Rick Pitino on Turning St. John’s Into a Tourney Contender and Why Coaches Should Wear Suits

Late last week, GQ caught up with Coach Pitino about coaching in the NIL era, the ups and downs of his life in basketball, and his continued commitment to sartorial elegance.

GQ: At 72, you still have a youthful energy, but you’re also seemingly in the last quarter of your career. When you took this St. John’s job, did the idea of this being a last dance of sorts cross your mind?

Rick Pitino: Not really. I don’t look at age. I look more at health. I could coach six, seven more years or I could coach one more year. You just never know. So I don’t really look at it that way. I just look at the next game, the next day.

How has NIL [the 2021 NCAA rule change that allows players to profit off their name, image, and likeness] changed the way you view coaching? What are some of the challenges for you now?

A lot of coaches hated it. They got out of the business. For me, it’s just the way to adapt. We are now professional teams. Everybody has a chance to have revenue sharing and pay the players. So now it’s almost like the pros. You’ve got to make sure you draft properly, you sign free agents properly. If you make a mistake and you pay someone a lot of money and he winds up batting .120, then that’s not a good thing.

Something I find admirable about you is that you’ve had plenty of ups and downs throughout your life—whether that’s your tenure with the Celtics or the way things ended at Louisville—but you’ve always gotten right back up. You’ve never wavered.

Well, sometimes you get bad breaks, and sometimes adversity comes in a big way. When I was in Boston, I took over a team that won 15 games [the year prior], and we were banking on getting Tim Duncan [in the NBA draft] and we had two picks in the top six. And instead of getting [picks] one and two, which [statistically] we could have gotten, we got three and six. So, those are bad breaks that you could do nothing about.

At Louisville, I’m responsible for my assistant coaches, and they did the wrong thing. I don’t look back on it today and make excuses. I was fired. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to learn from what went wrong? I look at failure as a great thing—when you fail, just make sure you don’t fail for the same reasons over again. I traveled to a foreign country and became a pro coach overseas, became the Greek national coach, and then decided to come back. So, I think you have to look adversity in the eye.

This team is a great group of guys, but they get down when they miss shots, they’re playing for a coach who absolutely does not care. If the shot is open and they’ve moved the basketball, I expect them to take the shot and not pass it up. And what happens is these guys pass up open shots because they’re counting their misses. They know they’re 0-for-3. And I keep telling ’em, well, if you’re 0-for-4 and you make the next four, now you’re shooting 50%. They don’t look at it that way. They get dejected, they get down, they hang their heads and they try to get a two-point shot instead of taking the open three. So analytically, it’s a bad thing when we don’t take open shots and I want to make sure they do.