Month: January 2018

Being a head basketball coach in the ACC is a tough gig.

Not just anybody can do it.

Buzz Williams, I’m prepared to say, can do it. Of course the evidence was strong even before Williams took over at Virginia Tech in March of 2014, based on the run he had at Marquette.

With tonight’s 83-75 victory over Wake at Joel Coliseum, Williams’ Hokies are 13-4 overall and 2-2 in conference play. They made the NCAA last year, finishing 22-11 overall and 10-8 in the ACC. They made the NIT the season before that, finishing 20-15 overall and 10-8 in the ACC.

Williams had to dig out of a mess at Virginia Tech, and his first team finished 11-16 and 2-16. He has spent the last three seasons proving what he proved during his six years at Marquette, where the Golden Eagles made the NCAA Tournament five of those years.

The man can coach.

Danny Manning, hired at Wake Forest two weeks after Williams arrived in Blacksburg, may or may not prove to be ACC coaching timber. He’s now coached 112 games at Wake, and it’s still anybody’s guess.

The Deacons did make the NCAA Tournament last season, finishing 19-14 overall and 9-9 inside the conference. But with tonight’s setback, Manning’s fourth team at Wake Forest is 8-8 and 1-3 in conference play.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Deacons are facing a murderous stretch during which they will play Duke twice, Virginia, Louisville, Florida State, Clemson and Miami – all over the next eight games.

Gulp.

I thought at the time that Ron Wellman, Wake’s director of athletics, took a flyer when he hired Manning in early April of 2014.

Yes, Manning had coached Tulsa to the NCAA Tournament the previous year, and yes he was one of the great players in the history of college basketball over the second half of the 20^th century.

But he had only two seasons of head coaching experience, both spent at Tulsa. And close scrutiny of his time there shows that his first team was 17-16 overall, and his second was 10-12 in early February before getting hot in time to win 11 of its last 12 and finish 21-13.

So the case can be made – which I’m getting ready to make – that Manning was hired at Wake based on a six-week run at Tulsa. That and the fact he was one of the great players in the history of college basketball over the second half of the 20^th century.

Tonight, the Deacons lost because they couldn’t exploit their size advantage inside. Virginia Tech has only regular taller than 6-6, and that one player, the 6-10 Kerry Blackshear, was limited to 21 minutes because of foul trouble.

There’s so much that goes into being a successful head coach in the ACC, and a big part of it is knowing how to use your personnel to its greatest advantage. And Manning has said repeatedly that a key to this season – and every season – will be the number of paint touches his big players get.

Tonight, playing against one of the smallest teams they’ll see this ACC season, Doral Moore had five paint touches in the first half and six in the second. He had none in the final nine minutes.

He did finish with 11 field-goal attempts, but had to crash the boards for six offensive rebounds to do so.

I watched the game, so I know how hot Brandon Childress got late. And I know Bryant Crawford followed two straight 3-pointers by Childress with one of his own.

But if anybody for Wake even took a look inside down the stretch, I missed it.

For Wake to beat Virginia Tech, that can’t happen.

Being a good coach isn’t good enough to make it in the ACC. To make it in the ACC, especially at places like Virginia Tech and Wake, it takes a great coach.

During his 112 games as Wake’s head coach, Danny Manning has shown no signs whatsoever of being a great coach.

I’m still looking, but I’ve yet to see it.

“Basketball is a beautiful game when the five players on the court play with one heartbeat.’’ – Dean Smith.

Ahead of the pack on a two-on-none, Bryant Crawford made a beeline for the basketball for a layup in Wake’s 77-71 loss at Boston College today.

I have no way of knowing if the teammate running alongside Crawford, freshman Chaundee Brown, had any problem whatsoever with Crawford’s play.

I have no way of knowing if Coach Danny Manning had any problem with Crawford’s play.

But I do know there was one person who would have had a serious problem with Crawford’s play, and that was Dean Smith.

My formative years as a sportswriter were spent in Chapel Hill, where I was lucky enough to learn much of what I know about the game of college basketball from Smith. And I can still plainly remember his biting reaction when a Tar Heel would take it to the basket himself instead of passing off to an open teammate.

It didn’t happen often, and when it did, it rarely happened again. Smith recognized that selflessness is the adhesion that holds a team together.

“Basketball, more than any team sport, is a team game,’’ Smith said. “(It’s) about thousands of small, unselfish acts, the sacrifices on part of the players that result in team building.’’

Smith also said that “good people are happy when something good happens to someone else.’’

