Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

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  The first thing he learned at his new job was how little he knew. “I remember sitting in that first meeting with Thad and his guys and thinking, I have no idea what I’m doing,” Stevens says. “I played this game my whole life, but everything was foreign. I could see I had a lot to learn.”

  In many ways, Matta was the perfect boss for Stevens. Whereas Brad was by nature reserved, Matta was a ball of fire. At thirty-two, he was pretty young himself, and the two of them spent a lot of time together on and off the court. If Matta gave Stevens a small assignment like reorganizing the personnel book, Stevens would attack it like it was the most important thing he had ever done. With Tracy relocating to Ohio for law school, Brad was free to devote as many hours as he wanted to watching video, studying numbers, and learning the craft of coaching. It was basketball nerd heaven.

  The best thing Matta did for Stevens was assign him to work with Matta’s top assistant, Todd Lickliter. Lickliter had spent twelve years as a high school coach in Indiana before coming to Butler two years before. Stevens considered himself to be thorough and meticulous, but Lickliter took those habits to the extreme. He asked Stevens to go over box scores and statistics in search of any bit of information that might give Butler an edge. He instructed Stevens to type up his scouting reports and edit video packages. If the video wasn’t in the proper sequence, he would tell Stevens to cut it again. Back in the days when coaches performed this task using three videotape machines, it might take Stevens two hours to reorder a ten-minute clip. Looking back, Lickliter says if he realized how much time was involved, he might not have asked Stevens to make those minor changes. “But that’s the beauty about Brad. He’s not going to say anything,” Lickliter says. “You knew you could trust him. He wasn’t going to try to cut a corner.”

  There was an important principle at work. Lickliter liked to cite an age-old line from the man who apologizes for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a shorter one. He understood that a coach’s time with his players is finite, so it’s important to make every moment count. Stevens noticed that the players tended to gravitate toward Lickliter during practice. Such was the power of knowledge.

  In 2001, his first year at Butler, Stevens reached his dream of being part of the NCAA Tournament when the Bulldogs made the field and advanced to the second round. As a result, Matta was hired away by Xavier, and Lickliter was promoted to head coach. Lickliter worked efficiently and wanted his teams to play that way. If he had ninety minutes to practice but got his work done in fifty, then practice would end early. He wanted his players to be prepared, but he also wanted their minds clear and their legs fresh. In 2003, when the Bulldogs were in Birmingham preparing for an NCAA Tournament first-round game against Mississippi State, Lickliter spent an hour teaching the guys how to play zone defense, which they had not done all season. Then he took everyone to the zoo. The next day, Butler squeaked by Mississippi State, 47–46, and two days after that they beat Louisville to reach the Sweet Sixteen.

  By that time, Tracy had returned to Indianapolis to finish up her law degree. She and Brad were married in the summer of 2003. In 2007, Lickliter again led Butler to the Sweet Sixteen. As a result, he was hired to be the head coach at Iowa. Lickliter had a young coaching staff, and most schools in that situation would look elsewhere to hire a successor. Butler, however, is not most schools. It has a culture of excellence that dates back to the early twentieth century. The athletic director, Barry Collier, is a Butler graduate who was the head basketball coach there for eleven years. He appreciated the value of hiring from within.

  The only question was whether any of Lickliter’s young assistants were ready. For his part, Stevens didn’t think he would be seriously considered. He had already packed his suitcases into the trunk of his car and was prepared to follow Lickliter to Iowa. When Collier called to say he wanted to interview him for the head job, Stevens pulled over, fished a suit out of his trunk, and got dressed standing by the side of the road. (“I probably could have gotten arrested for public indecency,” he says.) During two long interviews, Collier was taken by how thoroughly Stevens had thought things through. “He had some coaching materials that he had organized and drawn up and shared with me that were indicative of his organizational skills,” Collier recalls. “All the assistants were impressive, but Brad stuck out. He seemed to be the most ready, and the way he expressed himself gave me confidence he could do the job.”

  On April 4, 2007, Stevens was introduced to the public as the new head coach at Butler University. He would be the second-youngest basketball coach in all of Division I, and by far the youngest-looking. His wife believed he could handle the coaching part, but she was less sure about how he would conduct himself with the media. That changed as soon as Brad stepped to the microphone. As he spoke, Tracy stood a few feet away and marveled at her husband’s poise, eloquence, and confidence. It was as if he had been doing it his whole life.

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  Like most coaches, Stevens remembers his losses more vividly than his wins, so it’s no surprise that he credits his very first loss for delivering another important piece of knowledge.

  It happened in the Bulldogs’ eighth game. The Bulldogs were undefeated heading into their first Horizon League matchup at Wright State. As his players struggled to put the Raiders away in the second half, Stevens let his temper get away from him. They lost, 43–42. “That one was on me,” he says. “I was on edge, and our players were playing tight because of that. I told myself afterwards, You can’t be like that. So that was a good learning experience.”

