After changing out of his Gatorade-soaked Nike coaching gear Saturday, Tommy Lloyd pulled a Beastie Boys T-shirt over his head and wore it to the podium for the Pac-12 Tournament’s championship press conference.
It seemed like appropriate attire for the occasion, because, after all, one of the Beastie Boys’ best-selling songs is “Sure Shot,” of which one of the most-known lines is “top notch is my stock.”
Top notch? How about a 31-3 record? How about the No. 2 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament?
Across 11 months at Arizona, Lloyd has turned the theme of UA basketball from “Team Turmoil” to “Team Tommy.” It has been like an unscripted take from an episode of “Ted Lasso,” in which a folksy, inexperienced soccer coach with an optimistic demeanor rises to unexpected success.
Ted, meet Tommy.
Tommy, met Ted.
Arizona began the season unranked in the AP Top 25, voted fourth in the Pac-12 preseason poll. As such, I don’t think anyone, anywhere, thought that hiring Lloyd as Arizona’s basketball coach was a “sure shot” — certainly nothing compared to the school’s hiring of Iowa Final Four coach Lute Olson in 1983.
Yet if you comb through the NCAA record books, the only first-year, first-time head coach with a better regular-season record than Lloyd was Indiana State’s Bill Hodges, 1978-79, who went to the NCAA tournament with a 27-0 record.
But Hodges inherited Larry Bird, who led the Sycamores to the national championship game, a loss to Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team.
Arizona's Dalen Terry celebrates while cutting a piece of the net after defeating UCLA in the Pac-12 Tournament championship game.
Lloyd didn’t inherit Larry Bird. He inherited a broken operation.
He inherited a 3½-years long NCAA investigation. He lost returning starters who transferred to Baylor, Louisiana-Lafayette and Fresno State, and a scoring machine, Terrell Brown Jr., who would go on to lead the Pac-12 in scoring … at Washington.
Few were thinking “sure shot” then. I mean, it took a lot of Arizona fans a few months just to figure out if the correct name of the school’s new coach was Tommy Lloyd or Tommy Floyd.
Now we know it’s Lloyd — the L stands for luck. Good luck.
A few days before Arizona hired Lloyd last April, former Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth told a Spokane reporter that Lloyd’s typecast reputation as an elite recruiter hadn’t fooled everyone.
“Just this year alone, there’ve been three jobs prior to Arizona in which schools seriously reached out and tried to connect with Tommy,” said Roth. “That’s probably the case the last five or six years, on average. These are Division I jobs in multiple-NCAA bid conferences.”
Roth had been contacted by the Arizona administration, seeking their blessing in speaking to Lloyd about the vacant UA job. It was thus arranged that UA president Robert Robbins and AD Dave Heeke would call Lloyd a few days after Gonzaga had lost to Baylor at the Final Four.
Lloyd’s top competition probably was Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner, he of Lute Olson lineage. It proves that you don’t always have to hire family to be successful.
At Lloyd’s welcome-to-Tucson press conference on April 15, he said there was no hesitation to leave Gonzaga; he fully accepted the uncertainties of Arizona’s foundering basketball operation.
“It’s a dream come true,” he said. “I never got into playing the job-hunting games, at least not publicly. In my mind and my heart, I know this is the only place I would ever leave Gonzaga to come to.”
Lloyd’s veins quickly began pumping Arizona red blood.
Last week in Las Vegas, he spent time with Tucsonan Terry Francona, the greatest baseball player in UA history. Lloyd and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr exchanged several phone calls. If a two-time World Series champion manager like Francona and a three-time NBA champion coach like Kerr are on your speed-dial, you are doing something right.
This is what he is doing right: Developing players like few coaches in college basketball.
Christian Koloko went from a 5.3 points-per-game, sometimes-starter to the All-Pac-12 team and Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year.
Dalen Terry went from No. 5 in minutes played to No. 2, the best player on the court in the final 10 minutes of a Pac-12 Tournament championship victory over UCLA.
Arizona's Bennedict Mathurin shoots against UCLA during the first half of Saturday's win.
Bennedict Mathurin went from the UA’s No. 4 scorer to the Pac-12 Player of the Year.
Oumar Ballo went from six blocks in his entire freshman season at Gonzaga, to six blocks in Saturday’s Pac-12 championship game against UCLA.
The improvement and development of Koloko and Ballo’s is a definitive snapshot of how Lloyd has earned his paycheck.
“Oumar is a force and gives us a lot of options,” Lloyd said Sunday. “It’s pretty unique in this day and age that Oumar and C-Lo are out there together.”
For the first six weeks of the season, Lloyd almost never deployed Koloko and Ballo at the same time. But as they learned and improved, Lloyd learned and improved. He changed his playbook, and how many coaches are willing to do that? Koloko and Ballo are the most formidable 1-2 inside tandem in college basketball.
No one had any idea that was possible as recently as New Year’s Day.
So, yes, pay the man.
Lloyd is being paid $34,600 a week ($1.8 million per year) to coach Arizona. He gets another $13,400 a week ($700,000 a year) to help with the athletic department’s marketing, fundraising and promotional endeavors.
Because he did his job so well this season, Lloyd has already earned $190,000 in bonuses — for everything from being voted Pac-12 Coach of the Year to winning more than 25 games. He will get another $25,000 if Arizona beats either Bryant or Wright State in Friday’s NCAA Tournament opener, and another $50,000 if the Wildcats reach the Sweet 16.
Yet the last person who would tell you it’s about the money is Tommy Lloyd. He’s not a champagne drinker; he’s a Pabst Blue Ribbon guy. He’s not a suit-and-tie guy; he’s a Beastie Boys guy.
Top notch, for sure.
