When now 43-year-old Kevin Young was introduced as BYU’s 20th men’s basketball coach last April, more than a few people who gathered at the Marriott Center snickered a bit when he promised to make the program a pipeline to the NBA.
After all, the Cougars don’t currently have a single alum playing in the world’s top basketball league, and haven’t had one since Elijah Bryant was a seldom-used substitute on the world champion Milwaukee Bucks in 2021. BYU hasn’t had a player drafted in the NBA since Jimmer Fredette in 2011.
When Young, who was an assistant with the Philadelphia 76ers from 2016-19 and Phoenix Suns from 2020-23, told the crowd that he would bring four- and five-star prospects to the conservative school in Provo with a strict honor code and high academic standards through his vast network of national and international basketball contacts, more eyebrows were raised.
When he said he would use NBA methods and processes, and attract people to his coaching and support staffs who had experience working in that league, there were more incredulous stares.
But perhaps the most pronounced disbelief came just before Young’s first season, when the father of three who was raised in Texas and Georgia said he had retained and imported enough talent on BYU’s roster for the Cougars to finish in the top half of the expanded, 16-team Big 12 — one of the top two college basketball conferences in the country — in his first year.
“Some people out there in Utah thought he was nuts,” said Young’s former high school coach in the Atlanta area, Roger Kvam.
“When he laid out his vision, yes, there were (some) skeptics,” said former Cougar and former Atlanta Hawks guard Travis Hansen. “But some of us never doubted for a minute. We knew what he was all about.”
An uneven start, then a promise delivered
Doubt crept in when BYU was routed 83-64 at so-so Providence on Dec. 3 in the Big 12-Big East Battle, and when the Cougars lost three of their first four and four of their first six Big 12 games, including an 86-55 pummeling at Houston and a faith-draining 73-72 overtime loss at rival Utah. On Feb. 8, when BYU was hammered 84-66 at Cincinnati to drop to 6-6 in league play, Young’s proclamations from months prior rang a little hollow.
Well, just look at Young and the Cougars now.
Regardless of the outcome of Thursday’s third-round Big 12 matchup with No. 12 Iowa State, he has delivered on his promises — an NBA-styled program and scheme, player development that turned Richie Saunders into the most improved Big 12 player and recruiting that stretched from Moscow, Russia, for a top-10 pro prospect to the home of the No. 1 prospect in the land.
The former small college (Clayton State) guard, who was so feisty as a high school freshman that he picked a fight in a pickup game with a senior teammate a foot taller than him, according to Kvam, has put BYU into the national headlines with his recruiting (BYU has signed the country’s No. 1 prep player, AJ Dybantsa), but more importantly, his eye-popping early success.
BYU (23-8, 14-6) is ranked No. 17 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, and has won eight straight games — including wins at nationally ranked Arizona and Iowa State — to finish tied for third with perennial power Arizona in the Big 12 in the program’s second season in the league.
The Cougars handed the winningest program in college basketball history — Bill Self’s Kansas Jayhawks — their third-worst loss ever, 91-57, and are the No. 4 seed in this week’s conference tournament at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.
So far, so good.
BYU heads into postseason with high hopes
Having gone 5-0 in its last five Quad 1 opportunities, BYU was No. 26 in the NET rankings — the NCAA’s primary sorting tool for the Big Dance — on Tuesday and could rise to a four or five seed in the NCAA Tournament, depending on what happens in the City of Fountains this weekend.
“Yeah, I welcome it. That is the whole point, is to have postseason success. That is what you want, so I welcome it head on.”
— BYU coach Kevin Young
BYU earned a double bye in Kansas City and will play in a quarterfinal game Thursday (10:30 a.m. MDT, ESPN2) at T-Mobile Center, where last year it was bounced from the tourney in the second round under Mark Pope, falling 81-67 to No. 25 Texas Tech.
The Cougars haven’t won a conference tournament since 2001, when Steve Cleveland was head coach; if Young somehow guides them to a title, possibly getting them through the likes of No. 12 Iowa State, No. 2 Houston and No. 9 Texas Tech, they will make him honorary mayor of Provo and erect his statue outside the Marriott Center.
That’s how badly BYU fans have hungered for postseason success.
Not surprisingly, Young — the great-great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young’s brother, Lorenzo, is not shying away from the expectations. He knows that when all is said and done, wins in mid-March are what matter most.
“Yeah, I welcome it. That is the whole point, is to have postseason success,” Young said Monday. “That is what you want, so I welcome it head on.”
