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While we all wait for a new coach to be announced, expecting it to be Niko Medved, here’s a choice middle chunk from a January, 2024 profile of him in The Athletic. Read the whole thing if you’re a subscriber.
Inside the CSU walls, they speak another language.
“If we go dodger,” Medved says at a Friday staff meeting as he talks through the UNLV game plan, “you can go wolf or tiger.”
Over the next few minutes, he mentions waves, Ohio, snake cuts, the jungle, Canada and “smoking him out of the room.” The coaches decide they’re going to add a wrinkle to a snake cut, and spend a few minutes trying to come up with a name for it.
Lizard? Flame? Raptor?
“A cobra?” assistant coach Tim Shelton says, raising his eyebrows.
“A cobra,” Medved says, letting it marinate for a few seconds as the other coaches all nod. “That’s not terrible. Anything that’s sticky is just good for the guys. If they chuckle at it and they think it’s funny, that’s the s— they remember.”
Put it in the playbook!
Colorado State’s motion offense has become a must-watch for basketball junkies. The ball moves; there’s constant cutting and reads. It has elements of Johnny Orr’s spread, John Beilein’s 2-guard attack and Lennie Acuff’s version of the Princeton.
“Maybe one day it’ll be the Medved system,” Medved says.
He’s proud that this system is uniquely his. He nearly copied his way out of his opportunity. Once you get a head coaching job, which he did at Furman in 2013 at age 39, the hourglass flips and the sand starts falling. There are typically two paths: You win and climb the ladder, or lose and slide back to the assistant chair.
In Medved’s second season, his team was in last place in the Southern Conference in late February. Furman had lost seven straight. He started to turn reflective, realizing he was following somebody else’s vision. Dick Bennett, who has been Medved’s most influential mentor in coaching, had told him soon after he got the job that he needed to coach his team the way he wanted and not try to be somebody else. But Medved was coming from Colorado State, where he helped Tim Miles take the Rams from winless in the Mountain West their first year to the NCAA Tournament in Year 5. He stuck around for Larry Eustachy’s first season, and the Rams made it back to the NCAA Tournament and won a game.
Medved took what he thought were the best parts of Miles and Eustachy and employed those systems at Furman. But the offense he’d always wanted to run was the spread, which he first saw when he went up against Dana Altman and Creighton in 2002 while an assistant at Furman. He studied it for years, and when then-Furman coach Larry Davis put him in charge of the offense two years later, he ran the spread. The next two seasons were the best offenses Davis had in his nine years at the program.
It was too late to reinvent his offense midway through that second season as head coach at Furman, but Medved was ready to put his stamp on the program. Two days after that seventh straight loss, he told his assistants they were going to do a perfect-possession drill. To get one point, you had to have a perfect offensive possession — the cutting, the passing, the screening, the footwork, everything, had to be textbook — followed by getting a stop on defense while also nailing every last detail. “And we’re going to be pricks,” Medved told his staff.
It took three hours to play to three.
That practice was magical in Medved’s eyes. He saw an elevated level of competitiveness. “The guys knew that there was no way out,” he says, “and it was like, we’re either gonna do this or we’re not. And all of a sudden, they really started having fun.”
The next night, Furman held Western Carolina to its lowest point total of the season and won 53-49. Two days later, the Paladins nearly upset league champion Wofford, losing by two. The next week at the conference tournament, they won three games in three days to set up a rematch with Wofford in the conference title game. Wofford won by three, but Furman was on its way. The next fall Medved put in the spread and won 11 conference games. It was only the second time in the previous 25 years that Furman had won double-digit games in conference play. The next year, the Paladins won 14 and shared the conference title, and Medved left that spring for Drake.
Medved inherited a 7-24 team at Drake that went 17-17 in his first season and finished tied for third in the Missouri Valley. That spring Colorado State came calling, and he returned to a spot he considered a dream job. He built CSU back up, the foundation being a 2019 recruiting class that included both Isaiah Stevens and future NBA first-round draft pick David Roddy. In Roddy’s final two years, the Rams had their best seasons ever in the Mountain West — 14-4 both years — and made the NCAA Tournament in 2022. After an injury-filled season a year ago when CSU slipped to the bottom half of the standings, Stevens returned to school and Medved wisely fished the transfer portal for catches — the Rams have two former Division II players in their starting lineup and a D3 transfer in the rotation — and lured Clifford from Colorado for some much-needed athleticism.
www.nytimes.com
Inside the CSU walls, they speak another language.
