O’Neill ready to go forward

Kevin O’Neill, USC’s new basketball coach, said he was ready to move “forward” -- his view being that the glass is half full and not cracked and leaking all over the counter as the perception has been recently.

These are hardly happy times around the Galen Center, with an NCAA investigation churning on and recruits leaving with such speed that they cause vapor trails. But Monday, for the first time since Coach Tim Floyd resigned this month, the subject of basketball resulted in grins instead of grimaces around Heritage Hall.

O’Neill, 52, brings with him a hard-edged reputation -- he once yelled at a struggling player, “You better hope you die before halftime.” Yet, he has also enjoyed turnaround success at Marquette and Tennessee, experiences to draw on even as he framed his new job as not a rebuilding project during his introductory news conference.

“You end up working in chaos when you have won four games the previous year,” O’Neill said, recalling past reclamation projects. “It’s a slow process, where you start from the ground floor up. You have to endure a lot of losses.”

That, he said, is not the case this time.

“I look at the roster and think we have good players, with a good core of guys,” said O’Neill, who spent last season as an assistant with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. “My expectations when we hit the practice floor are nothing short of getting to the NCAA tournament.”

Athletic Director Mike Garrett was sold.

Garrett was turned down by Pittsburgh’s Jamie Dixon and Nevada Las Vegas’ Lon Kruger, and rebuffed by former NBA coach Jeff Van Gundy, but on Monday called O’Neill “my first choice because when I started talking to him he’s the one that I wanted to have.”

Garrett said Monday that Floyd was not pushed out and that his resignation had come as a surprise. An allegation that Floyd made a payoff to an associate of former Trojans star O.J. Mayo was part of an off-season in which the program had three players declare early for the NBA and five recruits for next season choose to go elsewhere.

The specter of NCAA scrutiny and potential punishment was a factor during the job search.

“Sure, there are questions, but there are questions about every school, about every situation,” O’Neill said. “I think we have a lot fewer questions to answer than a lot of people do.”

O’Neill referred to USC as a “world-class institution” and predicted his new job would be exponentially easier “once there is a definitive answer” from the NCAA.

O’Neill met with most of the remaining players Monday, then was scheduled to fly to Belgrade, Serbia, to talk with Trojans forward Nikola Vucevic. He then plans to immerse himself in recruiting, after he passes the standard NCAA test for coaches.

“I think he’s a positive guy,” USC forward Leonard Washington said. “I like the way he’s approaching everything. It’s not an easy job to take this job after everything that has been going on.”

O’Neill spent nine of the last 10 seasons in the NBA, one as head coach of the Toronto Raptors. His college resume includes leading Marquette and Arizona to NCAA tournaments and getting Tennessee and Northwestern to the National Invitation Tournament.

But those experiences left him with the reputation of being a defense-first-and-foremost coach, who could swing from occasionally offbeat -- he once sent 1,000 letters in one day to land a recruit -- to somewhat vicious.

“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not Darth Vader,” O’Neill said, smiling. “People think I was slaying people every time I turned around. . . . Players don’t always like the coach. Guess what? Coaches don’t always like all the players sometimes either.”

O’Neill said that he has mellowed since the days when he was a head coach at “31 and Irish Catholic and prone to be wild on occasions.” That was evident to Van Gundy, who had O’Neill as an assistant with the New York Knicks.

“I think every coach evolves and changes, continues to get better,” Van Gundy said. “Kevin will probably be the first to say he is different now than when he first took over at Marquette.”

His reputation for stressing defense, O’Neill said, is deserved.

“I am a defensive coach; I’m good at it,” O’Neill said. “That’s why I have been hired a bunch of times. You have to be good at something.”

O’Neill said some of his team’s plodding offenses stemmed from a key missing ingredient.”We didn’t have any talent when we started, so yeah, we did walk it up. I think the better your players are, the faster you should play.”

USC still has some talent, and got more good news Monday when guard Marcus Johnson said he would return for his senior season. That gives USC 10 scholarship players and an immediate need at point guard.

O’Neill said he thought some players were still out there but added that any late recruit “has got to be somebody with success for the long term and not just be a plug-the-hole guy, because that doesn’t make sense.”

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Times staff writer Gary Klein contributed to this report.

chris.foster@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

KEVIN O’NEILL’S QUIRKS

New USC basketball Coach Kevin O’Neill has often done things his way. A few examples:

* O’Neill, an assistant at Arizona, would write recruits 100 letters per week, including a stick of gum in each, saying, “Whatever happens, I’m going to stick with you.”

* Recruits Sean Rooks and Mark Georgeson arrived in Tucson on Halloween weekend and were greeted at the airport by O’Neill, who was wearing a gorilla costume.

* As coach at Tennessee, he watched point guard Jason Moore make a handful of mistakes in the first half of a game, prompting O’Neill to yell at him, “You better hope you die before halftime.”

* While at Tennessee, he sent recruit Tony Harris 1,000 letters . . . in one day. Harris signed with the Volunteers.

* O’Neill, while at Tennessee, was unsatisfied with guard Alico Dunk’s inability to handle full-court pressure during practice. So O’Neill went to the stands, sat down, and booed Dunk for 15 minutes.

-- Chris Foster