Despite his rabid-eyed sideline rants, the rainbow-colored peace sign tattoo acquired on a lost Hollywood night, and the fact that he married a K Street lobbyist, Jimmy Patsos is nonetheless sane by the standards of a college basketball coach.
And yet Patsos, currently the coach at Siena College, will forever be defined by a brilliant idea he had while coaching at Maryland’s Loyola University in the fall of 2008 – a brainstorm that failed so spectacularly it is believed by many to be insane. His obituary is sure to identify him as the coach who, deep in the consolation round of an otherwise unmemorable preseason National Invitation Tournament (NIT), held Stephen Curry scoreless by double-teaming him the entire game, daring Curry’s Davidson College teammates to score at will. Playing four against three, Davidson seized the opportunity to take wide-open shots, scoring 78 points and winning by 30.
“I would never do it again,” Patsos told the Guardian this week.
But, in fact, Patsos’ idea was not as stupid as history insists. His Loyola team was not good that fall, stripped of depth by injuries, leaving him without a player good enough to guard Curry. Davidson was ranked 24th in the country at the time and was playing on its home court, and Curry came into the game averaging 35 points a game. The triangle-and-two defense Patsos employed to stop Curry was the only chance he had to keep Loyola from losing by 30 anyway.
What the criticism fails to recognize is the real genius of Patsos’ plan – a scheme that might just have worked against anyone but Curry. Great scorers are equipped with a selfishness that demands they must put the ball in the basket. This is what makes them great scorers. Held too long without a point, they become impatient. They fight the defense. They force their shots through double teams. They try to make baskets that aren’t there.
This is the calculation Patsos made before daring Curry’s teammates to score in his place: he expected Curry to want his points. Only Curry refused the temptation.
“At the time I didn’t know he was that smart,” Patsos told the Guardian. “He has great composure. Would JR Smith be able to do that? Would Kobe [Bryant] or Michael Jordan?”
Ultimately, Patsos might have taught the NBA more about Curry than any of the guard’s 40-point games in college ever could.
“He was great about it,” Patsos said. “He shook our hands afterward. I became a bigger fan of his after that. He never broke, especially after they were up 20 and most guys would have been itching to score points. We tried to get in his head and instead he got in ours.”
Then came the attacks. As the story spilled across the internet about the coach who held Stephen Curry scoreless but lost by 30 points, the voices of protest howled. What was Patsos trying to prove? What did he have against Curry? What was the point of keeping Curry scoreless if Loyola was just going to lose?
“I took it a little hard,” Patsos said.
Why couldn’t everyone see that he didn’t want to lose? His double-team on Curry was the only chance his team had to win. Lost in the shouts about the coach who wanted to humiliate Curry to the detriment of his own team was the fact that Loyola was in the last game of the loser’s bracket in the preseason NIT – a series of games Patsos didn’t even realize Loyola would have to play until after it lost its first game in the tournament to Boston College. Loyola had beaten James Madison University the night before it played Davidson, a victory Patsos considered to be an upset. With no time to prepare, Patsos quickly designed the Curry defense, seeing it as his only hope.
The plan wasn’t made without some consideration. Rolling in his mind were the words of every great coach he had ever worked with, all of whom preached the same tired mantra: never let the other team’s best player beat you. He thought back to the night during the 1987 NBA finals when he stood in the fifth row of Boston Garden and watched with horror as his beloved Celtics failed to double-team Magic Johnson, allowing him to get open for the hook shot that won Game 4 for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Forever after he wondered: why didn’t they keep Magic from getting the ball?
So many factors went into Patsos’ decision. Curry had moved to point guard that season, making the idea of a double-team more plausible since Curry would be responsible for setting up his teammates as well as himself. Had Curry still been a shooting guard, Patsos would not have double-teamed him.
In other seasons, Patsos had transfers from big college conferences like the ACC or the Big East. Those players were usually quicker and thus able to match up with a player like Curry. At the start of the 2008-09 season he had no one like that. The triangle-and-two was his best hope.
After the game, when a reporter approached him to ask for a comment about the defense, Patsos tried to explain his thinking behind the maneuver, then noted that history would probably show he was the only coach to keep Stephen Curry from scoring in a game. It was supposed to be a joke. But the comment about history is the only thing anybody seized upon in the days, months and even years that have followed.
“I’m a big literature fan,” Patsos said. “Every great story has a hero and a villain. I guess this time I got to be the villain. It was my turn.”
Now, with Curry the NBA MVP who has led his Golden State Warriors in the finals, Patsos is getting calls again about that game – seven years ago, on the second straight night of a consolation round he never thought his team would have to play. He doesn’t mind talking about Curry, whose game he loves even more than he did in 2008, but he hates the idea that his decision to double-team Curry will serve as his epitaph.
Patsos has won 176 games as a head coach. He turned Loyola from a perennial loser into an NCAA Tournament team. Before that, he worked with Gary Williams to turn the University of Maryland into a national champion. He recruited players for two Final Four teams. When he glances at his hand, he sees a national title ring. Reasonably, he thinks these are better representations of his career than a hasty decision in the middle of a tournament.
He figures the scorn would have been less had he not delivered his infamous post-game quote. But he had said other things too. Courteous things. He said he believed the double-team was Loyola’s best chance to win. He said he admired Curry’s patience. He said Davidson coach Bob McKillop did a terrific job adapting to the defense. But the only thing anyone seemed to hear was his proclamation about history.
“I was thin-skinned,” Patsos said with a sigh. “We had beaten James Madison the night before and I thought we should have gotten a little credit for beating James Madison. They made it out to be that I was the bad guy.”
When Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon – who are old friends – ripped him on their TV show Pardon the Interruption, he responded with a long letter that included a paragraph in which he wished the country had leaders like McKillop and Curry, and that those leaders could have prevented 9/11 or the mortgage crisis and advised the Bush administration to never have invaded Iraq. He concluded that while these were “extreme examples to show that the Davidson basketball family adjusted, [they] made smart choices and unselfish choices for the good of the team”.
Needless to say, the letter did little to change the perception of a coach who had lost his mind. In a soundbite world, the subtleties of Patsos’ idea had been trampled by a stampede to judge him.
Still, as Patsos talked this week, he laughed. Keeping Curry scoreless never affected his job, nor did it prevent him from getting a new one at Siena. And the way Curry keeps getting better and better hasn’t hurt, either.
“I feel just a little bit justified,” Patsos said. “I wasn’t that crazy. See, everyone? He’s the MVP! I guess I wasn’t that off, right?”
Then he chuckled again.
“I’m like Denzel [Washington] in The Manchurian Candidate,” he said. “See! I’m not crazy!”
