Joseph Blair keeps proving that you can keep going home again.
At least for a while.
After spending the past two seasons as an undergraduate assistant and a graduate manager for Arizona, where he played for the Wildcats from 1992 to 1996, Blair began working this week as assistant coach for the NBA Development League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers.
There, in Hidalgo, Texas, Blair will have a close tie to his hometown team, the parent Houston Rockets.
“I was a huge Houston Rockets fan,” Blair said Wednesday by telephone during the Vipers’ second day of training camp. “It started with the University of Houston with Hakeem (Olajuwon) and then when Hakeem went to the Rockets, I think everybody became Rockets fans.
“So for me, it’s a really big deal to come here. It’s a good organization and the Rockets really take pride in their team down here.”
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The Rockets and Vipers have also had a distinct Arizona connection in recent years. Not only did the Rockets have two former UA guards on their roster last season — Jason Terry and Nick Johnson — but the Vipers have had at least one Wildcat pass through Rio Grande Valley in four of the past five seasons (Johnson, Kevin Parrom, Kyle Fogg and Mustafa Shakur).
Then there’s the staff: Former UA player and assistant coach Matt Brase was a Vipers assistant coach in 2012-13, has served a variety of player development roles with the Rockets and became the Vipers head coach this season.
Blair has known Brase since he began playing for the Wildcats, when Brase was a middle-school kid who happened to be the grandson of then-Wildcat coach Lute Olson.
“I talked to a couple of other teams, but I thought this was the best situation for me,” Blair said. “Being from Houston, connecting with the Rockets, and then you add Matt to the mix and my relationship with his mother and father. It was a just a very open and honest situation for me.”
Although he is established in Tucson with his Blair Charity Group, which he intends to keep running, Blair began looking elsewhere to coach last spring for two reasons: He said he had “fallen in love” with coaching after two years working on the UA staff, but still had no experience as a full-time coach.
Plus, Blair said, there aren’t exactly a whole lot of jobs to coach in Tucson at the major-college level. One of them did actually open up last spring when Damon Stoudamire left his position as UA assistant coach, but full-time UA assistant coaching jobs are usually given only to those who have full-time college coaching experience elsewhere.
Sure enough, UA coach Sean Miller hired coaching veteran Mark Phelps to replace Stoudamire, and Blair applauded the move.
“There’s no way I can talk negatively about his decision,” Blair said. “When you’re at an elite-level program like Arizona, you want to bring in elite coaches, coaches with experience. (Not staying at UA) was more publicly awkward, but not my relationship with coach Miller.”
Blair said he was actually approached a year earlier about leaving Arizona, after finishing up his undergraduate degree while working the 2013-14 season, but wanted to stay for the chance to keep learning under Miller. UA was able to keep him back last season as an unpaid graduate assistant, while Blair took graduate classes.
Now, Blair’s job turns to basketball full-time. There’s no classes and no NCAA restrictions on what he can do.
Just basketball, albeit in one of the most fluid situations possible.
When he was a Vipers assistant, Brase said he would often pick up new players at the airport in the evening, drive them directly to the gym, then go over the basics of the Vipers system — before playing them in a game the next night.
Blair expects to do the same.
“You never know what’s going to happen on any given day,” Blair said. “A guy could be sent down from Houston, or guys will be sent up. There is different dynamic than any other level because an NBA team stays more or less the same, and a college team doesn’t change during the season. That’s exciting in my eyes.”
Rim shots
- Arizona sold 11,893 season tickets for this season as of Wednesday, with a 99 percent renewal rate, according to Senior Associate AD
- James Francis
- . A limited number of priority season tickets remain, but non-priority (those without an extra fee above the ticket price) are sold out. McKale Center holds 14,644 seats but 2,300 are set aside for students and several hundred are typically held back for television and other complimentary seats.
- Forward
- Ryan Anderson
- (27) and center
- Kaleb Tarczewski
- (72) made an ESPN list of the top 100 players in college basketball.
- Sports Illustrated’s projection system pegged the Wildcats at No. 11 nationally and No. 1 in the Pac-12, barely ahead of No. 13 Cal.