How it happened on the court
Naturally, the self-deprecating Young credits his players for the turnaround, saying there is “total buy-in” and “unbelievable role acceptance” on his squad, which is a good mixture of veteran holdovers from the Pope era, combined with impactful transfers and ever-improving freshmen.
Any questions regarding how he’s reversed course are answered by crediting his players and assistant coaches.
Chief among the on-court reasons for BYU’s success in 2024-25 is the rise of junior Richie Saunders, a first-team all-Big 12 selection and winner of the league’s Most Improved Player award.
“Richie has an unbelievable work ethic and an unbelievable motor. Those are the things that drive him and help him be successful. It has been a good marriage in terms of the way we like to play, and his strengths,” Young said.
BYU’s offensive versatility that is put on display when its bread-and-butter — 3-point shots — aren’t falling is also a key component of its recent rise. Centers Fouss Traore and Keba Keita have been forces inside, and much-hyped freshman Egor Demin, an honorable mention all-conference player and member of the league’s all-freshman team, gives the Cougars a lengthy point guard who can get to the rim. Most teams don’t have that, Young emphasizes.
“Not a one-trick pony,” is one of Young’s go-to sayings.
Additionally, Mawot Mag and Trey Stewart bring defensive intensity and the ability to limit dribble penetration that BYU teams haven’t had in the past, and Dallin Hall and Trevin Knell contribute leadership, the ability to hit 3-pointers and improved playmaking fueled by Young’s confidence and trust in their abilities.
Freshman Kanon Catchings, who has missed the last two games with a lower leg injury, has been an enigma — disappearing at times and riding the bench a lot more than anyone expected, yet brilliant when brilliance was absolutely needed. He came up huge in the overtime win over Baylor and the big road win at then-No. 19 Arizona.
Young said Catchings remains “day to day” and would not say if the former four-star recruit from Indiana will be available Thursday.
Depth a ‘blessing and a curse’ for Young, BYU
On several occasions this season, Young has said that the team’s depth — 11 guys have been part of the rotation — is both a blessing and curse, but that this group has the maturity and selflessness to handle limited minutes with aplomb.
“It speaks to the character of the guys we have in our locker room, and in our program,” he said. “It also speaks to the relationships that our assistant coaches have with our players, keeping the guys in the boat, rowing in the same direction, always being there to work with them and keep them focused on what they can continue to do to keep getting better.
“I could go down the list of why every single guy on our team deserves more minutes than they are currently getting,” he continued. “Honestly, we have just kinda tripped on it, and it has been a strength of this team.”
Although it wasn’t by design, that depth has enabled Young to incorporate another NBA element to the season: load management. Guys aren’t given games off like they are in the NBA, which has 82 regular-season games, compared to 31 in college basketball.
But Young has been able to keep guys fresh and energized. Nobody is averaging more than 30 minutes a game; Saunders leads with 29.4 minutes per game but has made 69 3-pointers, after making 62 combined in his first two seasons at BYU,
“The transition from NBA to college head coach appears to be working, because he has implemented a fast-paced, modern system, is what I see,” said Hansen, who played professionally in Russia and Spain, among other places.
Hansen has formed a strong bond with Demin, who is from Moscow and celebrated his 19th birthday recently with his girlfriend — BYU women’s basketball star Delaney Gibb — at Hansen’s home.
“Kevin’s system is based on rim-and-3s principles — attack the basket or shoot open 3s, and avoid those less-efficient midrange shots,” Hansen continued. “He also brings this modern, analytical, statistical approach to college basketball, and it is working. He has the right players. He is putting them in the right roles. He had this vision of what he wanted to do, and strategically he has done it.”
Building an NBA-style support staff
Before the Cougars even took the court in November, Young’s NBA processes were already at work. In addition to adding several assistant coaches with NBA experience, BYU brought in former Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury director of performance nutrition Danielle LaFata to work with the men’s and women’s basketball programs at BYU.
He conducted an NBA-style combine to measure the skills and athletic ability of his players, discovering that senior guard Trey Stewart, underutilized in 2023-24, could be a valuable contributor after Stewart was timed at 9.8 seconds in the Pro 4-Way Agility Test (which would be an all-time record at the real NBA combine).
He brought in Akash Sebastian, a Suns coaching analyst, from Phoenix, and made him BYU’s director of analytics and strategy. Several times this season Young has credited the analytics guru for pointing out trends and tendencies that have helped BYU win.
