The Athletic has live coverage of the 2026 Men’s March Madness Sweet 16.
WASHINGTON — Long before they broke Rick Pitino’s heart on behalf of Duke University, Christian Laettner and Grant Hill were teenage campers awed by his knowledge of the game. Laettner raved to his older brother Christopher about the passionate guest instructor with that raspy New York voice.
“Rick Pitino was his favorite coach,” Christopher once told me.
Hill? The TV analyst was nodding his head courtside Thursday at the start of Duke practice in Capital One Arena, right after taping what he called a cute segment with the St. John’s coach for CBS.
“Coach Pitino is one of the best camp lecturers I’ve ever experienced,” Hill said. “It was like, ‘Wow, this guy is not only a great mind and great teacher, but he was playing one-on-one against top campers and kicking their butts.’”
Rick Pitino kicked a lot of butts on his way to the Hall of Fame, two national championship victories, seven Final Four appearances and 14 trips to the Sweet 16. The 73-year-old coach will carry a 12-1 career regional semifinal record into Friday night’s clash with top-seeded Duke, the only other team with 21 victories in its last 22 games.
But when it is Pitino vs. Duke amid the madness of March, the conversation almost never turns to his national title run with Louisville in 2013 and the blowout Elite Eight victory over the Blue Devils along the way. Even Pitino can’t help himself when it comes to Duke. Every time that school comes up, one memory immediately rushes to the surface:
2.1.
As in the 2.1 overtime seconds it took for Hill to fire a perfect pass down the floor of the Philadelphia Spectrum, and for Laettner to catch it, dribble, and launch it over a pair of helpless Kentucky defenders to make perhaps the most famous shot in college basketball history.
March 28, 1992: The Christian Laettner Shot.
Elite 8, Philadelphia, Duke 104 Kentucky 103 OT.
pic.twitter.com/erA13TrsZI— This Day In Sports Clips (@TDISportsClips) March 29, 2025
Pitino famously did not put a defender on Hill, the son of a star Dallas Cowboys running back, because he didn’t think Calvin’s child could throw the ball like Calvin’s teammate, Roger Staubach. As he prepared for a this-is-your-life reunion with Duke — with Jon Scheyer in the role of Mike Krzyzewski — Pitino isn’t sure he erred in giving Hill a clear view of the court on that forever Saturday night in 1992.
“I’ll tell you where the mistake was, and I was the one who made it,” Pitino told The Athletic as he walked from his Thursday news conference to his locker room. “I told my players the ball is going to Laettner, but I told John Pelphrey and Deron Feldhaus, ‘Whatever you do, don’t foul.’ What I should’ve said was, ‘We’ll sandwich him and knock the ball down.’”
Afterward, Pitino told his devastated team, “Don’t let two seconds determine your basketball lives, because it’s worth a lot more than that.”
Someone could have given the same consolation speech to the Kentucky coach. Pitino had inherited a program rocked by scandal and a two-year postseason ban, and as soon as the NCAA let his program come up for air, he had come within a miracle play of the Final Four.
He had rebuilt Kentucky as quickly as he had rebuilt the New York Knicks. With a circle of leftover, low-profile Wildcats and one true star, Jamal Mashburn, he had nearly dethroned a defending champ led by Laettner, Hill and Bobby Hurley.
Pitino agreed Thursday that taking his Kentucky team that far stands among his very best coaching jobs, right there with leading the undermanned Providence Friars to the 1987 Final Four.
“People misconstrue it. I took it as a positive,” Pitino said of the Duke defeat. “We went back to Kentucky and the four seniors, (Richie) Farmer, Feldhaus, Pelphrey and (Sean Woods), they got their jerseys retired to the rafters after that loss, which you never see.
“But I always treasured that game. And every time I’ve watched that game, I didn’t grimace about Christian Laettner hitting the shot.”
Thirty-four years later, Pitino remains a threat to win the whole thing. St. John’s hadn’t advanced to a Sweet 16 since 1999, and in Year 3 of the Pitino era, voilà, the lifer from Manhattan, Queens and Long Island put the Red Storm in the national conversation. His teams have won back-to-back Big East regular-season and tournament titles, and in 200 postseason minutes played this year (including the conference tourney), St. John’s has held a lead for 194 minutes and 25 seconds.
“Rick is the best college basketball coach of any I’ve known to take a team that’s not that good and win the most games with it,” said Syracuse’s retired Hall of Famer Jim Boeheim. “He’s done it at six places.
“Mike Krzyzewski is the best coach we’ve had since John Wooden, but over one season, Rick will get the most out of a team.”
In 1976, Boeheim drove through the rain to the Americana hotel in New York to spend four hours interviewing Pitino for an assistant’s job … on the coach’s wedding day. Boeheim offered him a salary of $13,000 before upgrading it to $15,000 to close the deal. Pitino canceled his honeymoon with his bride, Joanne, to start recruiting and hasn’t stopped since.
Today, Boeheim ranks his former assistant among the top five college basketball coaching titans, along with Wooden, Coach K, Bob Knight and Dean Smith. “Rick’s got a unique ability to drive people,” Boeheim said. “And I knew it from the first day I met him.”
Pitino always coached the way his teams played — relentlessly. He pressed with fast, athletic guys, and he pressed with slow, unathletic guys. It’s fitting that the one time he took his foot off the gas, he paid a terrible price.
Grant Hill told me years ago, “it was hard to believe” Pitino didn’t put a defender on his inbound pass. “But I was just happy they didn’t,” he added.
Thursday, Hill maintained he probably could’ve stepped back from the baseline and made the same pass even if a Kentucky player had been assigned to him. He had tried a similar heave that failed at Wake Forest earlier that season, but worked on his long-distance aim in the weeks that followed.
“We practiced that pass every day,” Hill recalled. “I used to throw good passes, too, and I would talk trash in warmups. I’d say, ‘I should have played football.’ I’d yell that all the time in practice.”
Hill was part of the broadcast team for enough St. John’s games this year (he even hitched a ride on the team plane back from Xavier) that Pitino joked he couldn’t escape him. But as he faces a Duke coach in Scheyer, who was 4 years old when Hill made the pass and Laettner made the shot, Pitino doesn’t have to escape anyone or anything.
He is one of the finest motivators and strategists the sport has ever seen. Not even another Duke buzzer-beater Friday night could change that.