None of this is to say that Bryant Crawford is a bad person, or even a particularly selfish player. I do know he has a warrior’s heart. I’ve always admired his drive, his competitive spirit.

And I’m certainly not hanging this ACC loss on him or his failure to pass the ball to a teammate for an open basket.

But what it appeared from watching the game on television was that the thought never occurred to him. And, maybe it’s just me and Dean Smith, but, in my mind, it should have.

Crawford ended up getting his today, scoring a season-high 24 points. But it took him 24 field-goal attempts – of which he hit eight – to do so. That was twice as many field-goal attempts than the next guy, who happened to be Brown with 12.

I recognize there was more of a load on Crawford with Keyshawn Woods being out with an injured knee. But I went into this game wondering if the closing of one door would open up another for a player like Brown, a highly-prized freshman who, going into the game, was averaging a paltry 6.8 points a game.

So there was cause for some excitement when Brown nailed four 3-pointers in the first half for 14 first-half points. But Brown had yet to get a shot in the second half when the offending (at least to me) play took place, and Crawford motored to the basket on a two-on-none.

If Crawford had given it up to Brown for a layup there, would it have gotten Brown going again? It’s anybody’s guess.

But everyone can see that the Deacons are going to need more from Brown to have the season they want.

Brown did make a couple of 3-pointers late to finish with 20, so all might be good there. Wake lost this game, despite playing defense well enough to get stops on 40 of 76 Eagle possessions, because the Deacons shot just 29 percent in the second half. Nor did getting outscored by 15 points at the line help the cause.

There may be people reading this who feel I’m making way too much out of one play. They may be right.

But I do feel it’s something that bears watching. I know one coach who is no longer with us who would be watching.

On this point, I feel I’m in good company.

There’s so much to be said for being 65.

Health obviously comes an issue, especially for a man of considerable girth who has spent 50 years wearing out his wild side. And folks my age don’t read the obituaries without a palpable sense of trepidation.

Live as long as I have and you’ve lost – and continue losing daily — so many folks who have been on this journey through space and time with us.

And that never stops hurting.

But the rewards are many. Living this long gives one a chance to finally figure some things out.

Living this long also means you’ve crossed paths with so many people, many of whom you’ve gotten to know really, really well. And lucky me for living in an age of mass and social media where I’m able to keep up with so many of them from afar.

Rarely do I sit down to watch a sporting event on television these days that I don’t know somebody in the game. It can be a player, but more often these days it’s a coach I came across during my years covering ACC football and basketball.

The ones I usually know best are those who came through Wake, where I rode the Deacons’ beat for the Winston-Salem Journal from 1992 through this past August. And two I know really well – Chris Mack and Jeff Battle – are coaching their teams against each other as I write this.

Mack, the head coach at Xavier these past 10 seasons, was an assistant for Skip Prosser at Wake in Skip’s first three seasons of 2001-02, 2002-03 and 2003-04 It’s has been fun to see how well he has done, coaching the Musketeers (where Prosser also flourished) to a No. 2 seed – highest in school history – in 2015-16, the season he was named national coach of the year by the U.S. Basketball Writers, CBS Sports and Basketball Times.

Mack left his mark at Wake, mostly for his hand in helping Prosser develop the marketing scheme of tye-dye shirts and a Deacon riding a motorcycle that, for some tired reason, persists today.

To paraphrase Richard III, an idea, an idea, my kingdom for an idea.

At Wake, Mack had a real edge about him. You can still see it today, especially when he plays cross-town rival Cincinnati. But the years have smoothed that edge out a bit, and he has grown to the point he’s one of the premier coaches in the college game.

Wake played Xavier regularly in the Skip Prosser Classic, so pretty much every year I’d call Chris before writing my advance. We’d discuss the game coming up, but we’d also catch up on families and all our mutual acquaintances.

I did get a kick after Wake beat the Musketeers in 2013 when Mack – his sharp edge showing through – kept his troops across the hall in the visitors’ locker room at Joel Coliseum longer than it took me to write my game story.

Battle, meanwhile, is now an assistant for his good friend Ed Cooley at Providence. Jeff was at Wake Forest from 2001-02 through 2013-14, where he was an assistant to three coaches – Prosser, Dino Gaudio and Jeff Bzdelik.

He’s a bit reticent by nature, and I didn’t get to know Jeff that well the first half-dozen or so years around.

But over the years I was around when Battle’s wife, Joyce, died of cancer. I was around when Prosser, his mentor and close friend passed. Shared experiences pull people together and the better I got to know Jeff the better I liked him.

