Rick Pitino, You've Lost My Respect

(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

Rick Pitino and I share a few things in common.  First, we both have the same birthday, September 18.  We are both Italian and come from the New York City area.  We both share a love for basketball and fell in love with women whose name happens to be Joanne.  We both lost a relative on September 11th in New York City. 

Rick Pitino is a phenomenal motivator and college basketball coach.  What he did at Providence College, taking over a losing team in 1985 and going all the way to the Final Four in 1987 was the stuff of legend.

The Pitino show left Providence to take him back home to New York to become the head coach of the Knicks.  With the Knicks, Pitino's magic touch carried straight to the NBA.  The Knicks made the playoffs each of his two seasons at Madison Square Garden.  The Knicks under Pitino would win the Atlantic Division title in 1989; this would be the Knicks first division crown since 1971.

He would go on to find his greatest success at the University of Kentucky.  He would take this legendary college basketball program from coming out of probation to a National Championship.

After falling in overtime in the 1997 National Championship game against Arizona, Pitino would leave Lexington, Kentucky and move up near Lexington, Massachusetts and sign a $50 million contract to coach the Boston Celtics.

Something would happen to Rick Pitino in Boston that never happened to him in the past.  He failed.  The Celtics from 1998 to 2001 missed the playoffs each of the three-plus seasons that Pitino was at the helm.  He would resign in January 2001.

Pitino usually knew when to leave a situation, but this time he resigned in disgrace.  He resigned in Miami after the Celtics had lost to the Heat and did not return to Boston to face the media.

A couple months later, he would find himself back in school and in the state of Kentucky, but this time it would be at Louisville, as he replaced Hall of Famer Denny Crum as the head coach of the Cardinals.  Pitino's return to college basketball has been very successful.  Louisville went to the Final Four in 2005, and was ranked the number one team in college basketball for a portion of the 2008-09 season.

His method of solid recruiting and coaching along with being able to motivate players has been a staple of his success in college basketball for over twenty years.

There is one problem with this latest sales pitch.  No one is going to buy it, and for a rare time in his life, Rick Pitino is on the defensive.  Remember one of the last times he was on the defensive?

You could laugh at his Boston press conference with those infamous comments.  But, you cannot laugh at what has taken place between Pitino and a woman not named Joanne Pitino.

This week, Rick Pitino is facing a problem the likes of which cannot be solved by moving on or by saying something motivational.

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