NEWARK, New Jersey — BYU’s Sweet 16 clash with Alabama Thursday is clearly one of the most important games in program history.
But for Kevin Young, playing in New Jersey also marks a homecoming of sorts.
The man at the helm of the Cougars’ impressive run spent most of the 2010s coaching in the mid-Atlantic, first as an assistant and eventual head coach with the G-League’s Delaware 87ers before ultimately breaking into the NBA on the Philadelphia 76ers bench.
Professionally, it was an instrumental period for Young — he likely wouldn’t be in this position at BYU without it.
As for his family life, those years between 2013 and 2020 were even sweeter.
“My wife and my oldest son flew on this trip with me, and one of my daughters, shoutout to Jersey, she was born in New Jersey,” Young told reporters Wednesday. “One of my sons was born in Delaware, as well. This is a special part of the country for me on a personal level. A lot of unbelievable memories out this way.
“But in terms of my basketball, yeah, I’d say it was probably — not probably. It was the most important time of my life as a young coach.”
Young’s arrived in Philadelphia — about 75 miles south of Newark — in the middle of “The Process,” a famed rebuilding stretch where the franchise sold off its existing parts, sunk to a historically futile level of basketball, drafted and developed top prospects before rising again into a force within the NBA’s Eastern Conference.
During Young’s first season with the 76ers’ organization, the team finished 19-63. Over his final three years with Philadelphia, the Sixers won 62% of their games, with Young having helped to turn the operation around.
“That was a unique time going through that rebuild,” Young said. “I got there at the start of ‘The Process,’ and I saw the whole thing through pretty much. The thing that maybe doesn’t get discussed enough during that era was how many really good basketball people came through there.
“I mean, everyone that I was with there — there’s GMs, there’s multiple head coaches. I mean, there’s a bunch of guys who have moved up in the world on the coaching side, a couple guys that are on Boston’s bench now, have won championships, you go down the list.
“Clearly (head coach) Brett (Brown) and (general manager Sam Hinkie) were the leaders of that, but I think that crew of guys, we’re all still really, really close, and we all learned from each other. (It was a) super invaluable time for me for sure.”
Young specifically credited Brown for his efforts during “The Process,” calling him a “brilliant guy” and “by far the most influential coach that I’ve worked with and for.”
“I don’t think he gets enough credit for how good of a coach he is and even better a CEO,” Young said of Brown. “I learned so much from him from a leadership standpoint. Many of the things I do now is because of things I learned from him.”
While Young enjoyed success in the NBA — most notably, reaching the Finals with Phoenix in 2021 — the early returns on his tenure in Provo have been outstanding, taking the Cougars to their third Sweet 16 of the seeding era and signing highly-touted recruits such as Egor Demin and AJ Dybantsa.
“One of the reasons I wanted to come to BYU was because of the fan base and donor base in general,” Young said. “I know a lot of people have school pride, but I think BYU is unmatched, quite frankly, just in terms of how much people love the school, what it stands for, and the amount of alumni that have come out of BYU who are extremely successful, much of which still live out in Utah.
“... This place is set up to succeed. I’m definitely riding the wave of a lot of that. But it’s so much more than that. What you’re seeing, I think anyway in college sports, is you have to have the whole package,” Young continued. “You can’t just have one part of it. You’ve got to be able to have the fun. You’ve got to be able to have a blueprint. You’ve got to be able to have systems. You’ve got to be able to have player development. You’ve got to be able to have a style of play, and that’s what we’re trying to do is to check all those boxes.”
