Colorado brings in NCAA legend Danny Manning as assistant coach
After a nearly month-long search, Colorado has hired former NBA all-star and college basketball legend Danny Manning as an assistant coach.
He replaces former assistant Rick Ray, who departed after four seasons with the program to join Mark Byington’s staff at Vanderbilt.
“I’m very excited to join coach [Tad] Boyle’s staff,” Manning said in a CU release. “This staff has been together for quite some time and has had quite a bit of success, so I want to come in and be a sponge; learn from them, the things they’ve been doing to be successful and just try and add little nuggets that I can along the way in terms of my experience as a player and a coach.”
Manning’s basketball resume is extensive, all the way back to his playing days. The Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native was a superstar during his playing days at Kansas, earning Big Eight Player of the Year and All-American honors during his final three seasons there. As a senior in 1988, Manning won the Naismith College Player of the Year award as the best player in the nation and was named Final Four Most Outstanding Player as he led the Jayhawks to the national championship.
To this day, Manning stands as Kansas’ all-time leader in points (2,951) and rebounds (1,187), and his No. 25 jersey is retired. He was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.
His success at the college level led him to be selected No. 1 overall by the Los Angeles Clippers in the 1988 NBA Draft. As a pro, Manning played 15 seasons in the NBA for seven different franchises, spending most of his time with the Clippers and the Phoenix Suns. He made a pair of All-Star teams and won the league’s Sixth Man of the Year award in 1997-98. For his career, he averaged 14 points and 5.2 rebounds per game.
Shortly after his playing career ended, Manning joined his alma mater as an assistant coach from 2006-12, winning another national championship with the Jayhawks in 2008. He then went to Tulsa as the head coach, and led the Golden Hurricane to a conference championship and the NCAA tournament in 2014. He then went to Wake Forest, where he was the head coach from 2014-20, reaching the NCAA tournament once in 2017. He spent the previous three seasons as an assistant at Maryland and Louisville.
Manning and Colorado head coach Tad Boyle have a longstanding relationship going back to their college days. The two were teammates at Kansas in 1984-85, when Boyle was a senior and Manning was a freshman. They also coached together one time with USA Basketball as assistants for the U19 World Cup team in 2017, where the team won a bronze medal.
“Coach Manning and I go back a long way in terms of our relationship as players back in 1985 when we were teammates at Kansas,” Boyle said in the release. “Obviously we know each other from those days, but having a guy like Danny on staff with his accomplishments as a player – 15 years in the NBA, the No. 1 draft pick in 1988 – as well as his numerous coaching stops at the Division I level where he’s been extremely successful, I’m excited to add him to the staff. He’s not only a great coach, but he’s a great human being and he’s going to do nothing but help Colorado basketball.”