SYRACUSE — When Arinze Onuaku visited Syracuse and spent time at the Melo Center last fall, he arrived with several agendas.
He wanted to welcome Adrian Autry as Syracuse’s new head basketball coach. He wanted to reacquaint himself with the school, where he thrived as a Big East center during a career that spanned 2005-2010. And he wanted to let everybody know his latest career ambitions about him.
“I was just in a period of trying to figure out what I was going to do next,” Onuaku said during a phone conversation last week. “I wanted to come up there, talk to the coaches, let them know what my status was and what I was interested in doing. So yeah, I was able to talk to Red, to GMac, to all the coaches in a group setting and one-on-one.”
Those conversations bore fruit a few months later when Gerry McNamara left Syracuse to take the head coaching job at Siena College. McNamara said his relationship with Onuaku convinced him to hire one of the best big men in Syracuse history. Onuaku left SU with the school’s best all-time field goal percentage (64.8%), a number since eclipsed by Maliq Brown (69.8%), though Brown played just two seasons for the Orange.
McNamara liked Onuaku’s initiative, his varied career background. He liked his reputation around the DMV, an area of heavy recruiting interest. He called Onuaku, a Lanham, Maryland native, and pitched the opportunity.
“He knows the game. He communicates it well. And it was pretty clear that this was what he wanted to do,” McNamara said. “(I had) that relationship with him, first as a former teammate and friend, then player-coach when I came back as a GA. Just seeing a young guy that I know has a lot to offer that he wants to get into this, I felt lucky to be able to help him out.”
Onuaku, 36, is coming off a year as an assistant coach at powerhouse Gonzaga High School in Washington, D.C. There, he coached the big men.
He’d spent the previous year as an assistant coach for the Washington Wizards’ G League franchise, the Capital City Go-Go. When the Wizards fired their GM, Tommy Sheppard in April 2023, Onuaku said, most of the organization’s coaching staff was dismissed, too.
He took the Gonzaga job, but yearned to return to a full-time coaching gig. He remembered Siena from his Syracuse playing days. McNamara schooled him on the program’s facilities (the MVP Arena), its ardent fan base and its geographical position near New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and DC.
It was enough to sell Onuaku.
This will be his first college basketball coaching job. Naturally, he’s been assigned the Siena big men, a group that includes former Syracuse center Peter Carey.
Onuaku’s playing resume after college includes stints in the NBA, the G League and abroad. He carved out a 10-year career in professional basketball. During that career, he said, he rarely played for a position coach or a head coach that was a former big man. He believes his experience of him at that position sets him apart and will be an asset to college or pro teams.
“I may have had one or two coaches that could tell me what to do and show me at the same time,” he said. “And it’s very tough at times for bigs who have a coach who’s 6-feet tall trying to tell you how to do a block move and you’re looking at them like ‘that’s not going to work.’ But you do it because you respect your coach.”
McNamara said Siena will likely play a 5-out brand of basketball, the modern version of the game that values shooting at every position. But he believes there’s a place for big men to convert near the basketball. And Onuaku, he said, offers a blueprint for how it’s done.
“I still think those big guys need to be down on the block and have an arsenal of moves for when they get the ball from 8-feet in. No one that I played with as far as a true center had the type of moves that Arinze did, where he could carve out space, seal you, work early in the shot clock and create position, feel the paint on drives,” McNamara said . “To be able to work with somebody who can refine and retune those guys from 8-feet in, he’s as good as you can get at this level.”
Onuaku said he likes coaching. He appreciates seeing the growth of players he works with and the payoff when a move he taught translates to buckets in games.
Often, he said, he relates to players on a more personal level. He recounts for them the struggles he faced early in his Syracuse career and early in his pro career. He encourages them to talk through their own issues.
“I’m able to tap into all these guys at the places they are in their lives,” he said, “because I’ve been through all their situations.”
The Siena job will deposit Onuaku into a brand-new coaching universe.
He cites his ties to the DMV as an advantage, but college basketball recruiting in 2024 is a multi-cycled, multi-year investment in sources. It counts on the daily grind of sometimes decades-old relationships.
McNamara said he won’t “just throw him out there and tell him to figure it out.” He will introduce Onuaku to sources, he said, help him understand the personalities and the nuances of the recruiting trail.
It will likely be his toughest adjustment, McNamara said.
“He’s got a name in that (DMV) area and not just as a player but how he conducts himself, who he is as a person,” McNamara said. “Anyone who’s come across Arinze over the years always admires and respects him for the person he is. And in this business, that goes a long way, especially when you’re trying to recruit players. That stuff comes around.”
Onuaku plans to relocate to Albany in time for June workouts. He has been in the Capital Region a couple times to get a feel for the city and find someplace to live.
He’s looking forward to the next phase of his coaching career. It is particularly meaningful because he’ll be working for McNamara, a friend of him in his first season as a head coach.
“For him to leave Syracuse for that job is a big step of faith for him as well,” Onuaku said. “With Gerry, I have things that offset him as a coach and as a player. So why wouldn’t I want to help him succeed, which helps myself succeed also.
