Hawaii Basketball Is Living in the Now

The other shoe came crashing down in the hours before Eran Ganot's ninth game as a head college basketball coach, with his Hawaii team preparing to open its own Diamond Head Classic against a Northern Iowa team that's become a perennial NCAA Tournament Cinderella the past few seasons. December 22—that was the day the NCAA announced that Hawaii's program would be banned from the postseason in 2017 and have its scholarship numbers reduced due to Level 2 violations that occurred under former coach Gib Arnold. It was also the day Ganot realized that he'd taken on a job with no immediate clarity, one laden with uncertainty, but a job he still considers one of the few he would have ever accepted.

He referred to it as his dream job when he was hired last spring, at age 33. He did so again this week. It's the kind of motivational lingo college basketball coaches tend to traffic in, except that Ganot tacitly acknowledges the bullshit quotient that the more high-profile members of his profession often employ to disguise their own ambitions. "For me, it's always surprising when people say they have so many dream jobs," he told VICE Sports by telephone this week. "Maybe I'm a simpleton, but my only dream jobs were at places where I played or coached."

Ganot grew up in New Jersey, the son of immigrant parents, a Romanian father and Israeli mother. He played college basketball at Swarthmore, a liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania, turned down an investment banking job to serve as a volunteer assistant at St. Mary's—the West Coast Conference power near San Francisco that's proved a fierce rival to Gonzaga—went to Hawaii as an assistant, and then came back to St. Mary's for a couple of years before getting hired at Hawaii. He knew sanctions were coming at Hawaii when he was hired, and he didn't care. He still doesn't know what the future holds, since the Hawaii administration is appealing next year's postseason ban, on the sensible platform that Ganot and his players had nothing to do with the violations.

So far this season, Ganot has accomplished perhaps one of the most adept coaching jobs in the country given the circumstances: the Rainbow Warriors have won 16 of their first 18 games this season heading into Saturday's game against Long Beach State, and are No. 58 in Ken Pomeroy's power rankings. Their only losses have come to Oklahoma (Pomeroy's No. 1 team) by three points at home, and to Texas Tech (ranked No. 49) by eight points on the road; meanwhile, they have solid wins over Auburn and Northern Iowa (they won by 16, despite the sanctions being announced that day), and are 5-0 in Big West Conference play.

"I can't say enough how resilient this group is," Ganot said. "They've had to deal with a lot of stuff."

It's not that Ganot inherited a roster devoid of talent—the Warriors won 22 games under interim head coach Benjy Taylor last season, and won 20 in Arnold's final year, in 2013-14—but it would have been easy to imagine the whole thing coming apart at the seams. Ganot could have taken a heavy approach and imposed his will on a program. Instead, he's employed a light touch. Asked in the days after he took the job about his "style of play," he was refreshingly non-committal, insisting that he would adapt to the talent he had. So far, he has: the Rainbow Warriors have improved their efficiency on both offense and defense, and have four players scoring in double digits, including junior forward Stefan Jankovic (15.6 points per game) and senior guard Roderick Bobbit, who scored 32 points against Oklahoma. They swept a recent road trip despite losing second-leading scorer Aaron Valdes to a turf-toe injury that will keep him out indefinitely. If they can hold it together for the second half of the season, they could wind up playing in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2002.

"It was a matter of finding a balance of what we're comfortable with as coaches, and what they're comfortable with as players," Ganot said. "You have to credit these guys for finding a balance between their strengths and our strengths. We can't be stubborn as coaches, and they can't be stubborn as players. And that's hard to do under the circumstances."

The big picture is still a bit of a mess, still rife with confusion, and to hear Ganot essentially acknowledge as much is refreshing. "That's the way we're going to run our program, is being honest and forthcoming," he said. His long-term strategy is to stabilize first, and then build; he recognizes that this program is still very much in the stabilization phase, and that this stabilization cannot even begin to occur until the results of Hawaii's appeal come down, which will likely take several more months.

In the meantime, Ganot has helped generate a level of excitement that hasn't been seen around Hawaii's basketball program in years. This is the closest thing, after all, that Hawaii has to a statewide professional team, which is why last Saturday's win over UC Davis drew more than 9,000 fans; this weekend's Long Beach State contest could be Hawaii's first sellout in more than 12 years. The Rainbow Warriors' bench is up there with Monmouth's in terms of its synchronous antics, and by dint of his location, Ganot is hoping he can tap into the same Australian recruiting pipeline that's turned St. Mary's into a national power, producing NBA players like Matthew Dellavedova and Patty Mills.

"There's still a lot to sell here [despite the sanctions]," Ganot said. "But we have to stabilize and build. That's just common sense. You can't build unless you stabilize. I don't want to skip steps."