McDermott, Altman all too familiar with each other
When Creighton and Oregon take the floor for their matchup at 9:40 p.m. Saturday at PPG Paints Arena, their two coaches will have a level of familiarity not many others can reach.
Creighton’s Greg McDermott will be taking on his predecessor, Dana Altman, who spent 16 seasons in Omaha, Neb., and “laid the groundwork” for the program that McDermott carries now.
The mutual respect between the two coaches was a popular topic at Friday’s media availabilities.
Altman accumulated a record of 327-176 over those 16 seasons, including seven NCAA tournament appearances and many, many recruiting battles with McDermott from when he was coaching in the Missouri Valley Conference at Northern Iowa.
“He’s a really good guy, really good basketball coach,” Altman said of McDermott. “I love the job he’s done at Creighton. It’s so good to watch from afar. It might be my ego or whatever, but I still feel a part of it. I still cheer for them. My family is all back in Nebraska, and Oregon might be 1, but Creighton is 1A. He’s been so good to my dad, my brother, so I think the world of him and his family.”
McDermott has said multiple times throughout the week that the Creighton basketball program doesn’t look like this without Altman setting the foundation.
“He recruited the right kind of guys, and there was a culture of family in his program then,” McDermott said. “And you can tell that because a lot of his former players, a bunch of them live in Omaha, or they’re constantly coming back to Omaha for games, or they’re stopping by the practice facility. The former players don’t do that unless they enjoyed their experience, unless they were treated the right way.”
Dante’s Pitt connection
Oregon center N’Faly
Dante dominated in the Ducks’ first- round win against South Carolina on Thursday, scoring 23 points on 7 of 9 shooting in a city where a former high school teammate made a name for himself.
Dante and Pitt star Blake Hinson played together at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kan., where they dominated in 2017-18. Dante, a consensus five-star recruit now in his fifth season at Oregon, and Hinson, who had stints at Ole Miss and Iowa State before finally coming into his own with coach Jeff Capel and the Panthers, walked extremely different paths to get here, but it was a bit of a full-circle moment for Dante to show out in Pittsburgh on the biggest stage in college basketball.
“That’s my guy,” Dante said of Hinson, saying they still talk from time to time through Instagram. “He’s a dog. He wanted to win all the time. You see how he shoots those 3’s? I’ve seen that since high school, so I’m not surprised by anything he does.”
Dante faces a tough matchup on Saturday, as he’ll be tasked with containing — and scoring on — Ryan Kalkbrenner, Creighton’s 7-foot three-time Big East Defensive Player of the Year. Dante said he’s just going to focus on playing his game, but Kalkbrenner and McDermott paid Dante the utmost respect in their press conferences Friday afternoon.
“He’s terrific, and you look at their team with him versus without him, and this is a team that’s grossly underseeded,” McDermott said. “If Dana had this group of guys available all season long, he wouldn’t have needed to win the Pac-12 tournament to get in the NCAA tournament. … Dante impacts the game on both ends of the floor. He’s very physical at the rim offensively, and then he’s a tremendous rim protector on the other end. And his physicality is obviously going to be a problem for us.”