Young also reached out to former players who have competed in the NBA — Hansen, Bryant, Eric Mika, Kyle Collinsworth and Fredette — and asked them to become more involved in the program, particularly in recruiting.
“I was one thousand percent confident his system would work,” Hansen said. “Just look at his history, how he recruits and develops young talent, makes players better. That helps you project a future forecast of success.”
Having stayed in touch with Kvam, Young brought him to Provo to watch the home games against Kansas State and Kansas, and attend practices and shootarounds. He sought out critiques from those he trusts.
“He’s so smart. I was taken aback by how smart he is, and how he was so well-prepared,” Kvam said. “Of course, they were so prepared in that Kansas game. They blew them out by a bunch. But his attention to detail and all the little stuff in the morning practice, was just so impressive to me.”
Young has also kept ties with the greats he coached in the NBA, all-stars such as Devin Booker, Chris Paul and Kevin Durant with the Suns and Joel Embiid with the 76ers. He hasn’t been afraid to leverage those relationships in his recruiting efforts, personally introducing Dybantsa to Durant and others.
Booker, of course, famously referred to BYU as “KYU” when Young got the job last April, returning the love. And when Dybantsa signed with the Cougars, Booker said the projected No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA draft “is in great hands with coach K.Y. We’ve done a lot of special things together. He allowed me to take my game to the next level and he’s going to do the same for him.”
Those are endorsements you just can’t buy.
‘This is their life. It is the air they breathe’
Hansen and Kvam, who Young mentioned in his introductory news conference as one of his greatest mentors and the biggest reason why he went into coaching, said basketball is in the Young family’s blood.
“He’s got an unbelievable family,” said Kvam, who retired from Sprayberry High in Marietta, Georgia, after coaching prep basketball for 40 years. “They are all so very relational, communicate so well. I knew he would be a head coach someday, because he is so competitive. I thought it would be in the NBA, but that job at BYU fits him so well, it is amazing.”
Kvam believes Young will stay at BYU for a long time.
Shortly after getting the job, Young brought in his brother, Justin Young, to be BYU’s director of recruiting — sort of like a scouting director in the NBA. It wasn’t just to do a family member a favor, Hansen said.
“Justin Young is an incredible asset to BYU. The whole family is, because they live it. This is their life. It is the air they breathe. It is who they are, and he was always going to figure it out at some point. And that is what he had done his whole career,” Hansen said. “He takes a group of guys and he strategically helps them, not only mentally, but also in their role, and figure out how to win games.”
That said, maintaining a good balance between work and family life is important to Young, he said last week when he was asked if he is an easy coach for which to work. He said assistants and staffers such as Doug Stewart, Chris Burgess, Tim Fanning, Will Vogt and Jordan Brady keep him grounded, and shoulder a lot of the load.
“Those guys are patient, and they want to win, and that is the undertone of how we want to approach things,” Young said. “But I think it has evolved in a good way as the season has gone on. … I am not one of these in-at-5 a.m., out-at-midnight type of guys. I value balance in this profession, which can be tricky at times. So, I don’t know, man. You would have to ask those guys. They might be dog-cussing me behind my back. Who knows?”
Family, faith and food
Ten months into his tenure, Young does not come across as the type of man who wears his faith on his sleeve. But players such as Trevin Knell and Dallin Hall describe the member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a “pretty spiritual” person who enjoys hearing stories about their two-year church missions, and how it prepared them for the rigors of high-level college basketball.
Young has said that one of the reasons he was interested in leaving a high-paying NBA job for BYU was because he could spend more time with his family and would get Sundays off.
“He hasn’t had Sundays off during the season ever in 13 years,” Melissa Young told the Deseret News last spring.
Kevin Young says a lengthy text from his wife when he was considering whether to take an NBA head coaching job or look into the BYU opening created by Pope’s departure made a significant impact on his decision. In that text, Melissa bore her own testimony about the importance of family.
“I get emotional, honestly, thinking about it,” he said in April. “That text was a pretty spiritual experience for me.”
Talking about traveling around the country and sampling food and fine, or not-so-fine, restaurants also makes Young tick. In fact, food is the way he was able to connect with a fellow Latter-day Saint who was coaching in the NBA, new University of Utah basketball coach Alex Jensen.
When he was head coach of the Iowa Energy in the NBA G League, Young and Jensen met at the Drake Diner in Des Moines, Iowa, for a meal and to swap coaching stories.
“Yeah, man, I go pretty far back with Alex,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for him and his coaching career. We have a lot of similarities.”
