Manhattan coach Steve Masiello caps an unbelievable year with an unpredictable championship

The wildest, most successful and most tumultuous 12-month stretch of Manhattan coach Steve Masiello’s career is ending in the exact same place it began: the NCAA Tournament.

The Jaspers claiming their second consecutive MAAC Tournament title with an improbable 79-69 win over top-seeded Iona on Monday only tells half the story of why Masiello looked even more euphoric than your average coach who just made the big dance for the second time. Or maybe just a quarter of the story .... it doesn’t tell much of the story.

Up until March, 2014, there had been nothing bizarre about Masiello’s coaching career. The former New York Knicks ball boy had walked on at Kentucky before spending 11 years as an assistant coach at Tulane, Manhattan and Louisville. When he returned to the Jaspers after landing the head coaching gig in April of 2011, he was tasked with rebuilding the reputation of a once proud mid-major program which was suddenly coming off of a season in which it had won just 6 games.

The 33-year-old got to work right away, installing the fast-paced system he’d spent years learning from Rick Pitino, placing added emphasis on recruiting the New York area, and forcing his returning players to buy into an entirely new culture. Results came immediately, as Manhattan won 21 games in Masiello’s first season, the biggest single-season turnaround in Division I for 2011-12.

Two seasons later, with his system fully in place and his players running it to near perfection, the Jaspers made the field of 68 for the first time since 2004. They almost did much more than that, as a brilliant game plan by Masiello had his team up 58-55 with 4 minutes to go against defending national champion Louisville, and its head coach on the verge of being knocked out of the tournament by his protege. Reigning Final Four Most Outstanding Player Luke Hancock came to the rescue late and saved the Cardinals, but the story of the game remained the Jaspers and the man who was suddenly one of the hottest young coaching names in the game.

“That’s one of the best coaching jobs that I have seen in my 39 years,” Pitino said during his postgame press conference. “He just made us have to guard on the perimeter with four guards.”

The attention and the accolades paid immediate dividends for Masiello, who became one of the names mentioned to be in the mix for virtually every coaching vacancy in the country. He was offered a contract by South Florida, and spent little time deliberating before he chose to accept.

It was an understandable move for the 37-year-old, who seemed to be following the time-tested career arc of so many eventual big-time college coaches: high-profile assistant, low/mid-major coach, slightly higher-profile gig, big-time gig. Only the progression was about to be unexpectedly stopped and forced to reverse course.

On March 26, 2014, just one day after officially agreeing to a contract with South Florida, the deal was rescinded after a routine background check uncovered a discrepancy on Masiello’s résumé. It turned out the head coach had not, as he had claimed, earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky in 2000.

Humbled, embarrassed, and harboring the knowledge that a lie forced him to lose out on a five-year deal worth $6.06 million, Masiello returned to Manhattan. He was placed on unpaid leave until he finished the course work necessary to earn his degree, something he accomplished on May 29.

The relationship between the band and the prodigal lead singer who left to launch a doomed solo career had bigger problems than just awkwardness. The core of Masiello’s program had moved on, with the Jaspers losing leading scorers George Beamon (18.8 ppg), Michael Alvarado (11.9 ppg), and Rhamel Brown (10.1 ppg) to graduation, a trio of players who had each scored more than 1,000 points in their college careers.

Many predicted the combination of inexperience and distrust would prove to be a lethal one, and early on it certainly appeared as though they were on to something. Manhattan lost all but one of its first six games, and entered league play with an overall record that was three games below .500. A far cry from the team which had wracked up 25 wins the season before. But there was a method to the madness for Masiello, who had purposefully scheduled 11 of his team’s first 13 games to be on the road.

“I wanted to put us through the meat grinder right away,” he said. “I wanted adversity.”

Masiello knew there would be no success in 2014-15 without regaining of the trust of his returning players. That started at the top with senior Emmy Andujar, a 6’6 forward who has gone from a three-year role player to an all-conference performer averaging 16.5 points and 7.5 rebounds per game.

“As soon as the ball went up, it started feeling like a normal season,” Masiello said. “My players never wavered on me.”

While much of the 2013-14 season was about the names -- Beamon, Brown, Alvarado -- who dominated the MAAC’s postseason awards list, this season has felt more centered around pride in Jasper basketball. Manhattan’s top five scorers are all returning players currently posting the highest ppg averages of their college careers. They’re all players who fully bought back-in to what their head coach -- the one who had, not just one foot, but his entire body out the door just months earlier -- was preaching, and decided to not let pride ruin a potentially special season.

It was the same type of resilience and certitude that left the Jaspers feeling confident heading into Monday night’s championship showdown with rival Iona. The same Iona that Manhattan had knocked off in the championship a year ago, but also the same one which had dominated the league to the tune of a 17-3 record, including a pair of wins over the Jaspers in February.

Manhattan nearly led for the entire game on Monday night, with junior guard Asthon Pankey -- who scored a team-high 16 points in the loss to Louisville last season -- leading the way with 21 points and 10 rebounds. The Jaspers held high-scoring Iona to just 69 points, one more than they’d surrendered in the championship game a season earlier. The similarities begin and there, however, as this team, unlike that one, is not destined to be someone’s trendy round of 64 upset pick next week.

Steve Masiello’s squad will enter the NCAA Tournament with just 19 wins, and with nobody expecting them to get No. 20. Of course nothing else about the last 12 months of Masiello’s life has gone as expected, so you’ll have to understand if he refuses to believe that trend is going to change now.