity to be around some really great players as well.

When you think about whether it's just in general the best players that you've ever coached, or the specifics with Dirk and Luca, what are some things that stand out about those guys that make them such great players?

Obviously there's physical tools and all those things, but what are the intangibles that make those guys great?

You know, that's, that's a great question.

First of all, I think I was lucky enough to either help recruit or help coach 11 lottery picks and about 23 first rounders during all those years.

Some really, really talented guys.

I think the uniqueness is in college or pros, the really great ones, I'm talking about the great ones both on and off the court, which, you know, there's, that separates a lot of people.

The great ones want to be pushed, the great ones want to be coached, the great ones want to be mentored, and the great ones want to be disciplined to some level of degree.

I think that's a separator and it's hard to be really good at something, especially if you're handsomely paid and continue to be that same person.

I've seen so many of my friends change again, going back to money and power and so that I think that's a separator and there's a lot of different separators.

You know, the two big trends I see now, and usually things trend down five, six years from the NBA to college.

The two big trends I see now are the best players and the pros, they're not playing, they're not playing when they're needed in, in April and May and June, they're hurt.

It's a, it's a trend.

Like 15 of the best 20 NBA players haven't played the last few years.

If you look up the playoffs, they hurt.

Why is a huge question.

And I'm sure their analytic departments are trying to research that.

You know, age has something to do with it, but it's absurd.

And now I see, especially in college football, guys not even playing in, in bowl games.

And, and so that's a trend.

You don't win the game because style of play, like the NBA way, which has trickled down.

Five out, first three open, everybody green light, run.

They always talk about running the O. I don't hear a lot of the great ones talk about running the D. Like I used to tell my guys all the time, is the court tilted?

Like, is it.

Do you run faster Just when you.

It's an amazing phenomena really.

But that trend of losing big leads has trickled down.

The uniquenesses in college, we got a 30 second clock and they're still losing games recently, 18, 20, 22 point leads with 11 minutes to go.

Because this is how you're supposed to play the game.

Well, in our, you know, used to go into the timeout, let's say there's six minutes to go, you're up 18, you, you'd go to the timeout and you'd say, okay, Mike, you're the best three point shooter on the team.

Knock it in if you're open.

The rest of us, let's see if we can grab a foul or a layup the first 15, 20 seconds.

But you can't say that now.

You definitely can't say it to a pro.

They're going to tell you what time they're going to work out, what time the chef's coming in, what time they're leaving and what time they're returning with their own shooting coach in the evening.

It's a players league, but in college I've seen that trend and it's so disappointing.

I see some friends of mine, they have like 12 point leads with two and a half to go.

Game over.

But they're not going to move away from.

We got to run it up, we got to get it up as fast as we can.

We got to get that three point line.

First available shot.

I don't know.

And that's, that's alarming.

Do you think that's a coaching problem or do you think that's a player IQ problem or do you think it's a combination of the two things?

Because I personally feel like, and this is a conversation, Larry, that I've had with a bunch of different people on the podcast, but I do think that when you look at the players today, right, Whether you're talking about college players or you're talking about NBA players, the skill level of players today compared to the skill level of players when you first got into coaching or when I was playing in college, the skill level of kids today is so much higher in terms of Just their ability to shoot the ball, their ability to handle the ball.

There's many, many more players that have many a wider array of skills than I had.

I think about when I was in high school.

Every single high school team that I played on or played against had like the six two football player who had no discernible basketball skill other than being able to set screens and go knock some people around and get rebounds.

Like those players.

Just those players don't exist anymore.

But yet at the same time, I feel like I learned how to understand the game by playing on the playground and knowing like, to your point, I'm the fifth best player in this game.

I'm 16 years old playing with college guys or men or whatever, and if I take this shot, these guys are going to be mad.

And then I'm going to have to sit for the next two hours to wait to try to get back on the court.

So you kind of learn the game.

I feel like the skill level's higher, but the basketball IQ isn't necessarily as high on the player side.