Young said he’s still learning about the Utah County restaurant scene, but says he isn’t hard to please. He likes celebrating home victories at the In-N-Out Burger locations in Orem with his kids, although sometimes the “30-car lines” at the drive-through test his patience.
A free-flowing offense flourishes in Provo
Using an offensive system borrowed from his time in the NBA that he often refers to as “rim-and-3 offense” or “paint-to-great basketball,” Young has turned his squad into one of the most efficient offenses in the Big 12, if not the country.
The Cougars are first in the Big 12 in overall field goal percentage (48.7%) and 2-point field goal percentage, because they get so many shots at the rim. They are third in 3-point field goal percentage (37%) behind league leaders Houston and Texas Tech.
However, they have made more 3-pointers — 329 — than any team in the league. They are second in points per game (81.4) behind Arizona and third in assists per game (17.1) behind Kansas and Utah.
“Tactically, BYU’s offense reflects an NBA-type emphasis on quality paint touches and 3-point shooting,” said Greg Wrubell of the BYU Sports Network. “Coach Young’s mantra of ‘paint-to-great’ is embodied in this season’s stats … ranking in the top 25 nationally in highest percentage of points scored on 3-point field goals.”
There are also the elements of crisp inbounds plays that produce points, well-designed out-of-timeout plays, and one of those NBA staples that you don’t see much in the college game — the two-for-one setups at the end of halves.
That was on display in the Cougars’ 85-74 win over Utah, as BYU got a couple of last-possession buckets to take a 34-30 lead and momentum into the second half.
Burgess “is tasked with helping me with clock management there at the end of the first half, and that was a master class in terms of what he helped us do there, in executing the two-for-one, maybe the three-for-one, in terms of possessions, and I thought that really propelled us into the second half,” Young said.
Another strategy Young has brought from the NBA in big proportions is the use of the high pick-and-roll, which is executed by Demin, Hall and Saunders up top, getting screens from Traore, Keita and occasionally Mihailo Boskovic at the post.
“The high pick-and-roll with Egor, with the shooters, and the spacing, is definitely what you see a lot in an NBA game,” Hansen said. “They have to choose: Are they going to do a drop coverage, or are they going to blitz it?
“And, if you have a point guard that can create an advantage from the get-go, that’s what you do in the NBA. You run a high pick-and-roll, and then you have shooters around them,” he continued. “So you don’t have to run any more plays than that, because you have already created an advantage.”
Young has also proven to be a master at in-game adjustments, evidenced in the wins over Utah and West Virginia recently when the Utes and Mountaineers were taking away the 3-pointer.
And he’s also brought more toughness to the program, beginning, he says, when the Cougars were getting “punked and pushed around” at Central Florida on Feb. 1.
Since back-to-back losses in early February to Arizona and Cincinnati, BYU has won eight straight, which is tied for ninth-best in the country. The winning and style of play has also kept the BYU fan base energized: BYU led the Big 12 and was seventh in the nation in per-game attendance, averaging 17,054 per game in the 17,978-seat Marriott Center.
Will Young’s ways work in March Madness?
BYU’s past failures in March have been well-documented. Just last year, the Cougars tied for fifth in the Big 12 and were a No. 6 seed in the Big Dance in Omaha (the hometown of Young’s wife, Melissa, ironically), but were upset 71-67 by 11th-seeded Duquesne in the first round.
Although he parlayed his regular-season success into a job at college basketball blue blood Kentucky, Pope never won an NCAA Tournament game at BYU.
So the question naturally becomes: Can Young’s methods work in March Madness?
The ever-confident Young believes they will. Trust the process, he tells his players and the media.
“I am a systems-oriented guy. I am a process-oriented guy. (From) a lot of years on the pro side of seeing how things were done there, I was able to customize it to the way I want to run things here, and was able to bring in a lot of people that understood how I wanted to do that, and I think it makes us unique in certain respects in terms of how we operate across the board, whether that is pregame warmups or whatever, as silly as that sounds,” he said. “We do it pretty uniquely here, relative to other college teams — much more from an NBA side. … It rears its head across our program, and it is sort of the backbone of how we systematically operate.”
Hansen says the proof is in the results — BYU’s performance the last half of the Big 12 season.
“In the Big 12, it feels like every game, or at least games against the top five or six teams in that league, is an NCAA Tournament game,” Hansen said. “He has proven that it does work and they can play that way against the best. Now it is up to the players to make those plays.”
Before they get, as Young believes they will, to the real NBA.
