Last Tuesday Hofstra beat Monmouth 75-69 in the CAA tourney title game to earn an automatic bid to next week’s NCAA tournament. The Pride lost 5 games in a row last January but turned things around after that and will be playing in the NCAA tourney for the 1st time since 2001. Earlier today HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to speak with Hofstra associate head coach Mike DePaoli about playing great defense and making the NCAA tourney.
You were captain of the basketball team at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, and played in a pair of NCAA tourneys for the Golden Knights: what is the key to being a good leader? Being authentic and wanting greatness for the group before greatness for yourself. There are different ways to lead but you need to be geunine, whether you are a quiet leader or whether you vocally hold everyone accountable. 2 of our best players this year were conference POY Cruz Davis/conference ROY Preston Edmead: they did not focus on winning awards, but rather on winning a championship. I always had a lot of fire as a player, and that is also how I coach, but I hope my guys know that I care about them as people.
You spent 11 years on the staff at Fordham, including 6 games as interim head coach in 2021: what is the biggest difference between being a head coach and being an assistant coach? You go from making suggestions to making decisions, and you cannot make a decision that will just solve the problem at the moment: you need to look at the big picture on the horizon. Every suggestion that I make to our head coach (Speedy Claxton) is to keep the big picture in mind. You have no idea how lonely that seat is until you are in it, so I make sure to let Speedy know that he is not alone.
You were a founding member of the “A-10 Connecting for Change” group that helped give student-athletes a voice in the fight against systemic racism: why did you do it, and what were you able to accomplish? Back in 2020 during COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement, I saw how emotional our players were and I wanted to use that emotion and harness it into a productive thing. We got all the A-10 schools to commit to creating a minority scholarship fund, which allowed us to go back to our players and show them how we were making a difference: it was a big outlet for a lot of our guys.
What makes Coach Claxton such a good coach, and what is the most important thing that you have learned from him so far? #1 is that he is very comfortable in his own skin. He played in the NBA for 10 years so he demands so much respect when he walks into a gym. Other guys lead from insecurity/anxiety, but Speedy’s emotional security permeates throughout our entire program. #2 is that he does not get too high or low. If you came into our office 1 morning, you would not know whether we had won or lost the previous night. The season is a marathon, not a sprint, so you want the temperature in the gym to be right every day. Some teams can get burned out by January but we have a history of being fresh at the right time of the year (February).
Your roster has 2 players from New York, 4 from foreign countries, and the rest are from various states around the US: what sort of recruiting philosophy does your team have? In years past we have been more New York-centric, but the college basketball landscape has changed over the past 2 decades: a lot of New York players will end up moving around the country to various prep schools. We work more from an NBA model, which involves a lot of analytics. The other challenge is that instead of spending a year getting to know your incoming freshmen, you only have a short 2-3 week window to recruit a guy out of the portal: it is like speed-dating! The 3 C’s that are non-negotiable for us are character/commitment/competitive spirit. Cruz is 1 of the quietest guys in our gym…but he is also the most competitive.
Your team lost 5 games in a row in January: how were you able to turn things around in February? If you look at that stretch, we had a combination of injuries/foul trouble. Not only were we limited in our rotation, but when our big man kept fouling out, we ended up having our worst rebounding/defending stretch of the season. Since then, we have been able to hold all but 1 of our opponents under 70 PTS.
Take me through the 2026 CAA tourney:
In the semifinals Preston Edmead scored 22 PTS including the game-winning 28-footer off the glass in the final second of OT in a 3-PT win over Towson: did you think it was going in, and where does that rank among the most incredible shots you have ever seen in person? Whenever Preston shoots the ball, we all have great confidence that it is going in. Tyler Thomas hit an OT game-winner for us at Rutgers in the 2023 NIT, so we have been a part of some special ones…but Preston’s shot is up there. He is not afraid of the moment and as Bill Raftery would say, has great onions.
In the title game you had a win over Monmouth: what did it mean to you to win a title, and what was the reaction like when you got back to campus? The coolest part of winning a title is that it is a culmination/validation of all the hard work that our group has put in. When you play with that emotional fire, it can either heat your whole house or burn your house down it if is not regulated. You want to play with great emotion, but not play emotional. The other cool thing is that you get to walk together forever: they will get to come back to campus every few years and get honored.
Your team’s 66.1 PPG is top-20 in the nation: what is the secret to playing great defense? We are 17-0 when we outrebound our opponent by 5 or more, and have only lost 1 game when we prevented our opponent from shooting over 40 FG%. I am a big FG% defense guy, and we are #6 in the nation at that: it is a staple of our program. Defense allows you to win games, while offense determines how much you will win games by. The biggest improvement we have made from last year to this year is offensive rebounding, which allows us to generate extra possessions, and that is how we won the title.
What kind of seed do you think you deserve, and what kind of seed do you think you will get? “Anybody anywhere anytime!” They can send us to Philly or Portland: I am just looking forward to another chance to compete with this team.
