As He Prepares for NCAA Final Four Tournament, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino Selected for Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2013

After a career that has lasted nearly four decades as one of college basketball's most successful coaches, Louisville Cardinals men's basketball coach Rick Pitino will be enshrined as one of basketball's immortals.

Pitino, 60, is expected to be among the new inductees into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 2013 when the class is announced Monday in Atlanta before the NCAA championship game.

The news comes as Pitino and Louisville, who made the Final Four last year, are preparing for another run at the championship Saturday when they take on No.9 Wichita State in their Final Four match-up. Pitino's team will be playing days after guard Kevin Ware gruesomely snapped his right leg during their Elite Eight game and urged the team to win the game; Ware will be in Atlanta to support the team.

Pitino has certainly amassed enough trophies and accomplishments in his 39 years of coaching to qualify. Pitino, who led Kentucky to the 1996 NCAA title, has been to the Final Four eight times with Providence, Kentucky and Louisville, won three Big East Tournament titles, and won the John Wooden National Coach  of the Year award. He also coached the Boston Celtics and led the New York Knicks to the Atlantic Division championship in 1989.

He has a chance to add to that legacy, as an NCAA title win for Louisville would make Pitino the first coach in NCAA history to win the national title twice with two different teams.

"Should've been (in) last year, but I don't see any way in the world that he wouldn't be in the Hall of Fame," Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim told USA Today Thursday. "He's got better credentials than probably 80 [percent] of the coaches in there."

News reports indicate that Pitino will be joined by former University of Houston coach Guy Lewis, former UNLV and Fresno State coach Jerry Tarkanian and former Seattle Supersonics star and NBA champion Gary Payton.

The finalists include Payton, Tarkanian Tom Heinsohn, women's coach Sylvia Hatchell, Tim Hardaway, Spencer Haywood, Bernard King, Mitch Richmond and women's player Dawn Staley.