“If we go dodger,” Medved says at a Friday staff meeting as he talks through the UNLV game plan, “you can go wolf or tiger.”
Over the next few minutes, he mentions waves, Ohio, snake cuts, the jungle, Canada and “smoking him out of the room.” The coaches decide they’re going to add a wrinkle to a snake cut, and spend a few minutes trying to come up with a name for it.
Lizard? Flame? Raptor?
“A cobra?” assistant coach Tim Shelton says, raising his eyebrows.
“A cobra,” Medved says, letting it marinate for a few seconds as the other coaches all nod. “That’s not terrible. Anything that’s sticky is just good for the guys. If they chuckle at it and they think it’s funny, that’s the s— they remember.”
Put it in the playbook!
Colorado State’s motion offense has become a must-watch for basketball junkies. The ball moves; there’s constant cutting and reads. It has elements of Johnny Orr’s spread, John Beilein’s 2-guard attack and Lennie Acuff’s version of the Princeton.
“Maybe one day it’ll be the Medved system,” Medved says.
He’s proud that this system is uniquely his. He nearly copied his way out of his opportunity. Once you get a head coaching job, which he did at Furman in 2013 at age 39, the hourglass flips and the sand starts falling. There are typically two paths: You win and climb the ladder, or lose and slide back to the assistant chair.
In Medved’s second season, his team was in last place in the Southern Conference in late February. Furman had lost seven straight. He started to turn reflective, realizing he was following somebody else’s vision. Dick Bennett, who has been Medved’s most influential mentor in coaching, had told him soon after he got the job that he needed to coach his team the way he wanted and not try to be somebody else. But Medved was coming from Colorado State, where he helped Tim Miles take the Rams from winless in the Mountain West their first year to the NCAA Tournament in Year 5. He stuck around for Larry Eustachy’s first season, and the Rams made it back to the NCAA Tournament and won a game.
Medved took what he thought were the best parts of Miles and Eustachy and employed those systems at Furman. But the offense he’d always wanted to run was the spread, which he first saw when he went up against Dana Altman and Creighton in 2002 while an assistant at Furman. He studied it for years, and when then-Furman coach Larry Davis put him in charge of the offense two years later, he ran the spread. The next two seasons were the best offenses Davis had in his nine years at the program.
It was too late to reinvent his offense midway through that second season as head coach at Furman, but Medved was ready to put his stamp on the program. Two days after that seventh straight loss, he told his assistants they were going to do a perfect-possession drill. To get one point, you had to have a perfect offensive possession — the cutting, the passing, the screening, the footwork, everything, had to be textbook — followed by getting a stop on defense while also nailing every last detail. “And we’re going to be pricks,” Medved told his staff.
It took three hours to play to three.
That practice was magical in Medved’s eyes. He saw an elevated level of competitiveness. “The guys knew that there was no way out,” he says, “and it was like, we’re either gonna do this or we’re not. And all of a sudden, they really started having fun.”
The next night, Furman held Western Carolina to its lowest point total of the season and won 53-49. Two days later, the Paladins nearly upset league champion Wofford, losing by two. The next week at the conference tournament, they won three games in three days to set up a rematch with Wofford in the conference title game. Wofford won by three, but Furman was on its way. The next fall Medved put in the spread and won 11 conference games. It was only the second time in the previous 25 years that Furman had won double-digit games in conference play. The next year, the Paladins won 14 and shared the conference title, and Medved left that spring for Drake.
Medved inherited a 7-24 team at Drake that went 17-17 in his first season and finished tied for third in the Missouri Valley. That spring Colorado State came calling, and he returned to a spot he considered a dream job. He built CSU back up, the foundation being a 2019 recruiting class that included both Isaiah Stevens and future NBA first-round draft pick David Roddy. In Roddy’s final two years, the Rams had their best seasons ever in the Mountain West — 14-4 both years — and made the NCAA Tournament in 2022. After an injury-filled season a year ago when CSU slipped to the bottom half of the standings, Stevens returned to school and Medved wisely fished the transfer portal for catches — the Rams have two former Division II players in their starting lineup and a D3 transfer in the rotation — and lured Clifford from Colorado for some much-needed athleticism.
Why it’s always sunny for Colorado State basketball coach Niko Medved
The Rams have hit a rough patch after rising to No. 13 in the polls. Medved continues to instill confidence in his team.
www.nytimes.com
