Usually at a press conference, it’s the reporters asking the questions.

Yesterday afternoon, when Georgetown assistant coach Kevin Broadus was named the new BU men’s basketball coach, that wasn’t necessarily the case.

During his opening remarks, Broadus broke the ice by asking the school’s athletic director, Dr. Joel Thirer, if he could call him ‘Doc.’

And when Pipe Dream Sports got a chance to sit down with Broadus after the conference, his line of questioning continued.

My colleague, Ben Masur, asked the new coach, a renowned recruiter, what he thought of Canadian point guard Chretien Lukusa, the only player to have signed a national letter of intent for next season.

‘I don’t really know, what do you guys think of him?’ he asked me, Ben and sports editor Mark Macyk.

Having never seen Lukusa play, I jokingly responded that he was a ‘two-star recruit on Scout.com.’ I reassured him that the two-star rating was great for Binghamton: Andre Heard, perhaps the most talented player in Binghamton history, garnered a two-star ranking in 2004.

‘Two stars, eh?’ Broadus said, looking me square in the eye.

He paused.

‘What if I got a four-star guy?’

We three reporters laughed, mildly inappropriately. Broadus didn’t flinch.

‘We’d erect a statue of you outside the Events Center,’ Mark responded.

‘We’d rename this place ‘The KB Arena,’ I added.

The laughter subsided.

‘Who knows, maybe we’ll get a guy you wouldn’t expect to come here,’ Broadus continued.

The new coach made it clear that he was both physically and emotionally drained yesterday afternoon, running on one hour’s sleep, but he made his on-the-court goals extremely clear: ‘We want to be America East champs. Once they [the players] taste winning, it’s contagious.’

While the prospect of winning now isn’t out of the question ‘ ‘I would love to win it immediately,’ Broadus said ‘ the man deserves two or three years to let his recruiting abilities shine. It will be tough to judge in the fall of 2007, but for now, this seems like a four-star hire.

And if Broadus does develop the program as quickly as he hopes, nobody will be laughing.