Xavier Silas on NIU job: ‘I want to go there and turn it into something we all know it can be’

As Xavier Silas sees it, there’s nothing stopping the NIU men’s basketball program from becoming the next Butler or Gonzaga.

The facilities are there, said the former NIU standout who went on to play in the NBA and is currently as an assistant coach in the NBA’s developmental league. The conference is great, he said. The location of the school works as well.

When the school announced the firing of Mark Montgomery on Sunday, Silas said he wants a chance at his first head coaching gig at his alma mater.

“I want it 100%,” Silas said. “I want to go there and turn it into something we all know it can be.”

Silas played two years for the Huskies, graduating in 2011. He led the MAC in scoring his final year, averaging 22.3 points per game and earning first-team all-MAC honors.

He played part of the 2011-12 season with the Philadelphia 76ers. He also played in the Big 3, in which he got his first opportunity to do some coaching. He also played briefly with the Boston Celtics.

“It was kind of like a transition that was happening the last two or three years I was playing,” Silas said. “Then it kind of ended up just going full time to the coaching thing. It wasn’t that big of a shock. What I will say is I like coaching more than I thought I would and I don’t miss playing as much as I thought I would.”

In addition to being an assistant coach with the Delaware Blue Coats of the NBA G League, he opened a charter school in Colorado that’s competing in The Grind Session, one of the top national prep leagues in the county.

Silas said the team, coached by his father James Silas who also played in the NBA, is 22-5 this year, its first, and features some of the best basketball players in the state of Colorado.

He thinks that level of recruiting is what he can bring to NIU.

“You have to have something or someone that draws players there,” Silas said. “Players win games and you have to have someone to recruit and get the players there. When you think about it there are a lot of schools that weren’t known as basketball schools before they were winning. There’s no reason for them to be considered basketball schools. It just took a coach and a culture to change that and get that negative stigma off the school.”

Silas, who graduated the year before Montgomery started coaching at NIU, said he was sorry to see the coach go.

“It’s always tough because that’s your profession and you don’t want to see anybody lose their job,” Silas said. “But at the same time it gets my wheels turning, what would I look like in that role. Especially at my alma mater.”

Silas said one of the big differences between coaching and playing is all about winning.

“As a player you want to win, but you also want to play well as a player,” Silas said. “There’s some built-in selfishness as a player. But as a coach you don’t care who scores, who gets the stop, who gets the blocked shot, who gets the assist, you want a team that has synergy and to win on a consistent basis.”

In addition to his experience in Colorado with recruiting, he said having played and succeeded at NIU would help land him recruits.

“I’m one of the only players who have gone to the NBA from NIU,” Silas said. “I’ve actually done it. I’ve been through it. It’s been my life’s work. For kids to come and play for me and understand that we’re going to win a lot more than when I was there, I’m going to be able to get them to the next level. You could argue head coaching experience, I’d argue experience of someone who has actually done it.”

Silas said he knows the power a coach can have. In college, he started at Colorado but followed Ricardo Patton from the Buffs to the Huskies.

He said that’s the type of rapport he wants to build with players as a coach.

“Players have shown they want to come and play for me,” Silas said. “Optimistically, I thought man, if we could do that at Northern Illinois and get those same kinds of ranked players, I think that turns it around.”