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Adrian Griffin during his Seton Hall playing days
In the months before he arrived as a freshman at Seton Hall in 1996, Shaheen Holloway would come to campus and work out with an outgoing Pirate senior whose attitude he greatly admired.
Adrian Griffin.
Unlike Holloway, who was just coming off being MVP of the McDonald’s All-American game, Griffin had arrived in South Orange with zero hype and became an All-Big East forward and winner of the Haggerty Award as the best college basketball player in the metropolitan area.
“He’s a guy that wasn’t highly recruited – nobody knew anything about him,” Holloway said. “Everything he did, it was because of hard work.”
Griffin went undrafted that June, yet managed to play nine seasons in the NBA as a 6-foot-5 wing. Now he has become head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks after a successful stint as a Toronto Raptors assistant that included an NBA title in 2019.
Holloway, who just finished his first season as Seton Hall’s head coach, said he could see this day coming since Griffin got a foothold in the coaching profession in 2008.
“He made it in the Big East because of hard work, got in the NBA because of hard work, worked his way up from assistant coach,” Holloway said. “I’m proud of him – it shows what hard work can do.”
Toronto Raptors assistant coach Adrian Griffin during a game in November of 2018.
The hiring is a proud moment for the Seton Hall hoops family, which now boasts an NBA head coach, an NBA assistant coach (Mark Bryant, with the Suns), an NBA executive vice president (Arturas Karnisovas, with the Bulls) and five Division I men’s basketball head coaches (Holloway, newly minted NCAA champion Dan Hurley at UConn, Binghamton’s Levell Sanders, Wagner’s Donald Copeland and NJIT’s Grant Billmeier). In all of college basketball, only Duke counts more former players in college head-coaching posts.
“That’s impressive, man,” Holloway said. “That goes back to the character of the people and the character of the school. It’s in the water; it’s in the blood.”
He added, “for Seton Hall, it shows you the type of people the school develops…
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Author : App.com | Asbury Park Press
Publish date : 2023-06-04 12:05:47
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