Hawai‘i’s NCAA tournament berth got an assist from an NBA veteran more than 8,000 miles away.
On Thursday, the Rainbow Warriors will face Arkansas in the first round of the NCAA tournament. One staff member who won’t be at the game is Patty Mills, the longtime NBA marksman who was hired as the program’s GM in June and recently signed with La Laguna Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands.
Mills’s hiring was part of a wave of NBA players joining their alma maters in honorary front office roles, mainly to help boost relations among former players and allow their most famous alums be able to interact with recruits. Stephen Curry (Davidson), Terance Mann (Florida State), and Trae Young (Oklahoma) all got similar titles to Mills, with varying levels of involvement on a day-to-day basis.
But Mills, who played college basketball at St. Mary’s, wasn’t hired for his wallet, despite his $85 million in career earnings.
“The focus areas have been mentorship, community engagement, growing the game on the islands, and helping navigate this new world in terms of fundraising,” Hawai‘i coach Eran Ganot told Front Office Sports.
Heading to Hawai‘i
While Curry, Mann, and Young have all served as honorary GMs from afar, Mills was around the team pretty frequently before he signed in Spain. He remained unsigned this NBA season while welcoming his first child.
Mills, who grew up off the coast of Australia, has called Hawai‘i his offseason home for years. He married his wife, Alyssa, on the islands in 2019 and has frequently used the Rainbow Warriors’ facilities. His relationship with Ganot goes back decades, as the two just missed each other between the coach’s two stints as a St. Mary’s assistant.
Even in the NIL era, most of Mills’s responsibilities haven’t been financial. The 16-year NBA veteran has spent more time focused on team chemistry and education instead of trying to impersonate Gregg Popovich—his former coach in San Antonio for 10 seasons, who made a small-market team an NBA dynasty.
When Mills accepted the unpaid job from Ganot, his first assignment wasn’t to call former teammates such as Tim Duncan or Tony Parker and see if they could throw the program some NIL money.
“There’s short term and long-term things to this,” Ganot said. “He’s still playing, he was going through the birth of his first child and so I think the impact is, ‘look we’ve been good in the community, we’ve been good in the classroom.’ He just took it up to another notch.”
Chemistry Over Currency
One of Mills’s first tasks was to launch “Roots and Reach,” which is an educational initiative that enhances players’ understanding of the Hawaiian Islands. To educate the team and build chemistry, Mills took the players shark diving, taro farming, and canoeing, and had them complete lifeguard courses.
“It’s the foundation,” Mills told KHON2 in July. “All of these student-athletes come from elsewhere, the mainland, overseas, so for them to come to such a unique and special place like this, it’s very important for them to understand where they are, the people here, and who they represent.”
“For me, this is just the start,” Mills added. “By the time they hit the court, that bond will be strong, and it’ll mean something.”
While the 2014 NBA champion has focused on team cohesion instead of roster building, his NBA experience has helped steer the program through a time where college sports has become more professionalized.
As a mid-major program in a remote area, Hawai‘i has some parallels to the Spurs, who have a reputation for finding and developing under-the-radar players while having strong team chemistry on and off the court. Ganot said Mills has used his own career to teach the players and staff how he prioritized winning over how his salary compared to his teammates.
“He’s been able to educate not just how to navigate that but how to continue to be a team through that,” Ganot said. “There’s so many layers there.”
A decade ago, Hawai‘i famously upset a California team led by now-Celtics star Jaylen Brown in the first round of the NCAA tournament, which was Ganot’s first season as coach. If history repeats itself on Thursday, Mills won’t be there to see it, but he would have played a part in helping make it happen.
“I was just so excited for our guys to be around one of the elite human beings, an NBA veteran, NBA champion, five-time Olympian,” Ganot said. “So to have that around your program is awesome and he’s been impactful.”
