“I told them I was packing eight suits,” Pitino said he told his team before the MAAC tournament started.
The most problematic opponent of Gaelics, however, has been the coronavirus.
Due to flight restrictions, the pandemic prevented Junior Joseph and Dylan van Eyck, who is from the Netherlands, from reaching the United States by the beginning of the fall semester. The Gaels have paused basketball activities four times since October, playing just 13 games before the MAAC tournament. A serious outbreak, in which nine players, two coaches (including Pitino) and two officials were infected, led to a 51-day break between games from late December to mid-February. It was the longest break of any school that played this season.
Then, at the end of February, the positive test of another player caused the cancellation of the last five games of the regular season. Players who tested negative and approved the MAAC protocols were allowed to train individually. But when the tournament started, the Gaels had not played for 17 days and had only a few training sessions to prepare for.
“Every time we get a rhythm, we get a winning streak, we get quarantined,” said senior guard Isaiah Ross with a smile.
But the Gaels defeated Quinnipiac in their opening game, recovering from a 9-point deficit to topple Siena in the quarterfinals and prevent a recovery from Niagara in the semifinals. Even so, Pitino regretted that his players were not at the peak of their physical condition, as they were in November, at the beginning of the season.
“In New York, treatment is very different than elsewhere,” Pitino said recently about virus protocols. “We got stuck. We don’t even have 10 minutes on the patio. “
Pitino was not hired to restore a show’s brilliance – as he had done on virtually every other chart, whether in Providence, Kentucky, Louisville or even the NBA’s Knicks and Boston Celtics. Iona had won the previous four MAAC tournaments, but the squad was empty when Tim Cluess, who took a sick leave last season, resigned.