Hopkins Era Comes to An End After 7 Seasons in Montlake
Mike Hopkins proved to be one of the nicest, most personable and by far entertaining University of Washington basketball coaches to come through Montlake.
He could stride into a media interview room, plop down in a chair, slap the table with both hands and let out a howl, making everyone laugh.
Unfortunately, Hopkins was not one of the better Husky coaches when the whistle blew on game night — going from instantaneously successful to maddeningly mediocre — and he was dismissed by the school on Friday following seven seasons in charge. He was let go a day after beating WSU 74-68 in Pullman and will coach the team through next week's Pac-12 Tournament.
Hopkins, 54, was named Pac-12 Coach of the Year after each of his first two seasons, yet he directed the Huskies to just one NCAA Tournament berth in his time at the UW and had to answer for a disastrous 5-21 season during the COVID pandemic in 2019-20, which was one of the worst in school history,
Considering the long-winding arc of the UW basketball program, Hopkins should have known his firing was inevitable someday. He became the sixth consecutive coach to be pushed out out of the job, following the forced exits of Lorenzo Romar, Bob Bender, Lynn Nance, Andy Russo and Marv Harshman. He was the ninth Husky leader over the past 11 to be summarily dismissed, which included Hec Edmundson.
Hopkins has a near break-even 118-105 record at the UW — yet just 70-83 over his final five seasons — entering the league tourney.
No one could criticize him for being a fun-loving person and bringing plenty of energy and personality to the job, engaging with everyone and offering no outward signs of coaching ego.
"How do you like my team?" Hopkins bellowed enthusiastically to someone (me) he had just met for the first time at the beginning of the season in 2019, flashing a big smile.
The first impression was this guy is going to do well in a job not always made a high priority at the UW, with it always taking a definite backseat to football. The reality was he never really seemed in control of his destiny, unable to halt big losing streaks and stubbornly relying on players who didn't produce.
Hopkins arrived in Seattle after serving diligently for 23 seasons as a Syracuse assistant coach for Jim Boeheim and being named as the Orange's head-coaching replacement in waiting, though he couldn't wait any longer for that to happen. Boeheim didn't retire until following the 2022-23 season.
Previously a finalist for jobs at USC and Oregon State, Hopkins took over for the popular Romar, a 15-year Husky coach and former point guard who saw his basketball program begin to splinter and was unable to counteract that. Romar went six years without an NCAA berth and suffered through a final 9-22 season under his direction when he was terminated. He recently was fired at Pepperdine in his second coaching stint there.
Using inherited players such as Jaylen Nowell and Matisse Thybulle, Hopkins did something in his first two seasons that his Husky predecessor couldn't or didn't do — he won with those guys, going 21-13 and 27-9.
Rewarded for his early Montlake success, Hopkins next signed a six-year extension in 2019 worth more than $3 million per year.
Yet typical of his uneven time spent at the UW, Hopkins could never build any serious program momentum. For example, he guided the Huskies in his first season to a huge 74-65 upset of a No. 2-ranked Kansas team in Lawrence, Kansas, only to turn around and have his team get trounced by Gonzaga by 27 points at home in the next game.
The following season, Hopkins was sailing along with a fairly solid 11-4 basketball team built around a pair of future first-round NBA draft picks in freshmen Isaiah Stewart and Jaden McDaniels when the coach encountered probably the most pivotal and disastrous moment of his UW coaching tenure.
The school ruled Kentucky transfer Quade Green, his point guard, academically ineligible.
So overly dependent on this playmaker, the Huskies proceeded to flounder without him. The UW immediately lost 11 of the next 12 games, including nine in a row, and a once promising season ended up as a huge 15-17 disappointment.
Hopkins seemed powerless to do anything about this mess, which was tied to the absence of just one player and it proved disturbing for everyone who witnessed the team crash and burn. Watching all that talent in Stewart and McDaniels go to waste was beyond painful.
The following season, the UW had a worse time of it in dealing with the highly contagious COVID pandemic setting in. The Huskies once again went through a gruesome 1-11 stretch, only this time to begin the 2020-21 schedule.
Hopkins did a poor job of putting that team together, ending up with a bunch of selfish and me-first basketball players. Some of his player loyalties totally backfired on him.
Veteran forward Hameier Wright, a marginal player who pulled way more minutes and took far too many shots than he should have, publicly criticized his coach before leaving town for reasons not entirely clear.
Transfer guard Erik Stevenson, a local player from Lacey, Washington, who would play for Wichita State, the UW, South Carolina and West Virginia in that order, was another self-centered player turned basketball mercenary who performed badly and then informed Hopkins that the coach had failed him in his exit interview, according to a well-placed source.
Turning heavily to the transfer portal to piece together subsequent new lineups, Hopkins could do no better than break-even seasons of 17-15, 16-16 and 17-14 to date.
Curiously, he brought in three former Kentucky starters overall during his time at the UW in forward Keion Brooks, point guard Sahvir Wheeler and Green, but still couldn't lift the Huskies to any NCAA berths or 20-win seasons.
He made recruiting mistakes, with McDonald's All-American forward Jackson Grant from Olympia surprisingly unable to play at the Pac-12 level and transferring to Utah State, where he's appeared in just four games this season.
With a new UW athletic director on board in Troy Dannen. Hopkins entered this season presumably needing to win at a much higher rate in order to please his boss and keep his job. His dismissal might have come the year before but Dannen's predecessor, Jennifer Cohen, didn't have the budget available to pay for a huge basketball coaching buyout.
Hopkins entered this past season with great optimism for overdue success. Understanding the urgency of the situation, he junked the exclusive use of his trademark zone defense, which was a turnoff in recruiting elite players who felt it hampered them in seeking NBA careers.
He had a pair of those ex-Kentucky starters in Brooks and Wheeler to lead his most recent team, teaming them up with a bunch of capable big men and some promising young guards to support them.
The Huskies even beat Gonzaga 78-73 in early December, for the first time on his watch in five tries, and recently toppled UCLA 94-77 to break a nine-game losing streak to the Bruins, and then defeated the 18th-ranked Cougars on the road. Large crowds continued to show up at Alaska Airlines Arena more often than not, but it wasn't nearly enough to save him.
Hopkins lost 6-foot-11 senior center Franck Kepnang, his most physical post presence, to a season-ending knee injury for the second consecutive year, with his team holding a 7-3 record in December when Kepnang went down. The Huskies couldn't win consistently without the big man.
On Tuesday, the school announced it was moving ahead with building a $60 million basketball practice facility, with the area already cordoned off for construction. Hopkins was asked what he thought about this, as if he was someday going to benefit from it, which was an awkward moment because that was not going to happen.
So the Hopkins era is soon to be over, remembered for some big wins and a lot of laughs, but probably lasting longer than it should have.
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