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Dan Hurley was linked to the vacant North Carolina job by ESPN on Saturday, but the UConn coach shut down those rumors while leaving the door open for the NBA “down the line.” “I’m the UConn coach until the end, and maybe the NBA someday down the line. But yeah, I’m the UConn coach," Hurley told Jeff Goodman of The Field of 68 and myself here at the Final Four. Hurley will lead UConn into the national championship game here Monday night against Michigan as the Huskies bid for their third national title in four years.
Dan Hurley was linked to the vacant North Carolina job by ESPN on Saturday, but the UConn coach shut down those rumors while leaving the door open for the NBA “down the line.” “I’m the UConn coach until the end, and maybe the NBA someday down the line. But yeah, I’m the UConn coach," Hurley told Jeff Goodman of The Field of 68 and myself here at the Final Four.
The mere mention of the large, gray, trunked mammoth that wandered into the banquet room was enough for Dan Hurley to cringe. Addressed more directly, he just waved it off. “Not another summer of that,” he said, as the dais was breaking up. That should be enough to calm any fears that Hurley would entertain the possibility of leaving UConn and coaching the Knicks, who fired coach Tom Thibodeau a few hours before Hurley arrived at the Aqua Turf Club, where his wife, Andrea, received the St. Clare Award at the Franciscan Sports Banquet in recognition of her community service.
How close were you to taking that Lakers job? Dan Hurley: We went back and forth. I mean there were there were obviously a lot of positives and the challenge was exciting so there were definitely times where you thought you were going.
It appears that time has arrived, with NJ Advance Media’s Adam Zagoria reporting that Hurley is set to release a “tell-all book” this fall. Taking to X, the 52-year-old head coach made his own announcement regarding the book, which will be titled Never Stop: Life, Leadership and What it Takes to Be Great and written in the first-person alongside author Ian O’Connor. “I’ve confronted a lot of adversity on my life’s journey and I’m proud to share those stories–along with my leadership philosophies in building championship teams at UConn–in my book ‘Never Stop,'” Hurley wrote. “I’m writing this to help people overcome & succeed.”
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From when Redick first talked about the position with Pelinka during the NBA draft combine in May, to officially becoming a Lakers candidate along with New Orleans assistant James Borrego and UConn coach Dan Hurley, several people close to Redick told him it would be a bad idea to take it, sources told ESPN.
With so many similarities with Dan Hurley (not the least of which, a couple of New York-area Irish kids who were former Big East point guards), Billy Donovan was a perfect sounding board for Hurley while he considered the NBA last spring. "We didn't get into the Lakers' situation or their personnel," recalled Donovan, who is entering his fifth season as Chicago Bulls' head coach. "I think Danny needed to go through whatever he went through. He was going to be able to find out the inner workings of the Lakers. I don't know anything about that ... Danny had to go through that on his own."
Rather, Donovan and Hurley's conversations were more about NBA life in general: the 82-game schedule, the work flow that is totally different from college. "It's like backwards, if that makes any sense," Donovan noted.
"Those were the conversations that Danny and I had, that kind of stuff," Donovan reported. "The X's and O's and the basketball stuff, I think most coaches enjoy that part of it. And the game's different than college is. The rules are different, you've got to pick up on those things. But it was more like, 'what's a year like, what's a week like, what's training camp like?'"
During an interview on In Depth with Graham Bensinger, Hurley finally gave an extensive explanation for why he eschewed one of the NBA's premier jobs to return to college basketball and chase a third straight NCAA title with the Huskies. At the heart of it, Hurley wanted to continue impacting the lives of his players, something he didn't feel like NBA coaches can do. Bensinger asked Hurley if he still wanted to coach in the NBA eventually, and the 51-year-old said he wasn't sure. "I don't know. I don't know about that. If you're not going to take the Lakers job, then what job are you going to take," he said.
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Sources say the Lakers were ready to fire Ham as soon as last season ended. It wound up taking a week to make that decision. Hiring Ham’s replacement took almost two months, and sources close to the Lakers say Redick was the choice for the vast majority of that time, outside of that wild weekend in which the Lakers made that infamous and polarizing offer to Dan Hurley. “Hurley leaked the kind of offer it would’ve taken to hire him,” an Eastern Conference executive told me. “They knew what it was going to take and still came in well below that line. If you do that, are we sure they ever really wanted to hire him? So was JJ just always the guy?”
