Although he believes his former Villanova coach is capable of jumping to the NBA, Jalen Brunson isn’t sure Jay Wright would actually enjoy the job.
“It would be different,” Brunson told Wright on his podcast, ‘Roommates Show.’
“It would be totally different. I feel like in college, you’re teaching young men how to be players and how to be young men. At least that’s what we did at ‘Nova. I feel like in the league you’re just playing chess. You’re putting pieces in to see what’s going to work and what may not work. And so, it would’ve been a little different. I think you could do it, for sure. I just don’t know if you would want to do it.”
Wright, 62, who hasn’t coached since leaving Villanova two years ago, acknowledged he has considered the NBA and interviewed with the Sixers in 2009.
He also served as Gregg Popovich’s assistant at the 2021 Olympics, giving him a taste of the best possible version of the NBA.
“We had great players. So it was like the perfect situation to coach those guys. And I realized, if you go to the NBA you don’t have all those guys on one team, it’s going to be a little different,” Wright said. “And I felt like I got my taste of it. And I really enjoyed it. I loved it. But I felt like I didn’t have anything in me at the end of my college career to make that jump to the NBA. So I did think about it some.”
Wright won NCAA titles in 2016 and 2018, with rosters that included current Knicks starters Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo.
He left just as the new NIL rules were altering college basketball. He was replaced by Kyle Neptune, who failed to advance to the NCAA tournament in his first two seasons.
