Commentary: Hopkins Needs to Lose Nice-guy Coaching Approach
Mike Hopkins is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet.
Funny.
Self-deprecating.
Caring.
Those are admirable traits for any human being.
However, as the fourth-year University of Washington basketball coach and a two-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year recipient, the man doesn't check every box.
He's too nice.
Too trusting.
Almost naive.
A year ago, Hopkins had a talented team implode on him and he was powerless to fix it or limit the damage.
Two NBA first-round draft picks went to waste.
The Huskies dropped 13 of 15 games on the way to a last-place finish.
All because Quade Green didn't go to class.
Hopkins had no options, no one else to fill in.
It was a stunning loss of team control, shocking in the way things were so leveraged.
Outside of Isaiah Stewart, the Huskies had no one else willing to step up and say how all that losing was unacceptable.
It should have been Naz Carter, but all he wanted to do was dunk and shoot 3-pointers, and let someone else do the hard stuff.
Hopkins deserved better from this particular player, one of his original UW recruits, someone he brought with him from New York.
Carter rewarded him by getting into trouble and forced out of school.
The Husky coach now has a team way low in basketball talent.
Hopkins has no big men who can score. Nobody rebounds. The defense is suspect. No one takes care of the ball.
When you're short on confident, productive players, the only way out of this is to make up for it with desire.
Players diving on the floor, getting physical with opponents, scaring others with tenacity.
In game after game this pandemic season — and Tuesday night's debacle in Arizona State was just the latest example — Hopkins explained how his players couldn't play with fire or find any energy.
That's a reflection on the basketball coach.
This happened often throughout the first dozen games when the UW lost all but one of those outings.
Twenty-three games into the schedule, the Husky performance against the Sun Devils was so uninspired and inept it would put any coach to shame.
It was a small thing, but Hopkins didn't start Green, his leading scorer, against ASU.
This marked the third time this season the senior point guard hasn't been on the floor for tipoff for some unexplained reason.
After what happened the year before, Green owes his coach more than that.
What's baffling about this is Hopkins learned the coaching trade from one of the best in the college game in Jim Boeheim.
He's one of the feistiest, most impatient, more demanding leaders.
For 45 years, this has been Boeheim's trademark approach.
He's been highly successful at it.
Hopkins was at Syracuse for half of it, as a player and assistant coach.
He's nothing like Boeheim.
The coach talks about his Husky players taking lessons from each failure.
Hopkins has to learn from this, too, or he won't last much longer at Washington.
It might not be possible, but he needs to make it less personal and those around him more accountable.
Not only that, he has to recruit another big guy or two who can score, rebound and play hard.
Doesn't he know nice guys finish last?
Or 11th?
He doesn't have to go all Bobby Knight on everyone.
Just better resemble Jim Boeheim before it's too late.
Follow Dan Raley of Husky Maven on Twitter: @DanRaley1 and @HuskyMaven
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