The basketball origin story of Dan Hurley – the man who is about to walk away from the opportunity to win a third consecutive national title and take over the vaunted, glamorous, celebrity-rich Los Angeles Lakers – was born in a 65-foot-long, tall -ceiling room attached to a parsonage of a downtown church, built for events and fundraising.
The White Eagle Bingo Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey, was only a basketball hall because someone attached a pair of hoops to each end (one of them was famously two inches higher than prescribed). It had more in common with the 1890s YMCA where James Naismith first released a pair of peach baskets than with the gleaming Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles.
It was at the White Eagle that Dan Hurley – the reigning two-time national champion in Connecticut and the top pick in the Lakers’ coaching search – first learned the game. Here he first learned the fire it took, he first learned the fight it took, he first learned the talent and tenacity it took to separate victory from defeat.
And it was there that he and his older brother, current Arizona State head coach Bobby Hurley, learned that every last tactical advantage, every inch of distance gained by a cut here, a flare there mattered. He learned that the little things depended on a course that was about twenty feet shorter than the regular rules, and whose unforgiving walls were only sixty yards from the outer limits.
How do you get open shots on a course where ‘open’ didn’t exist? How do you box in a box?
By somehow being both tougher and smarter than the other boys.
This was the basketball office of Bob Hurley, Dan’s father, who spent his days as a Hudson County probation officer and his nights as the most demanding basketball coach ever. Bob Hurley took over at St. Anthony’s High School in 1972 and won 26 state titles over the next 39 seasons, helping some 150 players receive college scholarships.
The actual St. Anthony’s high school was down the street, near the Holland Tunnel, in a four-story squat so small it didn’t even have the comically limited space that The Eagle had to offer. Bob Hurley was able to win four national titles at a high school that literally had no gym. No wonder he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
St. Anthony’s has never played a real ‘home’ game. That dusty bingo hall was all there was to practice. A few times a year, the boys took hammers and helped their father drive protruding nails back into the hardwood floor.
If Dan Hurley leaves Connecticut for the Lakers, it will be just the latest step in the manifest destiny of one of basketball’s most important families. Bob could have continued as a college coach, and probably as a coach in the NBA, but he believed it was his calling to never leave Jersey City.
Bob did everything he could for the city and the school, for his family and his friends.
He tried to preemptively help local children by teaching them discipline through basketball at a high school he worked hard to keep open, and later he tried to help redeem those who slipped past him by working as a probation officer. It was a modest life, but he was passionate about raising money for St. Anthony’s – including nationalizing the story through Adrian Wojnarowski’s epic 2005 book “The Miracle of St. Anthony’s” – until modern realities ultimately proved too much and the school closed in 2017. .
Dan initially followed the same path, spending a decade at nearby Newark St. Benedict’s before eventually entering the college ranks at Wagner, Rhode Island and then UConn.
It was the past two years where it all really came together, with Hurley bringing two different rosters to the same place: a national title. Dan became only the seventh coach to do so, but his run may be the most impressive. It wasn’t the product of a returning starting five. This meant finding the right guys to play the right system under the right demands twice.
Today’s college basketball is not the college basketball of even Billy Donovan (Florida 2006-07) or Mike Krzyzewski (1991-92), let alone Henry Iba (Oklahoma State 1945-46) and John Wooden (1964-65, 1967-73 ). ).
It’s fair to say that no college basketball coach has done a better job than Hurley over the last two seasons, and it’s fair to say that at no point are the skills needed to win in college as comparable to the skills needed to win in the NBA. You can’t just bring in a few recruits. Hurley’s Huskies played the game with both brutal pace and ruthless efficiency.
It was a tribute to everything built and learned at the White Eagle, everything from a basketball laboratory where none other than Bob Knight once arrived on a recruiting visit, viewed not only the scene but the ethos it engendered and declared, “I love this. [expletive] place.”
So now come the Lakers – 17 NBA titles, the franchise of Magic and Kobe, of Kareem and Shaq and the Logo, the one with a celebrity line-up and LeBron James and LA Live.
The Lakers were willing to take on a coach with big upside — JJ Redick was in the mix — and Dan Hurley certainly represents that. He is also more proven than most.
Can he coach 82 nights a year with the same current fire? Of course not. Should he soften disputes with rival fans? Of course he does. Can you conduct NBA workouts as if the players were teenagers in a bingo hall? Obviously not.
Hurley, 51, is smart. When you’re a high school coach, let alone the son of a successful high school coach, you learn one thing: Circumstances, personalities and roster strengths fluctuate. This isn’t your typical college coaching legend. He is not the product of a shoe company that provides him with an endless stream of top talent.
The Hurleys are pure basketball; that perfect combination of effort and intelligence that makes the game what it is.
Dan Hurley may be heading to the Lakers. It was probably inevitable.
