But now he seems to have an issue with his players. Is this a case of the type of kids he is forced to recruit. Did the time away from coaching rob Lavin of his tolerance of immature kids? Little bit of both?
I hate to keep back to the psychology of it all, but: Lavin flamed out spectacularly at UCLA, the highest profile job in college basketball. He was lampooned by UCLA fans, which lampooning in retrospect was evidently entirely justified. He then went to ESPN where he hung around with Dick Vitale and all the other failed coaches clapping each other on the back about how much they know about basketball. He then comes to SJU, which has a storied basketball tradition - as much as I hate all that glory days nonsense, it's true. And other than winning with the other guys players and some early recruiting success, he hasn't done much of anything. If he fails here, it's over for him: he'll never get another job and will have been exposed as a complete buffoon.
What all the drama does - which he creates, wittingly or unwittingly - is excuse his failure. We didn't make the tournament one year because he suspended Harrison for Harrison's own good. We didn't make the tournament last year because the delicate genius couldn't figure out which were his best six players. He tells the press that Adonis is too fat to run up and down the court, for his own good. And now it's Jordan, the victim of tough love, because there are more important things than winning.
There have been lots of SJU players with issues. Mullin was a drunk. Walter Berry was a prima donna. Jayson Williams is a psychopath. Kevin Williams wasn't far from one. Shariff Fordham was a crack dealer, Willie Shaw and Marcus Hatten were junkies, Alan Seiden was a degenerate gambler and Sonny Dove and a bunch of other players were implicated in point shaving. That's off the top of my head. There has never been a coach in my lifetime who aired his laundry in public like this. Not even Mike Jarvis, rape victim. Who humiliates his players and then piously claims it's for their own good. Part of that probably has to do with social media and the 24 hour news cycle. But alot of it has to do with Lavin. He's allegedly the grown up.