It is hard to believe more than a quarter-century has passed, but there was a time when many sportswriters, eager to make reality conform to a narrative of their own creation, commonly referred to John Calipari as a “Pitino clone.”
It didn’t matter that Calipari’s teams then were playing a jam-the-lane man-to-man defense while Pitinos were aggressively pressing all over the court. They both were of Italian descent, and both had been affiliated with the basketball program at UMass, and that was enough.
No one makes this mistake now, because the 77 miles that now separate them have made the divide between the two gentlemen clear.