Basketball family
Two Dunleavys will be in the state Saturday. Father Mike Dunleavy Sr. will be coaching Tulane at UConn, while son Baker Dunleavy will be coaching Quinnipiac at home.
HAMDEN — The Dunleavy Family Christmas had all the usual trimmings: a wonderful dinner, gifts, kids, reminiscing. For one day, ridiculously busy people could stop and celebrate together.
But if the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, talk of basketball would soon fill the air. By early evening, Mike Dunleavy Sr., men’s basketball coach at Tulane, and his son Baker, who holds the same position at Quinnipiac, had their laptops out. Their upcoming opponents played similar defensive schemes, after all. Mike Jr., the host and a pro scout for the Warriors, and James, a player agent, could join in, too.
“We met up for Christmas together at my brother Mike’s house in New Jersey,” Baker says, “and dad was watching film, getting ready for Cincinnati. I was doing the same for our next game with Manhattan. My mom, my wife and all the others would frown upon that conversation at dinner, but sitting on the couch after the meal, showing each other
different things — pretty cool.”
Both father and son will be coaching in Connecticut on Saturday. Quinnipiac plays Niagara at home at 2 p.m., and Tulane plays at UConn at 7 p.m. It’s not likely Mike Sr. will be able to get to his son’s game in Hamden, but Baker hopes to make it up to Storrs in time to watch his dad coach Tulane.
“The great thing about it,” Mike Sr. says, “is we can talk in very technical terms, and we don’t need paper and pen. We can be in a car listening to each other and know exactly the language we’re speaking, where people around us have no clue what we’re talking about.”
Mike Dunleavy, 64, played in the NBA from 1976 to 1985, and was a coach and/or GM with the Bucks, Lakers, Trailblazers and Clippers between 1988 and 2010. Baker, 36, played at Villanova, and after a time on Wall Street, went back there to join Jay Wright’s staff. Out of the game, Mike Sr. began watching some of his son’s practices and became intrigued. At the Final Four in 2015, he told Baker he was about to make a comeback at Tulane.
“I was so excited for him,” Baker says. “I knew what he was missing, there was just a void there. He just wanted to be with a group of guys he could help get better.”
Rebuilding Tulane is a long- haul proposition — the Green Wave went 20-42 in Dunleavy’s first two seasons. This season, set back by injuries, he is fielding one of the youngest teams in the country coming into the game at UConn. Tulane (4-12) lost to Memphis, 83-79, on Sunday.
“We’re very excited about our future,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of pieces we think are in place.”
Baker, meanwhile, became Quinnipiac’s head coach in
2017, starting out 12-21, but the Bobcats are gaining some traction in year two, with an 8-7 mark, after beating Fairfield by a basket Sunday. “You have the normal ups and downs with it,” he says, “but I think we’re getting better, heading in the right direction.”
For the Coaching Dunleavys, wisdom flows in both directions. Mike, who coached the Lakers in the NBA Finals in 1991, is master of the sophisticated strategies that worked in the NBA, with a proven eye for talent. Baker has more experience with the college game — the recruiting, administrating, compliance, academics.
“It was important for me,” Baker says, “because it was always tempting to go try to work for him, to try to blaze my own trail. Going to Villanova, going the college route, it was basketball but it was my way. I wanted to learn it, grind through it, come out the other side. But all along the way, he’s been an amazing resource for me in every way.”