And then from the coaching side, I think it's interesting just again, how the game has changed, that it feels like analytics is driving so much of what we do as coaches that we sometimes forget the point that you just made, which is, hey, there's three minutes left in the game, we're up 12.

We don't need to shoot a three in the first 10 seconds.

With a shot clock even, we just hold the ball and run out the entire shot clock and don't shoot.

We might be better off than taking a quick three.

So how do you balance out the, the coaching side of that with the player IQ side of it?

Well, in the pros, it was easy for me to see that, for me, that the head coach, the most important piece, he better get along and win the trust of the two or three highest paid players.

Because unlike in college, the, you know, the Ads, to my knowledge, aren't taking the guys out at night for dinner and drinks.

In the pros, the owners, that's what they do.

And so that's a different level, completely different mindset.

Whether it's good or bad, that's what it is.

And so I think that's one of the major roles of a head coach in the NBA.

Because if you don't get along with the guy they're paying 312 million or the guy they're paying 57 million, there's going to come a time when it's you, the coach or him, he's got a Three year deal, you know, so that was different.

But our college game has now justifiably gotten some of those attributes.

And so that's become more difficult because, you know, I always do, I do a lot of zooms with young coaches and I say, look, guys my age, we bitched about a lot of things too.

I mean, we did.

But, but before you guys complain about everything, if you're the head coach at Kent State now, you're a million or more.

That's a five year deal.

Like, unless your wife's a complete fool, you don't have to coach.

You can coach again if they fire you, but you're in a different position than most Americans.

And in my days, you know, when I was fired at Clemson, you and I gave nine of the, some of the best years of my life.

If I told you what they paid me after nine years, it's amazing.

And I remember Pam saying to me, it hurt for a moment, but I, I knew it was out of love.

She, she said, shy, you can't do anything else.

We gotta, because we have to keep coaching.

And we just jumped into a.

Are you kidding me?

Your wife and my wife could have coached them.

So sometimes things change in this landscape.

I don't think any of us are going to be able to predict what five and six years from now, because again, power and greed, like the Big Ten and the SEC and all of these rumors, these rumors have been around for over 20 years.

The breakaway, we're not sharing anymore.

The big want more.

Like I said, that's part of business we're now seeing.

That's part of politics.

Like more.

More is better?

No, more is not always better, but that's what we're seeing because money and power change a lot of people and they change their mindsets.

Yeah, there's no question about that.

I, I think that when you look at the way that things have gone and how the game has changed, both from a player perspective, what players can demand, slash, expect, and then what coaches offer, what they jumping from one job to another to be able to have more nil money available, there's just, there's a million things that, that go along with that.

And I want to go back to something that you said right off the top of that answer with being able to in the NBA, right, to get along with your star players, to be able to have that relationship where you can Coach your star player, right, where there's a.

There's a mutual respect going back and forth.

And some coaches are able to do that.

Obviously, Rick Carlile, someone who's had a tremendous amount of success as an NBA coach, which to me, in my mind, looking at it from outside, tells me that he's probably one of those guys that can build those relationships with star players to be able to coach them and get them to buy in and all those kinds of things.

And we know there are coaches that aren't able to do that.

So when you look at just whether you want to specify it to Coach Carlisle or just in general, how does a coach build that kind of relationship with a star player, where you have the disparity in money and in some cases, power, as you said, when the player is having dinner with the owner.

And we all know that if somebody's going to get fired, it's not going to be the player, it's going to be the coach.

And yet, as a coach, if you're going to do your job well, you have to get those players to buy in.

So how does a guy like Rick Carlisle build the kind of relationship with a Dirk Nowitzki, with a Luka Doncic, with a Tyrese Halliburton to get those guys to buy in so that they can put the kind of team together that can win at the highest level?

Well, I think it's a combination of, first of all, you better know your trade, you better know the game, you better know what you're teaching, you better, because they're watching, they're bright.

Whether it's a timeout, a practice, or a moment in the game where you have to make a decision, they have to trust that you know the trade, you know what you're doing.

That doesn't mean it's always going to work out that way, but they have to develop that type of trust.

