Pitino, Masiello meet again as Iona-Manhattan rivalry renews

Rick Pitino (left) and Steve Masiello, shown here in 2014 NCAA Tournament, coach against each other again Friday and Saturday as Pitino welcomes Masiello’s Manhattan team to Iona. (Photo by the Louisville Courier-Journal)

The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s marquee rivalry, barring any last-minute schedule changes or positive COVID-19 tests, will finally be reprised again this weekend. Only this time, the look and feel will be completely unlike any of the 98 prior meetings between Iona and Manhattan.

Friday at the Hynes Athletics Center, Iona will — assuming all goes well for a program riddled by numerous COVID-related pauses — take the court for the first time since December 23, 2020, a 51-day layoff that is the longest break between games in program history, and do so against a Manhattan team that is in search of finding the right groove at the most opportune of times after dropping four straight games and five of its last six.

Then, there is the connection between the two coaches.

While Steve Masiello is in his tenth season at the helm of Manhattan, it is the man on the opposite sideline who is new to the history between the Jaspers and Gaels, but not to his adversary. Rick Pitino, under whom Masiello served as a New York Knicks ball boy, walk-on at the University of Kentucky, and assistant coach at Louisville, will match up against his one-time protege for the first time since 2014, when Masiello’s Manhattan team nearly picked off a Pitino-led Louisville squad in the NCAA Tournament.

“Stephen’s like part of my family,” Pitino reflected shortly after his introduction at Iona. “Stephen’s an outstanding coach. We played against each other in the NCAA Tournament, we were life and death to win with far more talent and size, so he’s an outstanding basketball mind, he’s a basketball junkie. I just love him.”

The admiration is mutual from a man whose relationship with the Naismith Hall of Famer stretches over 30 years and encompasses parts of five decades.

“He automatically makes the league better,” Masiello said of Pitino. “He’s obviously a savant from a basketball standpoint, he means a tremendous amount to me as someone I was around since basically eight years old, nine years old, who has taught me everything about this business from scouting to the business side of it, to fundraising. So I’m very fortunate to have someone who I played for, got the opportunity to work under. I have the utmost respect for him, and I just think the world of him.”

Pitino and Masiello have squared off one other time before, Manhattan’s 2012-13 season opener against a Louisville team that went on to win the national championship, but first dispatched the Jaspers, 79-51, in a game Pitino said would be “like the basketball version of Watergate” when asked about it that year at Big East media day.

“Steve was very adamant about playing me his first game of the year,” Pitino intimated then. “I didn’t know why at first, and then it hit me: It was because I had no film on him.”

Iona has endured its own adversity in recent times, from Pitino himself testing positive for COVID-19 along with more than half his team through various points in the season, to not having a full complement of players to run practices. Manhattan is struggling in its own right, with Masiello admitting the need to understand the subtle nuances of the game in the midst of a slump. But despite all the various maladies, the clash between the two longtime adversaries is still reason enough to treat it as a big game regardless of records, trends or coaches, one of whom looking to become just the fourth to defeat his former boss.

“As far as the rivalry, Manhattan-Iona is bigger than any two coaches,” Masiello said in a nod to its significance and ability to stand up over different eras. “Whether it’s Tim (Cluess) and I, or Bobby (Gonzalez) and Jeff (Ruland), or Coach Pitino and myself, it’s always going to be Manhattan-Iona. I’m just very thankful and humble to be a part of such a great rivalry of two such storied programs.”

“We get together now, we speak all the time, and it’ll be a great rivalry,” Pitino echoed. “It’s one rivalry that you want to win, certainly, but if you do lose and you go shake that person’s hand, you’ll be very happy for someone that you love dearly. I’m real excited to be part of it.”