Earlier this month, Dan D’Antoni’s Marshall basketball program reached a milestone in making its most legitimate bid for the Conference USA tournament championship.
The day after the Thundering Herd fell short in the finals against Middle Tennessee, another new chapter began: Rosters now will be 100 percent populated with D’Antoni recruits.
That’s where coaching legacies are made and broken. MU’s only other trip to the C-USA finals, in 2012, was engineered by Tom Herrion, but more than three-quarters of that team’s points were scored by Donnie Jones recruits. Two years later, the program was a mess, Herrion was out the door and few of his recruits stuck around to play for D’Antoni.