Christen Cunningham sat at a table at Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse last spring and watched as Dino Gaudio and Chris Mack conducted a coaching clinic with silverware.



The fork in Gaudio’s hand was Chris Paul, who played at Wake Forest in the early 2000s when Gaudio and Mack were assistants there. And Mack, the first-year Louisville coach who had just hired Gaudio as one of his assistants, explained how they used the fork — er, Paul — in specific ball-screen situations. They talked about angles and screens they would employ to take advantage of Cunningham’s court vision and passing.



“And I’m just there thinking, Man, Coach Gaudio’s got this fork and Coach Mack is going into detail, telling me about the ball-screen actions,” Cunningham says, recalling the scene with a smile. “These guys are serious.”



The truth was, Louisville searched and searched for guards in the graduate transfer market in the days...