Reusse: Niko Medved returns to U with advantages over predecessor, fondness for Clem Haskins

Ben Johnson was 40 and had not been a head coach when he was hired to lead the Gophers men’s basketball program in late March 2021. Johnson, a former Gophers player, was replacing Richard Pitino.

Johnson had split with Pitino as an assistant coach in 2018. Now, Pitino was being dismissed after a 6-14 Big Ten record that was his seventh losing conference season among eight at Minnesota.

Immediately, it was a long shot for Johnson to succeed, based on this:

Big-time college basketball was roaring into the new era of players being free agents in search of name, image and likeness (NIL) dollars.

And if you’re old enough to remember how the Twins handled free agency when it first arrived in full force after the 1977 season, feel free to envision Mark Coyle, the Gophers athletic director, as a younger, thinner version of Calvin Griffith.

Calvin and Coyle … they both abstained from digging for dollars.

The Gophers started from ground zero after suffering transfer mania in Johnson’s first season. They were reasonably competitive in 2023-24, Year 3 for Ben, and then most of the talent scattered for large dollars.

Only Dawson Garcia remained, and he did so almost out of charity — $350,000 up front, then another $150,000 due in the months that followed. Garcia probably could have doubled that on the open NIL market.

Garcia was good, but not good enough. The Gophers finished 7-13 in the new, play-everybody, 18-team Big Ten — a tie for 12th. Coyle quickly fired Johnson and went to the coach rumored all winter to be the No. 1 candidate: Colorado State’s Niko Medved.

Rumored, as in, if Medved wants the job, it is his. The Rams came within a buzzer-beating bucket vs. Maryland from reaching the Sweet 16 — no doubt creating more options for Medved — but he stuck with the offer to come back home.

“Home” being Roseville High and Williams Arena and Macalester (as an assistant), before all the stops over a quarter-century: Seven seasons as an assistant to Larry Davis, a former Gophers assistant, at Furman (1999-2006); one year back as Gophers assistant (2006-07); six seasons as Colorado State assistant (2007-13); then, as a head coach, four seasons at Furman (2013-17); one season at Drake (2017-18); and seven seasons at Colorado State (2018-25).

Medved will turn 52 in August. He has 12 seasons as the coach in charge. He is starting off with those experience advantages over Johnson, and also a program in which the AD is fully invested.

The Gophers now have a marginally competitive amount of dollars to spend on talent — in the neighborhood of $6 million (not stated directly by Medved).

As with Johnson, the first season will feature a roster of transfers, although several with résumés superior to that feisty collection Johnson started with in 2021.

What Niko also has that’s important to many of us former Gophers hoops zealots is this: a firsthand gratitude and ongoing fondness for Clem Haskins, the coach for the last extra-exciting period inside Williams Arena.

Medved enrolled at the university in 1992, with the dream of being a basketball coach, and was able to land as one of the student managers for Haskins’ program. He graduated in 1996, missing out on the Gophers’ lone trip to a Final Four (forget the record book; we were there) in 1997, but he saw that team being put together.

And to see the way Haskins coached ’em hard and loved ’em when needed.

“I called the Haskins house in Kentucky the other morning,” Medved said Friday morning. “I talked to Yevette for a while. They lost their son, Brent, a while ago, terribly sad, and there have been some health problems, but I did get a smile over this:

“Yevette told me Clem wasn’t available because he was out in the field, helping bring in the hay.”

I smiled at that, too, remembering the tales of Haskins’ applying discipline to Willie Burton by bringing him to the farm in the heat of summer to rise early, to throw some bales, to feed the cows, to become a tough, disciplined young player worthy of being the No. 9 overall draft choice in the NBA.

How would Haskins’ tough love work in the pay-for-play, immediate transfer era? Medved could only smile at that thought.

Did Haskins ever put on a shooting exhibition for the student managers?

“Not often with those knees, but I remember we played St. John’s in the Garden, and we’re having a shootaround,” Medved said. “There were Knicks around, John Starks, those guys. Clem goes down to the basket, grabs a ball, and he banks in a layup, and keeps moving back, and he keeps making shots, and pretty soon he’s out there 20-some feet, and still making ’em.

“And he says, ‘I still got it.’ ”

Clem the Gem. Niko loves the guy. Which is good enough for me.

Welcome back, coach. Good luck in taking the dreariness out of old Barn.