I felt for him in 2011 when Cooley, upon being named head coach at Providence, tried to get Jeff to join him. I knew how badly Jeff wanted to take Cooley up on his offer, but Jordan, his son, was going into his senior year at Mount Tabor High School.

And being the father he is, Jeff wasn’t going to pull Jordan out of his comfort zone during his last year of high school.

Danny Manning hired his own staff upon arrival for the 2014-15 season, leaving Jeff on the sidelines for a year. But by the time a position came open in Providence, Jordan was already at upperclassman at East Carolina and Jeff was able to head north.

Jeff Battle is one of the really good guys I got to know over my coaching career, so I pull for Providence hard against whomever the Friars are playing.

That is, of course, unless they’re playing Xavier, and then my allegiances are decidedly split between two good friends.

There is so much to be said for being 65.

It took six tries, but Wake finally gave Jim Boeheim something to really whine about tonight at Joel Coliseum.

Known almost as much over the years for his bellyaching as his Hall-of-Fame coaching acumen, Boeheim was actually, best I could tell, on his best behavior after the Deacons beat Syracuse 73-67 for their first ACC victory. No grousing about the calls. No grumbling about having to eat at a Denny’s. No we-wuz-robbed kvetching at all, at least none that I could detect listening to the post-game video provided so graciously by the Syracuse Post-Standard.

People I know who know Boeheim say he’s a prince of a guy. And you certainly don’t have to read this to know he’s one of the greatest college basketball coaches ever. His 915-360 record, all of it fashioned at Syracuse, his alma mater, assures his spot in the sport’s pantheon.

Not only that, but I might, in a weak moment, even admit that I’ve enjoyed Boeheim’s acidic, dripping sarcasm on certain occasions. We might have heard some tonight but, again, not being there in person, I couldn’t be sure.

Maybe he was ripping his guards when asked about his team’s paltry nine assists. Or maybe he was just explaining that passing is not this team’s thing.

“We don’t get assists,’’ Boeheim. “We dribble-drive mostly, and try to score that way.’’

Tonight the Deacons beat Syracuse for the first time by containing the dribble-drive well enough to get stops on 20 of the Orange’s 35 second-half possessions. What’s more, they allowed Syracuse only six offensive rebounds.

The Orange, a team that can hurt you as bad on the second shot as the first, managed only 11 second-chance points. Coach Danny Manning of Wake will tell you that’s too many, but he knows that this night he didn’t get beat on the boards.

He’ll also tell you his team won the hard way, by playing the second half without leading scorer Keyshawn Woods and most of the final 10 minutes without center Doral Moore. Woods injured his knee in the first half, and his availability for Saturday’s game at BC may or may not have been determined – but wasn’t revealed. And Moore picked up his fourth foul with 10:36 left and sat the next eight minutes.

Earlier the Deacons were losing games at the defensive end, especially in the second half and especially, especially down the stretch. So Manning has to be encouraged to see the Deacons make a second-half stand for the second game in a row. The Deacons got 19 stops on 36 possessions Saturday at North Carolina, which means the last two teams have scored on just 44 percent of their second-half possessions.

If Wake plays defense that well at BC and as the season progresses, it might even be playing games that matter come March. Given the pratfall out of the gates, that would be some accomplishment.

I did like the way Manning mixed in the zone tonight, but I noticed that at winning time he went man and the Deacons responded by getting stops on seven of the final 10 possessions.

Wake’s three biggest offense plays, in the mind of Boeheim as well as my own, were the three 3-pointers out of the left corner, the first two by Bryant Crawford and the third by Chaundee Brown. Just when I was wondering what all the fuss was about this Brown guy, he nailed that trey for a 55-53 lead with 4 ½ minutes to go.

He even acted like he meant to make it, impressive for a freshman who had missed all five of his earlier shots from the floor.

Baskets by Terrence Thompson (off a nice feed by Brown) and Brandon Childress put the Deacons ahead to stay for the final two minutes, though a well-placed mic might have picked up the teeth-gnashing on the Wake bench when knock-dead free-throw shooters like Mitchell Wilbekin, Bryant Crawford and Childress kept missing free throws.

I thought Wake had made a mistake by inbounding to Olivier Sarr with 19 seconds left in a two-point game.

But Sarr sure showed me by draining both, then hitting two more with seven seconds left for good measure.

Manning and his players had good reason to be feeling pretty good when walking out the back door of the Joel in the bitter winter wind. It’s not every day, after all, that Wake beats Syracuse in basketball.

Before tonight, it wasn’t any day.