And he had that, you know, as I said, those are the last three years of Turkish.

Look, first of all, he treated me phenomenal, both Mr. Cuban and Carlisle and Dirk sitting on the front of the bench his last year.

But I gotta tell you that at that point, he could not have guarded your wife.

The trust that they have and the respect that they had for what he had given the franchise meant we're gonna work with you, around you and through you during this period, because we reaped the benefit when you were great and coach has that ability and had that ability and still does in Indiana, although tough times just with the injuries.

But I would say a Coach's role is not to get along.

The guys are going to figure that out.

If they think a guy's just getting along, they're going to.

You can't fake the funk.

I'll give you a good example.

I do a lot of zooms with young coaches.

And I said, are you aware of personal improvement programs like, you know, go to Ronald McDonald's or bring in a guest speaker to talk about mental health and good health and good decisions and leadership?

And I said, let me ask you a question.

If you go to Ronald McDonald or you go to a soup kitchen, are you there?

Head coach, are you there?

Is your wife and family there?

Because you can't do that with your players and tell them, you need to be a better person.

You need to do this.

You can't fake the funk.

Either you're part of everything.

Because they see an all in guy or they don't.

And they're even smarter today than they once were because they use their thumbs to get information in seconds.

I tell our guys, you know, I got three boys, they're in their low 40s now.

Two married, one not yet.

But I tell them every day, did you call your mom and tell your lover, like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Did you summer?

They both take five seconds.

You can hang up.

I can tell you there's a huge difference between people looking you in the eye and speaking to you than people thumbing to you.

Huge difference.

And that's getting tougher and tougher, too.

So the guys that can show this true ability to be open and honest and develop a trust level both ways are the guys that have the best shot.

Because talent doesn't always win or come on.

The Guardians pay poo poo.

But sometimes the ability to care, the ability to put things together and the ability to build that trust and those relationships, it can matter in the last 30 seconds of a game.

There's no doubt about that.

Basketball is, I think, a game more than any, right?

Where if you have guys who are willing to sacrifice and share the ball and you have guys who are willing to play hard, to me, those are always the two things when I look at teams that have success, or you think about, like, there's a million things we can look at with the New York Knicks right, this year and say, hey, they did xyz, whatever.

But ultimately they decided they were going to share the ball.

They didn't care who got what and who did what.

They did what was necessary for their team to win, and they just competed super hard.

And those two things, you can go.

We could break it down in a million other different ways beyond that.

But there's something magical when a team puts it together.

And for whatever reason, the Knicks figured out a way to, to put it, you know, to put it together this year.

And I do think that when you, when you find that whatever that is, you know, as a coach, getting the ability to get guys to buy into that is something that again, not every coach can do and not every player, player is capable of being receptive to that kind of coaching as, as you.

Well, as you well know, you know, got a few special friends still in coaching that I talk to often, but not a lot.

You know, Billy and Donnie Jones just to mention too, they attend a lot of leadership seminars.

They really into leadership books.

I think that's great.

First of all, however, just to give you a perspective, and I tell them all the time, it drives them crazy.

I said, guys, do me a favor.

The next time you hear about a seminar for followers, count me in.

Because I've seen, you know, we talk about leadership all the time.

Some of the most horrible people in the history of the world were horrible leaders.

Hussain, Hussein, Hitler, I mean some of the worst.

But it was because no one would plant their feet, as I said earlier, take a stand and say that's wrong, you're hurting others.

And to me, many and most of our problems could be coaching, could be business, could be politics.

To me, many and most of our problems are that lack of right and wrong, caring and not caring.

Because if everyone's quiet because they like something, they like the money they're making, they like this, if everyone's quiet, it can only get worse.

It's when you're willing to stand up, plant your feet and take a stand.

Sometimes you may be the immajority, but sometimes not.

And that's what your kids, that's what your grandkids will remember, or in my case, hopefully many of our former players.

But to me the leadership part is so important.

I agree.

But I think followers are far more part of the problem than we give credit to.

Yeah, you're definitely on a team.

