The Hoosiers and Buckeyes will take short bus rides from their friendly confines this weekend and venture into two basketball snake pits. Mid-majors in name and recruiting ratings only, Southern Illinois and Butler enter Saturday’s games as programs built on the exotic notion of taking good, but not spectacular high school basketball players and coaching them into regular members of the top twenty-five and teams Goliath loathes, but often sees in the brackets of March.
Chris Lowery and Brad Stevens, two coaching spring chickens at thirty-five and thirty respectively, are the latest stewards of these programs with now longstanding reputations for purist basketball excellence. While these two programs have been winning with consistency, if not great fanfare, for a decade, last season’s Sweet Sixteen berths were big enough splashes that even the myopic basketball media couldn’t look away. It helped that both teams’ final games last season were valiant near misses against giants. Southern Illinois put the kind of fright into NBA talent-stuffed Kansas that had Bill Self’s wig slipping in flop-sweat. Butler, along with Purdue, gave National Champion Florida its toughest game of the tournament.
Guards Make Good Coaches
Lowery has been a Saluki since 1990 when he began what would be four years as the program’s starting point guard. He was an effective coach on the floor, leading the team to an 86-37 record and four consecutive NCAA tournament appearances. Now translating that same toughness to his players, he is fresh off a spring in which he was wooed by several high profile suitors and a summer in which he signed a 7-year, salary tripling contract extension to remain in Carbondale.
Also a former backcourter, Stevens remains the all-time leading scorer at Zionsville High (IN) and was all-conference and a team captain at DePauw. After six years beside Todd Lickliter, and with all five starters returning from last season, the program’s transition has been seamless. Stevens enters the weekend with a perfect 6-0 as a head coach, a Great Alaskan Shootout title under his belt and with it the right to say he’s beaten Bob Knight.
Trade Secrets, Burn After Reading
The loyalty demonstrated by Lowery and Stevens, hardly an abundant commodity these days, is another secret of these programs’ success. As the odd logic goes, it is better to hire someone who truly knows and loves the program than to bring in a basketball mercenary who doesn’t know Saluki from dachsund or Bulldog from lhasa apso. SIU and Butler find their coaches in the simplest and most organic manner. They promote assistants.
Another secret of the approach is to recruit not by trawling the McDonald’s All-American game and every five-star camp, but by smart identification of good high school ballplayers who are also good fits for the program. And then, shockingly, the program develops its players to the maximum. Of course, this requires good basketball teaching. Assess the developmental curves of any of the key players on both rosters from high school to now. The graphs are steep.
For both programs the lessons often begin and end with defense. Last season Lowery placed three of his players on the All-Missouri Valley Defensive Team and held opponents to 56.2 points per game (3rd nationally). Butler was nearly as staunch, allowing only 57.1 points per game (5th).
This kind of defense is only possible when the coach has convinced every man on the roster of the unglamorous appeal of getting into his opponent’s jersey for forty minutes, that defense is the element of the game easiest to control and make consistent night to night, that five guys playing deep-knee, help defense can take the yeast out of many a foe. Narcissism finds no purchase on these teams. You don’t hear these coaches or players talking about needing good offense to motivate their defense.
Keeping opponents locked down to this degree is also highly dependent on playing disciplined, tempo-controlling offense and ruthless attention to the details. Salient examples of these programs’ emphasis on playing smart and maximizing opportunities are Butler’s 9.5 turnovers per game last season (1st nationally) and the work both teams do from the charity stripe, SIU currently at 80.2% (4th nationally), Butler at 77.6% (15th). Players with the work ethic of A.J. Graves tend to help these kind of numbers. Graves missed 8 free throws all last season in 153 attempts.
To The Pits!
Both SIU and Butler have rosters that are uncanny mirrors of each other with only one player above 6′8″ between them and a host of well taught, multi-skilled role players. The Buckeyes and Hoosiers counter with height, strength, and exponentially greater degrees of athleticism. The test for Matta and Sampson’s teams will be if these unmistakable roster advantages translate to victory.
Can Matta find a way to exploit the talent of his latest seven-footer against a team that shouldn’t be able to easily answer his unique combination of size and skill? Against committed defenses, big men, even ones as talented as Koufos, are dependent on an offensive structure and game plan that gets him the ball in good spots on the floor to succeed.
Matta’s propensity for simply spreading the floor and letting his athletes frolic and shoot whenever the mood strikes yields some impressive nights when the shots are raining or the opponent’s defense is token. Chances are Stevens will have a gameplan and Matta will have to do some coaching Saturday night. Or in lieu of coaching Buckeye faithful can hope their boys shoot the lights out.
Similarly, Sampson’s club on paper should be able to run SIU off the floor. Certainly Tim Floyd’s bunch had a good recent outing against the Salukis. It will be interesting to see how Lowery contends with the special problems that uber-frosh Eric Gordon presents. Will Gordon get off to the tune of his nation’s best 27.3 points per game? If so, will that be enough? Something says it’s going to again take more than one player’s explosive offense to beat the Salukis Saturday night.
Kudos to Matta and Sampson for having the guts to schedule these hostile dates. These are the kind of good tests in tough environments that can look great in victory, but will be labeled, unfairly or not, as mini-upsets if the result is contrary. Even if SIU and Butler are too good and have been this good for too long a time to be considered big underdogs, teams with the talent the Buckeyes and Hoosiers are bringing to the table should win. But as many talented teams littered in the wake of SIU and Butler’s democratic, well coached basketball attack have learned, talent is not always what matters most.
