At first glance, it appears Bob McKillop and John Thompson III have nothing in common. They are basketball coaches, yes, but watching them run the U.S. under-18 basketball team through one practice at Verizon Center evidences their dissimilarity.
“Gawd it! Gawd the ball!” McKillop screamed. “Push! Run! Cut through!”
The Davidson coach wears his blue Team USA coaching T-shirt tucked neatly into a pair of ironed khaki shorts. For the entirety of the two-hour workout he never stops needling, encouraging, coaching. He runs frenetically from player to player, blue eyes burning intensity into 18-year-olds, jaws chomping a stick of Big Red gum.
Thompson stands to the side, shirt untucked and hanging over a pair of baggy blue basketball shorts. The Georgetown coach walks slowly up the court, feet splayed out, gazing at the scrimmage before him with brown eyes. He waits for a break in the action, then sidles up to a player to offer a piece of advice inaudible to anyone beyond five feet.
Four months ago, they were on opposite ends of a game, which, depending on the perspective, was either a monumental victory or a devastating upset. McKillop and his 10th-seeded Wildcats toppled Thompson and the Big East regular-season champion Hoyas in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Now they are together, Goliath working for David. Thompson, 42, head of the power conference juggernaut, serving as assistant for the 57-year-old McKillop, author of the NCAA tournament’s Cinderella story. They are charged with the tall task of taking 12 four- and five-star phenoms from around the country and melding a team strong enough to compete with the world’s finest talent in the FIBA Americas U18 Championship next week in Formosa, Argentina. But over the course of their two weeks together at Verizon Center, they have found they have more in common than previously imagined. There is, of course, the basketball thing.
Turns out they both share the same coaching philosophies - an offense based on giving players multiple options off picks and screens, a defense rooted in unyielding pressure and constant movement - beliefs passed down from men like former Princeton coach Pete Carril; Thompson’s father, John Thompson Jr.; and longtime NBA coach Butch van Breda Kolff, for whom McKillop played at Hofstra in the early 1970s.
“I think there are a lot of similarities in how we see the game and how we think the game and how we approach the game,” Thompson said.
Said McKillop: “I steal from everybody. I steal from van Breda Kolff. I steal from [Lou] Carnesecca. I steal from [John] Wooden. Things I say in the meetings that we have, John has heard it because I read [Carril’s] book and watched Pete practice. John says, ’Yeah this is the way we did it.’”
They have known one another since Thompson’s coaching days at Princeton in the early part of the decade, when they often crossed paths on the recruiting trail. McKillop even tried to get Thompson to recruit his son Matt for the Tigers.
“I’ll never forget - I was in Indianapolis at some AAU tournament, and I walked by John’s table at lunch break and dinner break, and I was kind of hoping he would say, ’Hey, let me talk to you about your son,’”McKillop said. “But he didn’t.”
Thompson has no recollection of McKillop’s hopeful passes but remembers his boy.
“His son was a very good player,” Thompson said of Matt, who ended up starring for his father at Davidson. “He made shots - [McKillop and I] both like players that make shots. And he ended up playing for a pretty good coach.”
McKillop’s respect for Thompson grew after the Wildcats’ win in Raleigh, N.C., this spring.
“John was incredible,” McKillop said. “It was incredible how, in the aftermath of that loss, how gracious he was. He was stunned [by the loss]. But the way he responded - my coaches, my players, they have never forgotten that.”
In their time together, they have found they share much more in common.
Both men attended Catholic grammar schools and high schools and sent their children to similar institutions. Both men know the thrill of taking a small conference team to the NCAA tournament. Both men have recognized how their tunnel-vision focus for winning basketball games has prevented them from making friends with fellow coaches.
“I have a lot of colleagues, but I wouldn’t say I have any close relationships,” McKillop said.
Said Thompson: “Maybe I need to grow in that regard.”
So here they are, the two members of the coaching fraternity who never quite bought into the hoo-rah and the hijinks, trying to win together and learn from one another.
“When I help John and John helps me, all of a sudden you feel a collegiality that you didn’t feel before,” McKillop said. “You are always in a rival, competitive situation. Well now we have been cast into a situation where we are teammates. And all of a sudden, it’s ’Hey, he’s a really good guy.’”
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