Kihei Clark, Virginia's shortest player, made team's biggest play on road to Final Four
MINNEAPOLIS — Virginia coach Tony Bennett thinks size is all relative.
While recruiting freshman guard Kihei Clark, Bennett said he saw past a 5-foot-9, 155-pound frame.
“So many people get caught up in dimensions, and there’s value and importance in that,” Bennett said, “but toughness, quickness, feel, savvy, those things (matter).”
Bennett, standing slightly below 6-foot in height himself, said he learned to look closer for intangibles from his time playing back-up to one of the NBA’s smallest point guards during his stint as a player with the Charlotte Hornets in the 1990s.
“I was Muggsy Bogues’ backup in the NBA,” Bennett said. “When you see someone who has it and has that kind of heart and determination, that sold me. It’s not like I’m a giant myself. If you can play, you can play.”
Clark, an overlooked guard from Woodland Hills, Calif., decommitted from UC Davis to reopen his recruitment. By the time blue-blood UCLA came around with a last-minute scholarship offer, Clark said Virginia — a program that Bennett’s built on underrated talent — got to him first and had already won his heart because of its style outworking more hyped teams with a disciplined system.
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“Being my size, I never pass the eye test,” Clark said. “But I had the confidence to prove I could play with the best. That’s why I came here. I’ve always played with a chip on my shoulder, day in and day out. I feel like I always have something to prove.
“I didn’t know how much I was going to play once I got here. I just knew I wanted to contribute right away. I think I’ve earned the coaches and my teammates’ trust.”
Now Bennett’s recruitment of Clark and trust to insert him into the starting lineup has paid off — big time. Clark’s bullet pass to set up Mamadi Diakite’s buzzer-beater in the Elite Eight vs. Purdue remains the single biggest highlight reel of 2019’s NCAA tournament.
The play made the 5-9 Clark feel like the biggest man on campus when the Cavaliers returned to Charlottesville.
It was his hustle to get a tipped out rebound and court vision that set it all up. The way Virginia reached overtime and eventually prevailed to reach the Final Four left Clark awestruck: “For everything to happen the way it did (in the closing seconds) it had to happen perfect. Nine times out of 10 I don’t think it would’ve happened.”
Clark’s quickness on defense, which he credits came from his father, Malik, — a former Division II player at the University of Hawaii-Hilo — has allowed him to be a central part of Virginia’s precision-oriented pack-line defense, and he’s taken pride in helping manage the Cavaliers’ patient, tempo-controlling offense as the team’s point guard alongside Jerome.
“It’s part of being a point guard, knowing the pace of the game,” Clark said. “I think I can push it a little bit, but I can definitely slow it down. I pick (Jerome’s) brain every day in practice, both on and off the court. He’s obviously one of the best point guards in the country.”
Clark said one thing that lured him across the country from California was that Bennett had started fellow California product London Perrantes as a key fixture in its program development. Another is the diversity on the roster. Clark has a Filipino background. Diakite is from Guinea. Big man Jack Salt is from New Zealand. And freshmen Francisco Caffaro is from Argentina and Kody Stattmann is from Queensland, Australia.
“That type of thing really shows off the court,” Clark said, “because we get to learn about each other, get closer that way.”
Clark said he was playing basketball in the Philippines, where his mother is from, when Virginia lost to UMBC last year. Checking in on the game, not even being able to watch it, left him feeling helpless.
But when he arrived on campus, he could write the next chapter.
“When I came in, you could definitely feel it in the atmosphere,” Clark said of being integrated in with his teammates. “Everybody was focused and locked in. I’m just grateful to be a part of it.”