Arizona finds right fit in O’Neill

TUCSON -- They’re leaving the lights on for Lute Olson at Arizona, but the door to the brightly lit office that is filled with the memorabilia of a Hall of Fame career was locked last week.

The present and future of Arizona basketball sat in an assistant coach’s office down the hall, wearing gray sweats and a T-shirt.

The sideline that once belonged to the senatorial Olson is now the domain of Kevin O’Neill, so animated and intense during games that his face turns red and stays that way.

Olson will be welcomed back to coach next fall at 74, if he returns from the season-long leave of absence he took for family reasons, although fewer and fewer seem to expect him to.

Here’s what should make his decision simpler: Arizona basketball is going to be OK.

The players and assistants already call O’Neill the head coach, and not just because interim head coach is a mouthful. The 51-year-old who made stops at several colleges and had an NBA career that included a stint as the Toronto Raptors’ coach has been designated to succeed Olson when he decides to retire.

“Kevin O’Neill is our head coach. As of right now. I look to Kevin as my boss,” assistant Josh Pastner said.

It might not be obvious that a coach whose nickname at Canada’s McGill University was “Mad Dog” -- and who was such a manic recruiter as an Olson assistant in the 1980s that he once dressed up in a gorilla suit to pick up Sean Rooks at the airport -- could be the right replacement for the ultra-composed Olson.

Olson, O’Neill and Athletic Director Jim Livengood all have denied that O’Neill was brought in at the strikingly high assistant’s salary of $375,000 with any plan he would be the successor, a decision Livengood said was made only after Olson’s leave was extended.

Yet, Olson saw the fit, bringing O’Neill back to shore up a defense that had become stunningly passive and had fallen out of step with the Pacific 10 Conference.

The players have responded, even though O’Neill’s easy manner off the court turns famously demanding on it.

“The first time we really met Coach O’Neill was before the season, conditioning at 5 a.m.,” sophomore forward Chase Budinger said.

“That was the first time this program has done that, the first time I’ve done that. He had us doing so many sprints it made you want to puke. I think one guy actually did puke and some of it got on his shirt and he took it off. Coach O’Neill yelled at that player to put it back on. After that, you could see, ‘Whoa, we’re in for an interesting season.’ ”

Guard Nic Wise was the first to make the mistake of not arriving promptly for a workout.

“Nic was late, and he went nuts,” guard Jawann McClellan said of O’Neill. “We needed that. And we lacked defense. Coach Olson believes in offense. We score 95, and the other team gets 86. Now teams score in the 60s some games.”

Perhaps what’s most striking is there seems to be no push-back from the players.

“I think we look at it as he is coming from the NBA,” McClellan said. “He’s coming from where we want to go.”

Rick Carlisle, the former Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers coach who was a boyhood friend of O’Neill’s in upstate New York and twice hired him as his assistant, isn’t surprised.

“That’s what makes Kevin a unique guy,” he said. “He has the ability to have close relationships with the players, but he’s still able to tell them the cold-blooded truth.” Jeff Van Gundy, who hired O’Neill as an assistant when he was coach of the New York Knicks, cited the same quality.

“He’s not going to tell you what you want to hear,” Van Gundy said. “Coaching can make you cautious. He has that utter frankness.”

O’Neill shrugged.

“I’m very demanding, but I don’t have a dog house,” he said. “If somebody’s late, I kick him out, and it’s over. I have a short memory. People screw up. People are people.”

It has been nearly two decades since O’Neill left an assistant’s post at Arizona in 1989 to become coach at Marquette, with stops at Tennessee and Northwestern and stints as an NBA assistant in New York and Detroit before one season in Toronto and another assistant’s job in Indiana.

In Toronto, O’Neill lasted one season before being fired after publicly questioning the organization’s commitment to winning.

“If being dedicated to winning is abrasive, I’m abrasive,” he said at the time.

Over the years, he has become the ultimate professional coach, which is to say, an utter pragmatist. On the grease board in his office, written in black marker, is his list of dozens of defensive principles.

“Everywhere I go, I put it up the first day, and whenever I leave or get fired, I take it down,” he said.

