It is just as well that Illinois basketball coach Lon Kruger is no longer at Florida, a place too far out on the edge of things. Kruger belongs in the Midwest, equidistant from the margins. Mid-anywhere is Kruger’s natural place, any safe haven from the extremes of novelty and opinion.
Take the frivolous, off-day query about whom Kruger’s daughter Angie, a sophomore at the University of Florida, might be rooting for in Sunday’s tournament game.
“I am sure the day will be interesting for her,” Kruger said, blinking as blankly as a barn owl.
The old math problem about two trains leaving different places–say, Gainesville and Champaign? It is a snap to answer. They would meet at Lon Kruger.
Kruger has never heard a question he can’t come down on both sides of. You could throw Kruger up in prop wash and he would land exactly where he started.
Is it good or bad for players to leave college early?
“I don’t know if you can determine that,” Kruger said.
There is no extreme to Kruger, no yin, no yang, merely yawn, so no matter how relentlessly Kruger might be badgered about how he left Florida (by Floridians) or why he doesn’t get any players out of Chicago (by Illinoisans), he is as unruffled as a mailbox in a rainstorm.
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“No particular reasons,” Kruger explained.
The coincidence of Kruger coaching against Florida in the second round of the NCAA East Regional is certainly of more interest to the place he left than the place he now works.
In a nearly half-hour session of responding to press inquiries Saturday, Kruger took four times as many questions about Florida as about Illinois, starting with the ’94 Florida team he coached to the Final Four and finishing with rather smug testimony on the new and improved basketball facilities in Gainesville that Kruger may or may not have whined about ever getting.
“But I have the quote right here,” a Gainesville writer said, pointing to an old story in which Kruger apparently complained about having to fight for his sport.
“Fight is not a negative word,” Kruger explained.
Why any of this should matter to anyone who follows Illinois basketball is simply this: If there are still hard feelings about Kruger four years later, about the only coach to get Florida to a Final Four and after Florida has continued the success that Kruger started, what may one day be the opinion of him in Illinois?
“It has been written that I was frustrated,” Kruger said. “But I never said that and I never thought that.”
Certainly the accusation that comes most loudly from Florida is that Kruger cannot recruit, and yet the man who replaced him, hyper and young Billy Donovan, an apostle of Rick Pitino’s, has had no problem.
Pitino, in support of his protg, accused Kruger of leaving no talent at all in Gainesville, or to use the actual Pitinoism, “bankrupt of talent.”
“I think they had pretty good careers for Billy,” Kruger said of his recruits, coming very close to saying something resolute.
“Of course, Billy brought them along well.”
In fact, Donovan, playing with Kruger’s recruits, had losing records in his first two years.
And in the two years since, Donovan has brought in four high school All-Americans and his team made the Sweet 16 last year. Floridians seem to take an unnatural delight in proving Kruger wrong.
More patiently than the issue deserves, Kruger pressed on reasonably, neither denying nor defying the inquisition.
“If there is a perception that recruiting is a weakness, I can’t help that,” Kruger said. “I try to find good players who play hard. On paper, you can make a scenario look like what you’re looking for. It’s about success and results.”
Kruger has had both at Illinois and seems on the verge of more. He has not been around long enough to be judged in comparison with Lou Henson, who gave Illinois a consistent respectability.
Nor should one second-round tournament basketball game have any more weight than whether one team gets to play another game. My feeling is that Kruger is a better coach than Donovan, that Illinois gets more out of less, and that the Illini will win Sunday, but if none of that happens, Kruger will be no more defined forever than will Donovan.
“If we win, we advance to next weekend; if we lose, we don’t,” Kruger explained.
Being a solid, decent human being and a dull basketball coach should not be, to use Kruger’s own perspective, a negative.