Tom Izzo “talked Seriously” With The Phoenix Suns About Head Coach Position

Well, Suns fans, it is a day that ends in “Y”, so let’s talk about Mat Ishbia’s continuing connection with the Michigan State Spartans. 

Since taking over the team, Ishbia has installed a general manager and a head coach that both have Michigan State ties. Ishbia himself played 48 games for MSU from 2000 to 2002 under Tom Izzo.

In a recent interview with Dan Patrick, longtime Spartans head coach Tom Izzo revealed that he “talked seriously” with the Phoenix Suns about the Phoenix head coaching job last offseason. During this interview, Izzo implied heavily that he was offered the job:

“I’ve had more than a couple job offers in the NBA, and look, that one last year with Phoenix, you know, my former player Mat Ishbia, and that was hard. That was a hard thing to turn down because number one, I kind of wanted to go with him, number two… number two is, I’ve been pretty vocal about it — I don’t like what’s going on in college athletics. By the way, neither do 99.98% of the football and basketball coaches in America. And I think the kids are still going to find out before it’s done it’s not best for them, either.”

When pressed on whether or not an offer was made, Izzo stopped short of blatant confirmation:

“We talked seriously about it, let’s say that.”

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I find this potential job offer fascinating. I grew up in Michigan watching the Spartans and observing Izzo’s greatness up close. 

The reason I find it most interesting, though, is because of the path to the job. The NCAA-to-NBA head coach pipeline is surprisingly vacant. I was able to find four NCAA head coaches who immediately moved into NBA head coaching positions since 2010. There are also two head coaches, whom we will call our “honorable mentions,” who had a gap between their last NCAA head coaching stint and their first NBA head coaching job. Our list includes:

• Brad Stevens: Butler to the Boston Celtics, 2013
• Fred Hoiberg: Iowa State to the Chicago Bulls, 2015
• Billy Donovan: Florida to the Oklahoma City Thunder, 2015
• John Beilein: Michigan to the Cleveland Cavaliers, 2019

Honorable mentions:

• Mike Dunlap: Charlotte Bobcats, 2012
• Quin Snyder: Utah Jazz, 2014

Four coaches in the last decade and a half have made the jump directly to the NBA. Looking at the list, we see just two of them, Donovan and Stevens, have had long NBA coaching careers. Of those two, only Brad Stevens has seen sustained success. Yet, even this is not much to go on, since Brad Stevens took over the President of Basketball Operations job in Boston from Danny Ainge in the summer of 2021.

The NCAA is not where you find NBA head coaches.

Perhaps Izzo would have been different. Perhaps he would have been Brad Stevens instead of John Beilein. He is one of the all-time great coaches in college basketball history. He has a 71.1% win percentage and a national championship under his belt since he started coaching the Spartans a whopping thirty-one seasons ago in 1995-1996.

Instead of finding out, however, we got Jordan Ott. Ott is a Michigan State graduate who worked as an assistant coach in the NBA for three teams across seven years before getting hired to lead the Phoenix Suns.

Ott has performed admirably. He is the 8th head coach (including interim head coach Jay Triano) that Devin Booker has played for in his 11-year career thus far, and is almost definitely the most competent one of the group outside of Monty Williams, for whom we need to show respect for an excellent era of Suns basketball. I don’t care how it ended; I care about the bubble and the 2021 NBA Finals run.

If, in subsequent seasons, Jordan Ott performs as well has he has this season, he is on track to be the best Phoenix Suns head coach in a long time. Which is a breath of fresh air considering the last ten years has contained some of the worst coaching stints in franchise history.

Would it have been interesting to see what Izzo could have done with this team? Yes, it would have been.

Am I sad that we have Ott instead? No, I am not.

Jordan Ott is not a consolation prize, he is the coach the Suns needed all along.