O’Neill owns a lake house near Chateaugay, N.Y., where he grew up, but said he won’t buy in Tucson despite the succession plan, which remains only an oral agreement. That’s in part, Livengood said, because all employment contracts require the formal approval of the board of regents.

“I learned, don’t buy,” O’Neill said. “I bought a house in Indy, which was a mistake. I got fired a year later.”

None of that, O’Neill said, has made him less ambitious than he was as the Marquette coach fervently recruiting William Gates in the 1994 documentary “Hoop Dreams,” or as a young Arizona assistant going against then-Nevada Las Vegas assistants Tim Grgurich and Mark Warkentien with such ferocity over Tom Tolbert.

“We laugh about it every time we see each other now, but we all had to be gone from both places for quite some time,” O’Neill said.

“I’m still very ambitious. I’m ambitious in that I’d like to coach for 25 more years. I was very happy as an assistant in the NBA. I’m happy being in college. It’s the process of coaching. To me, coaching has no real end point.”

He is what Carlisle called “a lifer.”

Olson, dealing with other family matters in addition to a pending divorce from his second wife, speaks to O’Neill at least weekly and stops in occasionally to use the elliptical trainer at McKale Memorial Center.

“He seems good to me,” O’Neill said.

“I wasn’t really looking to go back into college. I thought it was the right thing to do, coming back here for a couple of years and help Lute. Circumstances changed. None of us were prepared for this. Some of us are flying by the seat of our pants.”

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com

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The Times’ rankings

ROBYN NORWOOD’S RANKINGS AND COMMENTS:

*--* Rk. Team (Rec.) Comment (last week’s rank) 1 KANSAS (20-0) Can Kansas State and Beasley ruffle the Jayhawks’ feathers tonight? (1) 2 MEMPHIS (19-0) Caution: Tigers shoot only 58.6% from the free-throw line. (2) 3 DUKE (17-1) One week to the first Duke-Carolina game on Feb. 6. (3) 4 UCLA (18-2) Bruins get another chance to work on zone offense against Arizona State. (4) 5 N. C. (19-1) High-scoring Tar Heels are No. 9 in ACC in defensive field-goal percentage. (5) 6 GEORGETOWN (16-2) There’s something to be said for being able to win close ones. (9) 7 TENN. (18-2) Lofton is showing signs he might be out of shooting slump. (8) 8 MICH. STATE (18-2) Neitzel is playing more like the Spartans need him to lately. (10) 9 WASH. STATE (17-2) Losses in Westwood and Tucson happen, even to good teams. (7) 10 TEXAS (16-3) D.J. Augustin has scored in double figures in 43 of 54 career games. (14) 11 INDIANA (17-2) Hoosiers will try to stay unbeaten in Big Ten at Wisconsin on Thursday. (6) 12 WISCONSIN (16-3) Loss at Purdue was its first of the season to an unranked team. (11) 13 STANFORD (16-3) Brook Lopez is averaging 21.8 points over the last four games. (20) 14 FLORIDA (18-3) Re-made “defending” champs are starting to make noise. (Unranked). 15 BUTLER (19-2) Freshman Matt Howard is making a nice impression. (17) 16 XAVIER (17-4) Musketeers take over our A-10 ranking after manhandling Dayton. (Unranked) 17 MARQUETTE (15-4) One more team that’s not so great on the road. (19) 18 ARIZONA (14-6) Six losses, but Wildcats are 13-3 when Jerryd Bayless is in lineup. (Unranked) 19 NOTRE DAME (14-4) McAlarney made the most of second chance after pot arrest. (Unranked) 20 KANSAS STATE (14-4) An upset or two could earn Beasley votes for player of the year. (Unranked) 21 DRAKE (18-1) Klayton Korver’s brother is Kyle Korver of the Utah Jazz. (25) 22 TEXAS A&M (16-4) Aggies need an upset of Texas tonight to stay in the rankings. (15) 23 PITTSBURGH (16-4) Loss to Rutgers team that was 1-6 in Big East was a bad one. (12) 24 BAYLOR (16-3) Cut the Bears some slack: They were tired after five-overtime win. (24) 25 USC (13-6) Arizona, ASU games could tell where USC is headed in Pac-10. (Unranked) *--*