Iona begins latest title defense with perhaps its most hype and deepest roster

Rick Pitino, now eight months removed from taking Iona to NCAA Tournament, sets his sights on greater heights with MAAC favorite Gaels this season. (Photo by USA Today Sports Images)

When Rick Pitino agreed to return to the college basketball ranks as the head coach of Iona just 20 months ago, it was never a question of whether or not the Hall of Famer would be able to continue the winning ways that Tim Cluess had spent a decade perfecting and mastering in New Rochelle, but rather, how soon it would take.

The two-time national champion needed all of four months, and guided the Gaels to a fifth consecutive Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament championship just weeks removed from a 51-day pause after being ravaged by the pandemic more than almost any other program in the country. And after graduating both parts of its two-pronged senior backcourt, Pitino smartly reloaded in the transfer portal and scheduled an overseas trip to Greece in August to fortify a team that was, to no surprise of anyone following the MAAC, the league’s unanimous preseason favorite.

“Oh, yeah. I can’t sleep at night,” Pitino quipped when asked if he felt pressure being the No. 1 choice of his fellow coaches. We upgraded our schedule consistently this year. We’ll see if we’re better. If we played this schedule last year, I don’t believe we could have taken that on. This year, I’m hoping we can.”

“We went to Greece and we played five pro games, and that was a unique experience. We won one, we played Panathinaikos to the wire. We are a deep team, I think the strength of our team is in the backcourt, we have four terrific backcourt players, Elijah Joiner, Tyson Jolly, Walter Clayton and certainly, Ryan Myers takes over for Isaiah Ross in finding out every shot is a great shot. He likes to score, to say the least. Our center, Nelly Junior Joseph, is progressing nicely. He still has to work on his perimeter game and his jump shot skills, but everything else, I’m very, very impressed with. So those four backcourt players, plus Nelly at the center spot, gives us something special. Then we took a transfer from Louisville, Quinn Slazinski, who is also a very outstanding offensive basketball player, he’s terrific. We’ve got a lot of transfers in that, I think added to what we had coming back, will make us a very deep team.”

But as deep as Pitino promises his second Iona team will be, the additional pieces were not enough to fully withstand the injury bug, which has bitten the Gaels’ more experienced players to the point where several integral parts of the rotation have been, or could be, sidelined for prolonged stretches of the coming season.

“We have had a rash of injuries, more than any other time in my coaching career,” Pitino cautioned. “Dylan van Eyck has been out for three weeks, Berrick Jean-Louis just came back, Osborn Shema’s probably out for the season, Colton Cashaw is out 4-6 weeks. So the silver lining in that cloud is we’ve been able to take our four freshmen, give them plenty of work to see which ones are going to be able to play, and definitely two of them — maybe three — will play significant minutes early in the season because of our injuries.”

Health aside, the ability to enjoy something close to a normal offseason — a luxury that was a pandemic casualty across the college basketball landscape — allowed Pitino more time to implement more wrinkles in his patented press defense and uptempo attack, as well as an increased amount of his vaunted player development sessions, which will have a much greater effect on his personnel than it did a year ago in light of the stop-and-start nature of the truncated season.

“It helped immensely because we tried to build a culture, but really couldn’t build it around 55 days of shutdown,” he said. “It was a really unique season for everybody. We had to get through it, and now our training program, our trip to Greece, every aspect of what we’re trying to build here — from our schedule to conditioning from a culture standpoint — is in place. It’s going to be a basketball season that’s much different than last year, and has to be much better.”

The hype is indeed real in New Rochelle, with fans taking advantage of the big dreams that most experts have given rise to by suggesting the Gaels could, with all the right breaks, be one of the MAAC’s most dominant teams in recent memory. And while Pitino did not necessarily indulge all the visions of grandeur, he did allow himself to admit the realization that his program could potentially be a Cinderella story come March.

“We’re an inner-city league comprised of small schools that rely on catching lightning in a bottle,” he said of the MAAC and its modus operandi. “I remember playing Siena, a Fran McCaffery team that was an awesome basketball team. We were life and death to win it, and I think we were No. 1 in the country. So if you can catch that lightning in a bottle, it’s something really, really special. You just don’t know who that team’s going to be or which team’s going to do it, but we’re excited to be in the hunt to be one of those teams.”