Rick Pitino has always expressed a firm belief in the power of positive thinking, but at Madison Square Garden three months ago, he sounded almost delusional.

“I am really happy with my guys,” said Pitino, the Louisville men’s basketball coach, after his team lost to Arizona in the Jimmy V Classic. “I see great potential in this basketball team, and if we continue to grow we are going to be an outstanding basketball team.”

It was hard for anyone else to see how Louisville could become “outstanding.” The loss dropped the Cardinals to 2–2, and the year before they finished 6–10 in the Big East. And yet as the calendar turns to March, few teams are playing as well as Louisville. After beating Connecticut Sunday, the Cardinals have won five straight and are 11–4 in the Big East with one game left, against Seton Hall on Sunday. A few months after the Cardinals looked like they were going nowhere, they now look like they could go to the Final Four.

Although Pitino hasn’t coached in New York since he left the Knicks for Kentucky in 1989, he’s a New York native and still recruits heavily in the area. Four players on Louisville’s roster come from New York or New Jersey, including freshman Derrick Caracter, who is both Louisville’s most talented player and, for most of the season, its most disappointing.

Pitino benched Caracter for most of the season and said he lacked the work ethic necessary to be an elite player. But Pitino fashions himself a master motivator, and whatever speeches he gave Caracter, they seem to have worked. Caracter has lost 57 pounds and finally looks more like a power forward than an offensive lineman, and his increased playing time has coincided with Louisville’s improvement. Caracter’s emergence relieves the burden on starting center David Padgett, a talented player who rarely plays more than 25 minutes a game because his two surgically repaired knees won’t allow it.

Like all Pitino-coached teams, this Louisville club makes ample use of the three-point shot. But while freshman Jerry Smith leads the Big East in three-point shooting, at 48.5%, poor shooting has plagued the Cardinals, who rank 11th in the Big East in field goal percentage. Louisville’s inconsistent shooting hasn’t been its downfall, though, because the Cardinals are executing Pitino’s 2–3 zone defense perfectly. Louisville’s opponents shoot just 40.2%, and the Cardinals force 15.8 turnovers a game. Edgar Sosa, a freshman from Rice High School in Harlem, leads the team with 42 steals.

With the stifling defense the Cardinals are playing, they have a good chance of being the outstanding team Pitino said they would become. No one who knows Pitino’s history should be surprised. Everywhere he has coached — whether it’s the Knicks and the Boston Celtics in the NBA or Providence and Kentucky in the NCAA — his teams have done the opposite of what was expected.

Pitino’s most successful coaching efforts have come out of nowhere. In 1985, Providence College hired Pitino, a brash 32-year-old Knicks assistant, as its head coach. Two years later, Providence reached the Final Four, and the Knicks brought Pitino back as the youngest head coach in the NBA. The Knicks had hit rock bottom, failing to win even 25 games in any of their three previous seasons. As successful as Pitino had been in college, many fans and commentators thought he was in over his head in the NBA. But he took the Knicks to the playoffs in his first season and to their first Atlantic Division title since 1971 in his second. Pitino had the team heading in the right direction.

And then, just when Pitino had Knicks fans’ expectations high, he left for Kentucky. No basketball team, college or professional, had lower expectations than Kentucky, a distinguished program devastated by NCAA sanctions following a recruiting scandal. Pitino so flourished at Kentucky that by the mid-1990s he was the hottest coach in basketball. So when he took over the Boston Celtics in 1997, he was supposed to be the savior of the NBA’s most storied franchise. Instead, he went 102–146 and never reached the playoffs. His tenure is best remembered for his admonishing fans to lower their expectations: “Larry Bird is not walking through that door,” he said. For Pitino, who always relished a challenge, it was a rare public acknowledgment that the expectations on him were too high.

He resigned 10 months after that outburst and became the coach at Louisville two months later. No college coach had a better résumé than Pitino, but the experience in Boston had taken so much out of him that he didn’t exude the energy that had always been his trademark. But Pitino steadily built the Louisville program and led the Cardinals to the Final Four in 2005, making him the first coach to reach the Final Four with three different schools.

And then came the disappointing 2006 season and the rocky start this season, and the expectations were low for Pitino again. But when he said three months ago that he saw great potential in his team, he was right. In a college basketball season when all the top teams have flaws, a Louisville could make a run to the Final Four. That would be just another unexpected development in a coaching career full of surprises.

Mr. Smith covers basketball for AOLSportsBlog.com.