The 10-time NBA All-Star and former national champion at Syracuse sat down with Rich Kleiman to reflect on his title-winning season with the Orange.
Video Transcript
Your year at Syracuse, do you now looking back at your career, look at that year maybe as one of if not the greatest year of your entire basketball journey?
1000%.
Even though we won it.
What made that year was the fact that we weren’t expected to do nothing, like, at that year, like the year before Syracuse wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t as good.
And it’s a very similar situation to what my son is going in right now to next year.
So me coming in there with 34 freshmen at the time where it was like there was no way freshmen are leading any team in college at this point in time.
So, I guess we have a carefree, like, we were just like, man, we ain’t got a shot of hell.
We just gonna go out there and just hoop, and we all going through the same thing.
We’re going through classes, we’re going through, you know, practice together.
We all freshmen, so you go through the same thing.
And we connected and we bonded us first and then we started to bond with Like like Hakeem and all those, you know what I mean, he just became slowly, slowly, slowly, like I, everybody coming together, and when they came together, it was just a feeling that You know, we are, we can, we really good like it went from like we we I.
Like we got right to a world we beat Missouri.
Like they top several or world Georgia Tech, and this is when they had Jerry, Jackie, Chris Bosh, like we beat them on Big, big Monday or Super Tuesday or something.
They still wasn’t giving us our love.
So we like, uh, we gonna protect home court.
We ain’t gonna, we, we don’t, we ain’t gonna lose in the carrier though.
And we didn’t.
We went 17-0 in the, in, in the carrier though, but that year is definitely at the top when it comes to like, one of the, one of my, like my best year, all the way through.
I had the most fun.
It was a carefree, playing basketball, working in the gym, teammates, gathering, like it was.
Totality that that was my favorite year.
Kevin has not to the same degree, I don’t think because they weren’t able to win a championship, but similar kind of sentiments around his year at Texas and he said to me once that like he really did actually think about staying for a year just because of the joy, but then like Rick Barnes was like, bro, go.
Did you like with the fun you had, was it really a thought like maybe I’ll run this back?
Yeah, I was coming back.
You were, yeah, I was coming back.
If we wouldn’t have one, I was coming back.
And what Boeheim was like, I just never even thought about, like, again, college basketball, right?
We grew up on that, like, you know what I’m saying?
We grew up uh in the, on the Big East and we grew up on the ACC like.
Down in Baltimore, KD can attest to that like, we love college basketball, you know what I’m saying?
So we going to college, like we, what they don’t go to pro where we from out of high school.
So we going to college and The way that you gravitate towards college, like you start looking at college like, man, I have to do this when I get to college, and like, you know, you, it’s a pecking order when you get to college.
So, the process of like growing as a person, as an individual, growing your game, seeing your game grow, the fan base growing with you, the school now, and then you start to kind of experience conference tournament, you start to experiencing the big games, you start experiencing the, the NCAA March Madness tournament.
It’s like, now your school just getting popping.
It’s, it’s February, March, so now you’re starting to see everything kind of blossom.
By the time April here, the whole university is crazy, right?
The whole city is crazy, so you don’t wanna leave that.
And for me, I was like, nah, like I ain’t, they were screaming one more year.
I’m like, man, listen.
I thought you stayed in school for 4 years.
Like I ain’t well y’all trying to kick me out.
I ain’t trying to leave it.
I’m, I’m trying to experience this, but once we won it, Beeha was like, oh, you gotta, you gotta go.
Don’t even think about coming back here.
You’ll be in the Carrier Dome a lot next year, yeah, yeah, I’m in there.
We, we bringing the energy back, bringing the lifestyle back to the cus, you know what I mean?
I wanna bring that, that vibe, you know what I’m saying?
I wanna bring the energy.
I wanna bring the music.
I wanna bring the pregame.
I wanna, you know what I mean, like the sweets and all like I just wanna bring.
That type of energy and you know, to the to the dome.