  One of the best pieces of advice Stevens got that first season came from Sean Miller, who had the unenviable job of following Matta at Xavier after he was hired away by Ohio State. “You’ve got to be yourself,” Miller said. That was good advice, but it wasn’t easy to follow. Butler had been to two Sweet Sixteens in the previous five years, which was astounding for a school from a “midmajor” conference with a sparse recruiting budget and limited television exposure. Though the team’s arena, Hinkle Fieldhouse, is a shrine that is listed as a national historic landmark, it was a far cry from the gleaming modern arenas that the big-time schools were building. In many respects, however, Stevens saw this as a benefit. If a recruit could walk through Hinkle Fieldhouse and still want to play for Butler, Stevens knew he was coming for the proper reasons.

  Stevens and his staff were forced to use their shoestring budget to scavenge for just the right players. “We tried to identify kids with intrinsic motivation,” he says. In his never-ending quest for knowledge, he read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which includes a chapter explaining that the best hockey players in Canada tend to be born in the first three months of the year. That meant they were the oldest among their peers, which gave them early access to quality competition and coaching. Stevens piggybacked on that notion and looked for recruits who were born between March and June, making them the youngest of their grades. He figured that meant they had more potential to grow into their bodies. While emphasizing that he does not have enough data to fully validate his theory, he does point to two success stories: Kam Woods, who was born on April 22 and went on to become the school’s second all-time leading rebounder; and Gordon Hayward, who was born on March 23 and was the ninth player selected in the 2010 NBA draft.

  Stevens had come a long way from being the wide-eyed greenhorn at that first meeting with Matta. Stevens’s father remembers watching a practice that first season in which Brad was preparing his Bulldogs for a game at Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Mark did not understand most of what Stevens was saying, except for a sequence in which he instructed his guys to leave one of the Wisconsin–Milwaukee shooters alone because “he is only shooting 18 percent from the corner.” Sure enough, the next day, the players did as their coach instructed and won the game.

  Stevens’s first team won 30 games and lost
in overtime to Tennessee in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, but that was with an older roster full of players whom Lickliter had recruited. The real challenge came when Stevens had to replenish the program himself. His first recruiting class as a head coach featured Hayward, a skinny but skilled 6´8˝ forward from Brownsburg, Indiana; Shelvin Mack, a tough-minded point guard from Lexington, Kentucky; and Ronald Nored, a 6´0˝ guard from Homewood, Alabama. Nored was a preacher’s son who was drawn to Stevens after he drove 480 miles from Indianapolis to give his pitch and drove back to Indy later that same day.

  Nored had told Stevens he wanted to be a basketball coach someday, and he sensed from the start that Stevens would help him achieve that goal. Nored will never forget the time he walked by Stevens’s office during his senior year and the coach invited him to sit with him and study how to manage two-for-one situations, when a team takes a quick shot in the final minute to ensure that it will get a second possession before time runs out. “The best thing about him is that he’s so real. It’s not like he’s trying to fake his way through just to get you to like him,” Nored says. “And he’s such a great communicator that he doesn’t have to scream and yell. He’s not going to hide the truth, but he’s going to do it in a way that builds you up and makes you want to get better.”

  On the other hand, Nored can offer testimony on Stevens’s competitive intensity. Nored was a limited offensive player, so Stevens needed him to be his toughest, most resilient defender. During a first-round game against Murray State in the 2010 NCAA Tournament, Stevens called time out because Nored was getting lit up by the Racers’ outstanding shooting guard, Isaiah Canaan. Holding a clipboard that listed Murray State’s players, Stevens turned to his assistants in the huddle and shouted, “Is there anybody on this board who Ron Nored can guard?”

  Butler is a rigorous academic school, but unlike many college coaches, Stevens did not steer his players into easy majors. Their schedules were so loaded with physics labs and engineering exams that the only time he could get them together for practice was at six o’clock in the morning. Hinkle being Hinkle, the place was freezing in the winter at that time of day. The players could often see their breath. When they complained, Stevens would remind them that being tired was no excuse for not performing. “Someday you’re all going to be fathers,” he said. “Your baby is going to be crying at three in the morning, and your wife is going to want you to feed him. You may be tired, but you still have to be a good dad.”

  Another player who enjoyed significant growth under Stevens’s tutelage was Matt Howard, a 6´8˝ power forward from Connersville, Indiana. Howard was good enough to earn a scholarship offer from Purdue, a Big Ten power, but not good enough for the Purdue staff to prioritize him. Stevens was all in from the start, and his persistence eventually won Howard over. Stevens was used to having to utilize undersized big men, so he tapped into Howard’s agility and toughness. He also loved Howard’s intrinsic motivation. Howard was the kind of player who would dive into the stands to try to save a ball from going out of bounds even if his team was winning by 24 points in the second half, which he did.

