I learned yesterday of Lavin's connection to Parga. Lavin's first assistant at UCLA, Jim Saia, coached at Parga's school, Citrus College, a few years ago--as did Saia's current first assistant at Fresno Pacific. Saia has a good relationship with Citrus and still actively recruits the school, landing a player just last year. He tipped Lav off to Parga.
Jim Saia is the former head coach at U$C. He's also the reason for the "Lavin sucked because he only hired his buddies as assistants" bull feathers. Saia and Lavs were friends and teammates both in high school and college.
Thing is, Saia wasn't hired by Lavin. He was hired by Jim Harrick as the replacement for Mark Gottfried, when Gottfried got the HC gig at Alabama in 1996. That fall, when Harrick was fired, Steve, with the most experience on the staff, was promoted to intermin HC, and the remainder of the staff was retained by AD Pete Dalis. When they got to the Elite 8 that year (losing only after they lost center Jelani McCoy for the E8 game, DALIS made Steve permanant, AND kept the staff on board. They promptly reeled in the #2 recruiting class in the country (Baron Davis, Earl Watson, Schea Cotton, Billy Knight, Travis Reed, Rico Hines and Todd Ramasar - 2 top 5 players, 3 top 70 players,1 top 100 player, and the #5 prep school player in the country). And they followed that the next year with a sweet 16 (out only when Baron tore his ACL in the round of 32 game), and locked in the #1 Recruiting class in the country - Dan Gadzuric, Jerome Moiso, JaRon rush were all top 10 recuits, whine Ray Young was top 30, and Matt Barnes top 50. They weren't consensus, but both Gadz and Rush were rated by at least one reputable recruiting service as the #1 recruit in the country. Gadz, Rush and Young were McD AAs.
Anyway, just saying Saia is an excellent judge of talent.
To the best of my knowlege, Jim and Steve are still best friends....