Why this year’s Utah-BYU game is a full-circle moment for two former NBA coaches

Nearly 14 years ago, two young coaches chowed down on the best wings Des Moines, Iowa, had to offer and bonded over the game of basketball.

Both men were early in their coaching careers and looking to make a name for themselves in the NBA’s Development League — now known as the NBA G League.

These two basketball savants were Iowa Energy coach Kevin Young and Canton Charge coach Alex Jensen.

Since that shared meal in March 2012, both coaches have climbed through the ranks, rising out of the NBA training grounds and eventually finding themselves as two of the most renowned assistant coaches in the NBA.

Now, after leaving the professional game, the two will face off as head coaches of rival schools when Jensen’s Utah hosts Young’s BYU on Saturday night.

“Basketball is a very small world, particularly in the NBA,” Young said. “... I go pretty far back with Alex. I got a lot of respect for him and his coaching career.”

Young, who led BYU to the Sweet 16 in his first season as the head coach in 2025, has had quite the list of locations on his resume, coaching in Ireland, Iowa, Delaware, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and now Provo. In 2021, Young was an assistant coach for the Western Conference Champion Phoenix Suns.

Before either Young or Jensen thought of taking head coaching jobs, the two crossed paths multiple times throughout their tenure in the NBA, with Jensen on the Utah Jazz sideline for 10 seasons and reaching the NBA Finals with the Dallas Mavericks in 2024.

If you had told them when they first met over a decade ago that they would both be coaching in college, they would’ve been surprised.

“Once you get in the NBA, most people stay in there,” Young said.

Still early on in their collegiate coaching careers, both Young and Jensen have seen similarities between the professional game and the NCAA.

“College now, I think it’s a combination of professional NBA, a lot like Europe and like the D-League,” Jensen said. “You see similarities and I’m able to look back on similar situations and see how it’s run.”

Young says he is constantly using “reference points” from his time in the pros to help scheme for the Cougars.

“In an NBA world, you are putting anywhere from 82-100 or more game plans per season, so you feel like you’ve seen a lot,” Young said. “There’s a lot of, ‘I remember against Kyrie we had to do this, against Anthony Davis we had to do that, against Luka we had to do this, and Giannis and Joker,’ so you have a lot of things that you can go back to.”

But even though the transition to college hoops might be seen as a step down from the pro game, every year the line between professional and amateur gets blurred more and more.

A first-year college coach, Jensen chimed in on what he has learned from his first season of navigating through NIL and what the future looks like for collegiate athletics.

“Once you start paying players, it’s not like they’re amateurs anymore,” Jensen said. “The sooner we as a whole stop treating them as amateurs and get some guardrails, I think it will not only help the schools and coaches, but also the players.”

The basketball landscape has changed dramatically since Young and Jensen’s first interaction in 2012. That was before the 3-point boom, before NIL and before transferring became a mainstay in collegiate athletics.

Between Jensen and Young, the two have plenty of history to navigate through the ever-changing waters of college ball.