Mar 4th, 2010
Here’s a question out of left field: Should Cal coach Mike Montgomery be in the basketball Hall of Fame?
The immediate reaction goes something like: Guffaw, chuckle, chortle, chortle, giggle.
Mike Montgomery has 593 career wins -- Photo Getty Images
Maybe if it were the Sarcasm Hall of Fame, because no one is better at disarming an acquaintance or media member with a well placed sarcastic jab to the ego, followed by a roundhouse verbal dig to the psyche.
But the basketball Hall of Fame? The one named after James Naismith? The one in Springfield, Mass.? Are you sure, you’re not talking about the BasketMAKING Hall of Fame?
Well, no, JakesTakeOnSports is talking about the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., zip code 01105, the one in which Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, John Wooden and Pete Newell are enshrined.
Montgomery won’t be part of the class of 2010 since nominations for this year’s Hall of Fame inductees have already been made, and Montgomery isn’t one of them. In fact, there were no current college coaches among the 19 candidates nominated
But two years from now? Or four years down the road?
It’s not impossible.
Montgomery needs some more wins, perhaps some more conference titles and probably some postseason success, but he could at least be included in the discussion pretty soon.
Heading into Saturday’s game at Stanford, Montgomery had 593 career college coaching victories. Only eight active head coaches had more than 600 victories before this season began, and four of them are in the Hall of Fame.
Plus, Montgomery has taken his team to the NCAA Tournament each of the past 12 years he’s been a college coach – assuming the Bears make it this season, which is a reasonable assumption. The first 10 in that streak came at Stanford, where he will be the enemy this weekend, and the past two came at Cal. And this season he became the first coach to take two different schools to a regular-season championship in the conference currently called the Pac-10.
Turning Stanford into a national powerhouse remains his biggest accomplishment. It’s hard to describe just how hopeless Stanford basketball seemed when Montgomery arrived. The fact that the Cardinal had not had a winning conference record in any of the 20 years before Montgomery showed up begins to tell the story. But the best indication came in 1976, when Dick DiBiaso was named conference coach of the year after taking Stanford to a seventh-place finish with a 5-9 conference record and an 11-16 overall mark. That’s what people thought of Stanford’s basketball potential, yet Montgomery turned it into a program that finished ranked in the top 10 five times in his final seven seasons, including No. 1 in 2004.
And now he has taken a Cal team that was ninth the year before he arrived to its first conferment title in 50 years in his second. Granted, the conference is worse than it’s been in several decades, and even Montgomery admits this is not the best team Cal has had since 1960, but a conference title is a conferent title.
All of which is nice and all, but we’re talking about the Hall of Fame here, and Montgomery has some shortcomings on his resume.
First of all, hold off on declarations that he has resurrected Cal basketball. He has earned the two NCAA Tournament berths almost exclusively with players brought to Cal by his predecessor, Ben Braun. If Montgomery can do it with his own players starting next season – and that will be a challenge with the returning talent – then we will credit Montgomery with turning around a second program.
You may recall it took Montgomery awhile to build the Stanford program with his recruits. His NIT team in his first year at Stanford and the team that finished ranked No. 13 in his second were both built with players recruited by Tom Davis. In Montgomery’s next three seasons, Stanford went 27-27 in the Pac-10 and never finished better than fourth, and in his sixth season, the Cardinal went 7-23 and 2-16 in the Pac-10. It was not until Montgomery’s seventh year, in 1994-95, when Brevin Knight arrived, that Montgomery started his ascent to the top of the Pac-10.
The second thing to remember is that the four active college coaches in the Hall of Fame – Jim Calhoun, Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams and Jim Boeheim – all have one thing Montgomery does not: a national title. No Montgomery team has made it past the Final Four, and Montgomery got there only once (1998). He may need more postseason success to get Hall of Fame consideration.
His failure with the Golden State Warriors causes pause when discussing Hall of Fame credentials, but that can be dismissed since so many other college coaches had a similar fate in the pro. Even Rick Pitino and John Calipari bombed out in the NBA. (Montgomery has more college coaching victories than either of those two, by the way).
People get inducted into the Hall by being nominated by a screening committee, then receiving at least 18 of the 24 votes from the Honors Committee, although the Hall new board chairman, Jerry Colangelo, suggests the fans or perhaps the media may have a hand in the selections at some point.
At the moment, Montgomery’s resume does not quite stack up, but he’s approaching the status of coaches like Ralph Miller, Marv Harshman, Fred Taylor, Al McGuire Lou Carnessecca and John Chaney, all of whom are in the Hall.
He fits in rather comfortably with those Hall members, so it would seem that if Cal does some serious damage in an NCAA Tournament in the next few years, the talk of Montgomery getting to the Hall of Fame will not seem silly at all.
(For more Stanford basketball stories, click here)
Also check the archives for Cal and Stanford stories at this site.
