Lifetime basketball journey leads NBA standout Rod Strickland to LIU

“Rod had a great stretch of his career in Portland,” Lloyd said. “No one could keep him in front.”

But the LIU players Strickland will lead into an NCAA Tournament game Friday against Arizona have almost no clue about what their coach used to do on the floor.

“He doesn’t even talk about it,” standout LIU forward Jamal Fuller said. “We’re just finding out about his journey as it goes on. When you get to see what he did it’s pretty amazing.”

They have to look him up on YouTube, Strickland says, and that’s just the way he wants it.

“I had a hell of a career, but it’s over,” Strickland said Thursday during a pregame interview at Viejas Arena. “I’ve never been an accolade guy since I stopped playing. These players have no clue. I don’t think it’s about me.”

A New York native who starred at DePaul for three seasons in the mid-1980s, Strickland went to the Knicks as the No. 19 pick of the 1988 NBA Draft and spent 17 seasons in the NBA before retiring in 2005.

When Strickland retired, he had amassed $41 million during his career, and had the ability to do anything with his life at that point, but said the basketball bug kept him in the game.

"You could go so many ways but I've always been a basketball person," Strickland said. "I think it’s like me trying to conquer basketball. I've felt it all my life. It ws just a natural progression after a while."

So, long before leading LIU into an NCAA Tournament first-round game Friday, the former standout point guard caught on with John Calipari and worked as Memphis’ director of basketball operations.

He became an assistant for one of Calipari’s former assistants, Orlando Antigua, at South Florida, then went back to work under Calipari at Arkansas before becoming the program director of the G League Ignite developmental program.

Shut down in 2024, thanks to the NIL money elite players can earn in college basketball, the G League Ignite was an alternative to college basketball for elite prospects to play veteran opponents in preparation for NBA careers.

He helped players grow, and grew himself until LIU hired him in 2022 to take over its once proud program.

"Rod has done a tremendous job as program director for NBA G League Ignite, from leading our recruiting efforts to aiding in the development of our young players, including six NBA Draft picks in the last two seasons," G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim said in a statement upon Strickland’s hiring. "LIU is getting an amazing person and great basketball man."

Still, it was a different sort of leap.

Strickland was the head coach, making all the decisions, for a team stuck at the bottom of low-major basketball.

He was starting over again, in a sense.

“I had to create the culture and it took a little time,” Strickland said Thursday. “When I took the job, I didn’t really have a chance to recruit. I had to experience some things. I had to surround myself with some people who were like minded. I just had to get the right people around me that thought like me.”

He built with high-major transfers who needed to go elsewhere to find playing time, such as former ASU guard Malachi Davis, but also lower-level transfers such as former Division II transfer Jamal Fuller.

Both players are from the Toronto area, and Davis said he went to LIU because “it felt like home,” being in New York, with a similar big-city atmosphere and culture after his year in Tempe.

Fuller and Davis turned into Northeast Conference all-league players this season, leading the Sharks to 24 wins, but the program itself needed development to get there.

In Strickland’s first season of 2022-23, the Sharks were just 3-26. They were 7-22 in 2023-24, then crossed over the .500 mark last season before this season’s breakthrough.

Now the Sharks are in the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2018, when they were known as the Blackbirds. Strickland will be out on the court leading them, and eyes will inevitably be on him.

But figuratively, he's staying in the background.

"This is more important for them than me," he said. "I've been in the spotlight. I’m cool right here in the corner. Let them do something special. They will remember this."