Highlights From Fred Hoiberg Appearance On Everybody Pulls The Tarp Podcast

Fred Hoiberg was a guest on a recent episode of Andrew Moses’ podcast “Everybody Pulls The Tarp.”

Here are a handful of highlights of the wide-ranging 35-minute conversation, which you can listen to in full here or here.

As many Husker fans know, Hoiberg’s NBA playing career came to an abrupt end due to a scary heart condition — he had an aortic root aneurysm. That was obviously a tough pill to swallow because he was coming off his 10th season in the NBA, which turned out to be his best.

At 32 years old, Hoiberg led the league in 3-point shooting in 2004-05, making 48% of his attempts (70-of-145).

“I was very excited. I was on the verge of finally signing a long-term contract,” Hoiberg said. “I had been pretty much on one-year minimum deals my entire ten-year playing career, and I found out after that season I had a heart condition. So I had to go in and have open-heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic at the conclusion of the season.”

It was a difficult surgery, Hoiberg said, that didn’t go as planned.

“They nicked my conduction system, so I developed a 100% heart block and I had to get a pacemaker put in, which I’m still 100% reliant on,” Hoiberg said. “Every time my heart beats, it’s because of my pacemaker, which is kind of crazy to me.”

Still, Hoiberg kept in shape for an attempt at making a comeback. And there was interest in the league for his services: the Steve Nash- and Mike D’Antoni-led Phoenix Suns.

“I did everything I could to get myself back in shape and resume my playing career, that was the plan when I went into the surgery. But then the complication put a whole new element into my decision making,” Hoiberg said. “And after basically agreeing to a contract with the Phoenix Suns, and that was Steve Nash coming off back-to-back MVPs, and D’Antoni was coaching, he said if you can run 3-point line to 3-point line you can play here. I said, ‘Well shoot, coach, I can do that,’ and after agreeing to that and telling my wife that I think I’m going to do it, their doctors stepped in at the last minute and basically said, you know what, I’ve talked to a lot of specialists and I just can’t recommend that you do this. And I had four young kids. I had four kids under the age of six at the time, including two-year-old twins. It was really what I was waiting to hear.”

After retiring as a player, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the organization Hoiberg played for in 2003-04 and 2004-05, wanted to keep Hoiberg around. NBA great and then-Timberwolves front office executive, Kevin McHale, pushed for Hoiberg to stay and offered a special assistant general manager position, which he accepted. Hoiberg went on to be promoted to vice president of basketball operations the following season.

Hoiberg is of course thankful he found out about his heart condition when he did, but the fact his playing career ended before he was ready for it to bothered him. And when he was in the front office, he missed the competitive aspect of the game he loved.

He wanted to be back on the court, in the huddle, with the players.

“As much as I enjoyed that front office work, I missed being on the sidelines, I missed being in-between the lines. And just that camaraderie you develop with your team and staff. That’s where the coaching part came into play,” Hoiberg said. “…It did take me a couple of years to get over it, but you have to separate. But first I was still very close with the players, because those were a lot of the guys I played with on the Timberwolves that were still on the roster. And it took me a while to still be close with them, but really have to separate because there’s a lot of business decisions that have to be made, that may be uncomfortable with people that you’re very close with.”

Hoiberg’s job with the Timberwolves was to put together pre-draft workouts and talk to agents and other teams’ decision makers to discuss roster moves and possible trades. He sat and talked basketball for hours each day with McHale, to which Hoiberg said of those experiences, “the game becomes more clear.”

Hoiberg also went on the road to scout games with the late Rob Babcock, who served as a scout and player personnel exec at Minnesota. He also became good friends with Zarko Durisic, Minnesota’s director of global scouting, who still holds that position today.

Living the front office life helped Hoiberg move on from his past as a player and onto the next chapter of his basketball career.

With the fire of wanting to be in the locker room and on the sideline with a team still burning inside, Hoiberg tossed around ideas of trying to get an assistant coaching job in the NBA or a head coaching gig in college.

As is the case with so much in life, timing is everything.

In April 2010 then-Iowa State head coach Greg McDermott had resigned and took the Creighton job — a move sparked by Dana Altman’s departure from Creighton to Oregon — after four seasons in Ames, leaving the Cyclones’ head coaching job vacant.

Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard gave Hoiberg a call.

“We were getting ready for the draft, and we had four first-round draft picks and a lot of salary cap space, and that was consuming a lot of my time,” Hoiberg said. “I got a call at about 8 o’clock at night, and it was Jamie talking to me about what was going to transpire the next day and if I had interest talking about the job. I said to Jamie, ‘Tell me when and where and I’ll be there.’ He was up in my house in Chaska, Minnesota, the next morning and we met for three or four hours, and I laid out my vision on how I could get Iowa State back on top.”

Hoiberg admits he felt pressure at Iowa State, his alma mater. His jersey was up in the rafters at Hilton Coliseum. If things didn’t go well, his legacy, the way college basketball people thought of him, would’ve taken a hit.

But Hoiberg, one of the first coaches to truly utilize the transfer portal, saw success with the Cyclones.

Hoiberg took Iowa State to the NCAA Tournament in four of his five seasons in Ames. There was a Sweet 16 run in 2013-14. He was the Big 12 coach of the year in 2012. He won the Big 12 Tournament in 2014 and 2015.

“I had a lot of people tell me there’s no way you should do this, but I had a confidence with putting the right people around us and having the right blueprint to get the thing going, and that’s ultimately what we decided.”

When Hoiberg left Iowa State after the 2014-15 season to become the head coach of the Chicago Bulls, he knew what it took to develop a winning program at the college level. But when he returned to it at Nebraska after his Bulls’ tenure ended, it had evolved into completely different beast.

Hoiberg remembers competing against three or four other schools to land high-quality transfers at Iowa State. When he got to Nebraska, Hoiberg found himself competing against what seemed like the entire country.

On top of that, Hoiberg said he took over a Nebraska program that rated as the “largest rebuild in the history of the Power Five with only one returning player (Thorir Thorbjarnarson), so it’s taken a few years to get to where we are, but now that we’ve had some success these last couple years, I’m confident we can sustain it.”

After going a combined 14-45 in his first two seasons at Nebraska, Hoiberg started seeing improvement after tweaking the approach to his Iowa State blueprint. He started recruiting transfers who fit the culture of Nebraska and play a brand of basketball that fits the Big Ten.

The Huskers finished with 10 wins in 2021-22, then 16 in 2022-23. The leadership from the 2022-23 squad that’s been well documented — it came from Lincoln native Sam Griesel as well as Derrick Walker and Emmanuel Bandoumel — helped build the foundation for the breakout 2023-24 team that won the second-most games in program history (23) and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a decade.

But like Hoiberg said on Huskers Radio Network last month, he knows there will be expectations for 2024-25. Nebraska snapped the streak of missing out on the Big Dance, but now that it made it last season, what’s the next step?

“I can’t sit here and lie and say Nebraska has this rich basketball tradition,” Hoiberg said. “It’s the only Power Five program that hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game. We’re going to get there, there’s no doubt in my mind. These last two years I think have really set the foundation, set the table for what’s ahead, and I’m excited about the moves we’ve made this offseason.”

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