Kentucky’s coaching staff and athletic director will make extra money off the performance the young Wildcats just delivered in each of the first two weekends of the 2014 NCAA tournament, culminating in Sunday’s Midwest Regional final victory over the Michigan Wolverines.
It therefore seems somehow inappropriate to put the focus of the moment on a coach and not a player. Yet, how can one avoid this?
Marcus Lee did come from nowhere to give Big Blue a huge lift inside Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Alex Poythress provided timely defensive plays near the rim to prevent Michigan from gaining leverage in the second half. Julius Randle was his typically imposing self. James Young played a highly efficient game. Aaron Harrison became a reborn player this March, never more so than in this contest.
These players — who make a lot of money that goes straight into the pockets of adults — deserve to have those bonuses land in their own wallets if fairness is something to aspire to in the athletic-industrial complex. Let that point ring loud and clear… and long through the evening.
Yet, the story of Kentucky’s improbable 8-seed arrival at the 2014 Final Four is most centrally a story of how a highly accomplished coach, his back to the wall near the end of an indisputably failed season, found a way to get his team to turn the light on just before it was too late. This bit of switch-flipping occurred between the ears and deep within the gut. It was a matter of both head and heart, both concentration and belief, in tandem with each other.
Someone had to do that.
It was the same someone who didn’t do that for four months, but then managed to do it in the two weeks that really mattered.
Call John Calipari a sorcerer all you want, but it has to be said that this is not the first time a masterful March magician has orchestrated a Big Blue revival.
In 2011, Kentucky — raw and young — made its way to the NCAA tournament as a 4 seed. It had to go through a 1 seed (Ohio State) before the Elite Eight. It had to beat a 2 seed (North Carolina) in the regional final. Sure enough, Calipari got his team to play mentally focused basketball at both ends of the floor, channeling athleticism into the feel and flow of competition while not sagging when negative in-game trends surfaced.
You could obviously draw some distinctions between that UK team and this one in 2014, beginning with the power and low-post prowess of the current Cats. Yet, the larger reality behind a Final Four run from a darkhorse seed position — namely, Calipari’s psychological work finally hitting the sweet spot after months of struggle — remains very much the same.
Understand this about championship-stage basketball: Opponents will land punches, and some shots won’t fall. In addition to the Xs and Os, players have to be ready and (more importantly) able to withstand negative turns in the road while being confident in shooting the ball. It’s a very fine line, one which emerges all the time in the NCAA tournament. Since these are 20-year-olds and not seasoned NBA veterans, it’s so much easier to see college players fall short of a hoped-for standard, and that’s what happened to Kentucky for four months.
These past two weeks and particularly on Sunday against Michigan, Kentucky met the standard.
What realization emerges from such a cold, hard, immutable, Big and Blue truth? Calipari changed the psychological dynamic inside the Kentucky locker room.
He’s been tight-lipped about the contents of his methods, but he has vaguely alluded to the changes he’s made in recent weeks. Obviously, they’ve worked. The important point is that the changes produced a team which was loose enough to have fun, but dedicated enough to put in the work needed to win games.
Cal hit the sweet spot — again, not for the first time in March after a season that didn’t quite come together in its totality entering the NCAAs.
It was one thing to see Kentucky go wild on the glass against Michigan, even without Willie Cauley-Stein. The Wildcats have big bodies to spare, with Marcus Lee and (on Friday against Louisville) Dakari Johnson seizing the spotlight. Seeing players with fresh legs become active on the glass over the course of a weekend doesn’t strike an observer as overwhelmingly surprising. (Lee’s total anonymity before his explosion against Michigan did indeed rate as an unexpected plot twist.)
What is truly remarkable about Kentucky’s run through each of the past three rounds in this tournament is that the Cats have beaten three big-name programs — all of which made the Final Four last season — with perimeter shooting. In each of these victories over Wichita State, Louisville, and Michigan, Kentucky has needed at least one if not two threes in the final minutes to nail down a win in a high-level basketball battle. Moreover, these threes in the Sweet 16 (against Louisville on Friday and Michigan on Sunday) did not come from James Young, the one semi-credible threat for Big Blue during the regular season. No, they came from Aaron Harrison, who was consistently unreliable as a three-point shooter during the regular season.
One of the great mysteries of college basketball is this notion of “shooting with confidence.” It’s elusive. It’s as thin as the air near Mount Everest. It can come and go just like that.
An open three in early February barely grazes the rim or hits the lower side of the rim. A contested hoist with 2.6 seconds left in a regional final splashes, and sends an 8 seed to the Final Four.
Kentucky’s shot selection a month ago was poor… not necessarily because open threes are bad (that’s neither inherently true or untrue), but because teams that can’t hit threes need to think about going to the rim first before retrying the long ball. Within a game, the “good shot-bad shot” calculus does (and should) change based on a combination of factors. Established shooters get more of a green light than unproven shooters when their shots aren’t going down. Aaron Harrison certainly wasn’t an established shooter; he took way too many bad shots during the regular season for that reason more than anything else.
It was John Calipari’s job, then, to find a way to transform Harrison’s outlook — not his shot mechanics — before this NCAA tournament. Giving Harrison confidence, not lectures or exhaustive technical seminars, is what Coach Cal needed to do.
We’re all grasping at an answer in terms of the specific buttons Cal pushed. We’re no longer in the dark, though, on the larger and simpler point: Cal did find an answer. He did unlock Harrison’s mind-body dualism. He did find the key to the Harrisons, to Marcus Lee, to Dakari Johnson, to all the non-Randle, non-Young members of his team.
It did take a long time for him to find the secret to success with this particular assortment of players, but when you’re at Kentucky or any other power program, your task is to find answers in March. Calipari — relentlessly, resourcefully, reliably — has done this once again.
The facts — especially another Final Four appearance — speak for themselves.
