Former NBA player Mark Madsen trying to do a different kind of dance with Utah Valley

Nearly 14 years removed from the last time Mark Madsen appeared in an NBA game, there is still one topic that always comes up when he gets recognized in public.

"I wish people came up to me and said, 'You were a great player,' " Madsen said during a phone conversation last week. "But no. They want to talk about one thing only: The dance."

Indeed, the images of a 25-year old Madsen in a baggy T-shirt dancing awkwardly but enthusiastically as Shaquille O’Neal rapped during the Los Angeles Lakers’ championship parade in 2001 have stood the test of time. Hey, for a guy who averaged 2.2 points over nine seasons, there weren’t many other ways for Madsen to live on as an NBA icon.

But by next week, there’s a good chance basketball fans will get re-introduced to the "Mad Dog" in a different context. In his fourth season as a college head coach, Madsen is hoping to lead Utah Valley to its first-ever NCAA Tournament bid by winning the Western Athletic Conference tournament.

With a  24-7 record, an outright regular season title and non-conference road wins over the likes of Oregon and BYU on its résumé, Utah Valley has the look of a team that none of the top seeds will want to see in the first round next week – if the Wolverines can break through and grab the WAC’s automatic bid.

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"That’s the goal," Madsen said. "Get hot at the right time, have a great defensive game and let the chips fall where they will."

Though Utah Valley had some success in the past under Dick Hunsaker and Mark Pope, who left in 2019 to go across town and take over at BYU, Madsen has led the program to its best-ever season in Division I at an interesting time.

A former All-American at Stanford who played on the Cardinal’s 1998 Final Four team, Madsen’s success would likely position him to be a leading candidate there should the school move on from Jerod Haase, who is about to complete his seventh season without an NCAA Tournament appearance.

Though Madsen stressed he is living in the present and that he and wife Hanna "could be very happy here for the next 20 years," there’s little doubt that Madsen is going to have options – and soon – given his 43-19 record over the past two years.

In the process, Madsen has proven a lot of people wrong who looked at his NBA background and questioned whether someone with minimal experience in college coaching could succeed – especially at a mid-major program with limited resources.

"A lot of people think someone coming from the NBA isn't willing to work," Madsen said. "I’ll be out on the recruiting trail in random places, small gyms outside of Los Angeles or overseas and I’ll see someone and they’ll look at me like, 'I can’t believe you’re out here recruiting like this.' "

Madsen isn’t saying that to pat himself on the back but rather to explain how the culture he’s built at Utah Valley reflects the qualities that he wished people remembered a little bit more about when he was a player.

Though it obviously takes a certain amount of talent just to make the NBA, much less play in 453 games, nothing about how he did it was glamorous. Madsen survived by grit: Setting hard screens, getting his fingernails dirty when necessary, being a great teammate and making a jump hook every now and then.

It is reflected now in a Utah Valley team that is top-40 in defensive efficiency but also 22nd nationally in assists per game despite ranking just 83rd in field goals made.

"Early on we had certain defensive metrics that just weren’t good, so we repped it, we talked about it," Madsen said. "We showed our guys the metrics and they bought in and really started competing on defense. And offensively, the ball movement we have is unbelievable. Our guys are really unselfish."

Madsen, now 47, had known since his playing days at Stanford that he wanted to eventually coach but hadn’t really been on the radar in college basketball until Utah Valley reached out to see if he was interested in the job.

At that point, Madsen seemed to be on an NBA track beginning in 2013 when the Lakers hired him to coach their G-League team, a job where he coached zero games because Mike D’Antoni asked him to come up to the big club as a player development coach.

"I wanted to be a head coach, but I got a great text from Mike," Madsen said. "He said, 'We’d love to have you on the Lakers. Just remember the shrimp cocktail tastes better with the big boys.' "

After six years as an assistant with the Lakers, though – a period that encompassed the end of Kobe Bryant’s career and the beginning of LeBron James’ stint in Los Angeles – it was not a shrimp cocktail type of job that made him a head coach.

And in many ways, it has been a perfect fit. Madsen, who is Mormon, has extensive family ties in the area. But on the court, Utah Valley is the kind of job that tells you whether a coach can do more with less. Much like a playing career where he knew early on he had to squeeze whatever he could out of his ability, Madsen is shattering expectations.

"We’re in the grind it out league," he said. "We do fly to games because of distances but we bus where we can, we save money where we can. We don’t always stay in the high-end hotels but that is kind of indicative of what we do. We recruit scrappy players and try to be a staff that isn’t afraid to put in extra hours and not worry about the other stuff."

Of course, for all the work Utah Valley has put in to win its regular season conference title, Madsen also knows how random and potentially cruel this week can be for teams in one-bid conferences. Breaking through for the first time is never easy.

But his body of work as a coach suggests that sooner or later, Madsen is going to take a team dancing. As the video evidence shows from all those years ago, that’s one thing he knows how to do.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mark Madsen hopes to lead Utah Valley to first ever NCAA Tournament