Florida basketball’s Todd Golden, staff return to their Empire State foundation

While Wall Street recovered from the Great Recession in the early 2010s, roughly 130 blocks north, a group of forward-thinking minds gathered. Multiple were former advertisers or came from trading backgrounds. They were not there, however, for financial incentive.

Far from it, in fact, as mid-major coaching isn’t an economic boon. On Columbia’s grounds, this posse of basketball innovators was set to create an evolved way of quantifying the game. Their test study: an Ivy League school that hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1968.

By the time their project was done, and each mind went its separate way, the school had its sole 25-win season ever.

The group’s greatest success — proof of concept, in a way — came a decade later. The underlying principles that constructed Florida’s 2025 national championship were those of hustle and statistical fine-tuning at their most inflated form — the same system the likes of Todd Golden, Carlin Hartman and Kevin Hovde discussed under the tutelage of now-Stanford coach Kyle Smith.

Nearly a decade later, the three reconvened in Gainesville after Golden accepted Florida’s head coaching position. Florida assistant Hovde departed this offseason for a head role of his own, fittingly, at Columbia. But Golden and associate head coach Hartman, along with a handful of others on Florida’s staff who got their starts in New York City, will return to Manhattan for the first time since their formative moments on the Upper West Side.

The stage will undoubtedly be bigger as No. 18 Florida faces No. 5 UConn at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Their sensei, Smith, almost definitely won’t be in attendance due to his own coaching obligations. But it’s easy to feel his pride, watching his system and the apprentices who mastered it.

“These young prodigies have already made a big mark in college basketball and the NBA,” Smith said during Florida’s tournament run. “This rise has occurred over 15 years. No one has put more time and effort into their craft.”

Golden is the one in the limelight, rising to become the youngest national title-winning coach since the tournament’s expansion in 1985. Hartman and assistant coaches Dave Klatsky and Jonathan Safir, nevertheless, each spent at least four years in the five boroughs perfecting their craft.

For some, it’s a coincidence they’ve ended up here together. Klatsky was an equity trader fresh out of UPenn, who then crossed the river to become an assistant coach at Stevens Institute of Technology. Safir, following the same route as Golden, served in multiple roles at Columbia, though the pair didn’t overlap at the corner of 120th and Broadway.

All touched the same analytics-driven, Ivy-tested formula that has guided Florida in recent years.

The premise is something called “hustle stats,” a loose term coined by Smith. He aimed to measure certain aspects of play that aren’t typically accounted for, like possession quality and guarding out. Numbers were to be used with defined precision.

As Florida looks to right a 5-3 start that’s catapulted it from preseason No. 3 to on the ranking fringe, you can still catch hints of the original formula. “If this team could start living around the 16% or 15% turnover rate level, we’re going to give ourselves a great chance to be a really, really good team,” Golden said confidently on Monday. He wants Florida to be four points better per 100 possessions — because, of course — and if it does so, he expects Florida to rise to No. 5 in KenPom, a college basketball rating system.

Florida’s next opponent is just as strong. Since the turn of the century, no two schools have combined to win the last three national championships and then played each other the following year … until Tuesday. UConn and Florida’s recent dominance is rare, especially in an era when teams change rosters each season more than ever.

Yet, by committing to a set of baseline concepts, who’s on the court has mattered a little less.

MSG, then, will be a test of sustained superiority. And in a home-adjacent atmosphere for the Huskies, the reeling Gators may just be a touch outmanned.

Guided by the analytics, though, Florida hopes a return to its foundation can spark a breakthrough.

“If we play our way,” said Florida guard Boogie Fland, a Bronx native, “we’re the best in the country.”