You need to have people who are willing to be led.

Right?

And that's part of when you think about the coach as the leader and then you think about the players following the lead of the coach.

And sure, we always want to develop leaders on our teams and that's important.

And we always talk about player led teams versus coaches, coaching coach led teams and, and I think that's all true.

And yet at the same time, you can't.

As much as you'd like to say, hey, we'd love.

We have 15 leaders on our team.

Anybody who's been on a team knows that that's not true.

There has to be somebody leading.

There has to be somebody who's willing to.

Willing to follow and willing to be able to follow the.

The lead of.

Of the person who's in charge, whether that be the coach, whether that be a fellow player, whatever it may be.

I do think that you make a great point about the willingness to take a stand.

I think going along with that is the ability to have tough conversations, right.

As a coach, you have to be able to have difficult conversations with your staff, with administration, obviously with players.

When it comes to playing time and decisions that you make, you have to be willing to not just kind of beat around the bush and be like, oh, well, you know, maybe you have to.

You have to make.

You have to take your stand.

And I think sometimes that's.

I'm sure when you talk to young coaches that that's something that comes up in conversation, is that you have to be.

You have to be able to tell the truth.

And sometimes that's difficult for some people.

And again, it does.

It never works out in my life, I can tell you that if there's ever been a situation where I avoided a tough conversation, it only made the next conversation that I had to have a lot more difficult.

So you got to make it.

You got to have those tough conversations when you have them.

Let me ask you about.

I want to ask you one just final question.

Give me your best Mark Cuban before we wrap up.

Give me your best Mark Cuban story that you can tell that you could tell on a podcast.

Yeah, that's great.

First of all, he.

They all were so generous to me.

I mean, I had no NBA experience, a lot of college experience, didn't really know the game, know the system, and know the management part, but they had open arms.

They were very kind to me, very generous.

In Mark Cuban's case, the one thing I would tell you that maybe some people don't realize, he spent an enormous amount of time around the team, around the staff, every day, practice, maybe two practices, and getting on his plane, not usually the team plane, which was phenomenal.

And we already see his park at 3am when we landed at 3:30.

So he put a lot of time and love in the Mavs when he was the owner.

You know, things have changed.

So, you know, I haven't been around since that change, and I can tell just on the outside looking in.

It's probably not the same for him either.

The love, the trust, the relationships that he had built all those years perhaps has escaped just because it's a different age, it's a different ownership group now, and his part of it is different, but he was very kind.

I don't have any specific stories, whether they would be good ones or not good ones.

All I have is a three year period of life that they really gave me an opportunity of something I hadn't touched.

And you know, in my case, it was a blessing.

I didn't feel like I could do another three year deal.

I was so much hoping to help Mike Weiner, a young assistant that had been with Rick and had been actually a manager at Florida.

And thank God he got my job and so it ended.

Ended up a grand slam home run for the Chiat's and the Mavs at that time.

Very cool.

And a good way for you to walk away from the game and to be able to go out and feel like again.

It kind of encapsulates what you talked about all throughout the pod tonight and all throughout your career, right.

Of having an impact on people and leaving a place better than what you found it and, and doing something right by, by somebody that you had an opportunity to work with.

Before we wrap up, Larry, if, if there are any coaches out there who listened and they want to get involved in getting connected to you, you talked about doing some zooms with young coaches and getting involved and, and trying to, trying to reach out to people.

How can people find out more about what you're doing?

You share an email address, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Yeah, I'm not a real social media butterfly.

I, I don't even have Facebook or Insta or whatever it's called.

Like if somebody calls me, I answer the phone, my wife gets pissed because so many of them are scams, but that's cool.

That was the easiest one I could come up with.

And look, I'm an open book.

I miss a lot of what I miss because it was that connection, probably the paycheck more than anything nowadays, because I don't know if I would fit in this landscape.

But I appreciate this.

Please give my love to your dad and family and anything I can ever do, all you gotta do is call me up.

Okay, perfect.

Larry, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule today to join us.

Really appreciate it and to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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