The mean streets of Twitter had some fun at the expense of Memphis Tigers coach Josh Pastner recently. Terms like “Pastner’d” were used and everyone had a solid giggle. The attempts at humor had a lot to do with a growing thought that the young coach isn’t exactly brilliant drawing up the X-and-Os and the fact that Memphis’ last possession against Tulsa on Saturday night looked like the offensive playcall equivalent of the Abominable Snowman trying to convince Katie Holmes to go on a date while riding a hornless unicorn. So, yeah, it was bad.
Then a thought trotted through a lot of folks’ craniums, then flowing through their hands and onto their Twitter Machines. They wondered how good a coach Josh Pastner really is and if his time is coming to a quicker close at Memphis than anyone could have ever imagined just a few short years ago.
There are plenty of knocks on the job Pastner has done in his six seasons as UM’s head honcho. The main knock is his inability to take his usually ultra-talented roster dancing deep into the Madness that is March. In fact, the 37-year-old has never taken his team past the round of 32 in the Big Dance.
That is a completely fair complaint rooters of Memphis can hold against Pastner. As good as some of his teams have been in the regular season, it hasn’t resulted in much when other programs have left much more substantial imprints on our memories in March.
Still, his lack of Albert Einstein-like playcalling and an inability to have any versions of his teams go deep into the Lion/Lamb month should be met with patience, not hatred or overreaction.
Memphis is not North Carolina, Duke, or Kansas. The Tigers are a historically solid program that reached up to greatness when John Calipari decided he wanted to lure every tippy-top recruit to play for him in Tennessee. Before he got there in 2000, though, the Tigers hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1996 and were more of a steady program than one defined by the dominance Calipari gradually created in his nine-year run at the school.
Those nine years spoiled people, and it’s important to emphasize as much in a discussion of reasonable expectations surrounding Memphis basketball. Memphis made a national title game, a few Elite Eights, and was usually stockpiled with McDonald’s All-Americans ready to join the program year after year. This is true although, it should be said, history has romanticized all this a bit. What is forgotten about the Calipari era at Memphis is that even he couldn’t take the Tigers dancing three times — the early years were rough.
The legacy of Calipari at Memphis, coupled with what he is doing at Kentucky now, has put Pastner in a weird and ultimately unfair spot. People want him to be the younger version of Calipari, and anything he does with less success than Cal is viewed as a complete and utter failure.
Pastner’s first three years with the program were far more successful than Calipari’s first three — on its face, this doesn’t seem like much of an argument, because you presume the latter left the shelves full of talent. However, that would be untrue. The 2008-’09 season saw Memphis go to the Sweet 16, but only a few holdovers from that roster made it to the 2010-Pastner version of Memphis. Think of Tyreke Evans in particular — he did not stick around for 2010. Had he done so, Pastner would have made the NCAAs in his first season on the job. Still, in his lone season not making the tourney with the program (until, presumably, this season), Pastner managed to do what he was known to do as well as anyone in the country: recruit the hearts, brains and souls out of the best high school players in the country.
That’s all ancient history now. No one cares that Pastner was taking over a program which wasn’t readily built to win loads of games. Yet the hyperbolic expectations left by his predecessor were set to the highest of high levels.. This is 2015, with Pastner in his sixth season with the program, and folks are wondering if he is actually any good.
There’s no short answer to this. It is a bit more complicated, sort of like a meteorologist predicting the weather. We know the bad stuff with Pastner. His in-game coaching isn’t that great and his track record of success — while impressive in regular seasons — is not as solid when it comes to the postseason. His foremost skill is his ability to recruit — that’s a skill whose value can’t be overstated in the coaching business, for basketball or any other sport.
The good thing about Pastner’s flaws, however, is that they are not only fixable, but even understandable at this point.
With just over a handful of seasons under his belt, it would pretty naive to think that this version of Josh Pastner is the best anyone will ever get. As he gets older, adds some experience with each passing season, and just sees more basketball through the eyes of a head coach, he is going to get better. As good as Hall of Fame coaches like Coach K are, none of them were recognized as being brilliant, all-world geniuses in just their sixth season as a head coach. Pastner’s current coaching woes, even his seemingly oblivious Pastner’d moments, are explainable because of his general lack of experience compared to a 20- or 30-year veteran who has learned how to be great on an annual basis.
A favorite coaching reminder for anyone who criticizes college basketball coaches is this: John Wooden didn’t win a “live-draw” NCAA tournament game in his first 13 seasons at UCLA (1949 through 1961). He won a regional third-place game, but that’s not a “live-draw” game — his team had been eliminated from further advancement.
It seems that John Wooden turned out okay, but he NEVER would have survived that long at UCLA in today’s climate.
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The good parts of Josh Pastner as a coach can’t be taught. Guys don’t become world-class recruiters by getting longer in the tooth. It is a gift. Obviously some coaches get a little better by learning the system and becoming more comfortable with the sometimes iffy recruiting trail, but Pastner is way above that and is already a recruiting mastermind.
Nevertheless, as time passes and folks start to form opinions on Josh Pastner, they will hopefully all realize some pretty simple stuff. Whatever thoughts you have on him now will likely be way different from the ones you will have in five years and another five years after that. Pastner isn’t even close to reaching his potential as a coach, and we’re just in the formative stage of the Josh Pastner hurricane-coaching analogy.
For Memphis’ sake, though, let’s just hope the Tigers don’t overvalue their own program and are patient enough to ride out the short-term Pastner-related forecast. I just looked it up. It calls for a sprinkle of doom and a probable chance of genius. Then again, even forecasters are wrong from time to time. Only time will tell.
Just ask UCLA fans in 1975, when John Wooden retired.