  Stevens encouraged his players to grow by straying out of their comfort zones, so much so that he often ended individual workouts with ten minutes where they could try funky things they’d never think of doing in games. The coaches referred to those periods as “dream time,” and in Howard’s case, that meant hoisting three-pointers. He went from not taking a single attempt as a freshman to shooting nearly 40 percent on 133 attempts as a senior. Show up, work hard, get better, persist. That was the Butler Way.

  An opposing coach inside the Horizon League once described Stevens’s teams to me as having “Ivy League smarts combined with military academy toughness.” Stevens likes to refer to Lickliter’s quote that “toughness is doing the next right thing,” but his players wouldn’t have had that quality if he didn’t emphasize it each day. He even had the letters TGHT stitched onto their game shorts. They stood for “The Game Honors Toughness.” During his first season as head coach, he named all five seniors as co-captains. It was the right thing to do for that team, but as the years progressed Stevens believed that naming a few players as captains disempowered the rest of the team. He rarely assigned captains again.

  Butler steamrolled through the 2009–10 Horizon League with an 18–0 record, but though they entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 5 seed, few so-called experts (including yours truly) pegged them as a serious Final Four threat. That started to change as they defeated UTEP, Murray State, and No. 1–seeded Syracuse to reach the Elite Eight. The Bulldogs’ collective authenticity was a major advantage in those games. They knew they weren’t going to “out-athlete” their opponents, so they would have to outsmart them and out-tough them. They managed tempo and guarded with intelligent ferocity. In the Elite Eight, they faced a Kansas State team that had averaged 79.7 points on 45 percent shooting during the season. Butler held the Wildcats to 56 points on 39 percent and won by seven points. That made the thirty-three-year-old Stevens the youngest coach to take his team to the Final Four since Bob Knight took Indiana there in 1973 at the age of thirty-two.

  It was remarkable enough that this humble little midmajor program with the baby-faced coach could make it to the game’s biggest stage. Adding to the Hollywood storyline was that the Final Four was being held that year in Indianapolis. After the team got home, Stevens had the team bus cruise by Lucas Oil Stadium so his players could savor the moment. From there, he fell back into his routine, running early-morning practices and bivouacking himself in his office so he could study the video and stats. Even after his team edged Michigan State in a dramatic win in Saturday’s semifinal, Stevens stuck to the script. On the morning of the title-game matchup against Duke, his players attended classes, just like always.

  The final game was a classic. Butler appeared poised to prevail right up until Hayward’s halfcourt attempt clanked off the rim at the buzzer, enabling Duke to escape with a 61–59 win.

  Much of Butler’s team’s core returned for the 2010–11 season, which was a blessing and a curse. The team may still have been technically a midmajor one in the Horizon League, but the Bulldogs were faced with big-time expectations. That took a toll. The season appeared to be headed off the rails after they lost three out of four games to fall to 14–9. After the team arrived at their hotel in Cleveland for a road game, Mack asked the coaches to leave so he could address his teammates. “Okay,” Stevens said, “but make sure whatever you say, you better start with yourself.” Mack challenged everyone to rediscover their underdog, aggressive mentality. Stevens, meanwhile, looked for ways to alleviate the pressure. In early February, he called Howard into his office to remind him that whatever happened the rest of the season, his legacy as the best four-year player in school history was secured. He invoked the metaphor of the trampoline, where the lowest point catapults the jumper to his highest level. “Let’s just enjoy this last month,” Stevens told him. From there, the team went on a 14-game win streak that didn’t end until the NCAA championship game, where Butler lost to UConn.

  Despite that ending, the consecutive championship game appearances constituted one of the most unlikely achievements in the history of the sport. Lots of people figured their coach was some kind of genius, but it takes much more than that to get a team to Us. Stevens made it happen because he worked hard, demonstrated character, empathized with his players, acquired the requisite knowledge, and applied an authentic servant’s leadership. He may have been young, but he was very good at what he did. And he really, really hated to lose.

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  Stevens could have had just about any college job he wanted. Collier gave him several new contracts with pay raises—Stevens had no agent besides Tracy, a contract lawyer—but Brad never really felt the pull of the big time. When he turned down UCLA in 2013, Tracy started to believe he really was never going to leave.

  It is qui
te possible that if Stevens had stayed at Butler, he would have taken the Indiana job after the school fired its head coach, Tom Crean, in the spring of 2017. That aside, the only times he let his mind wander to other destinations were when he thought about the NBA. He had been intrigued by the pro game ever since he attended a coaching clinic conducted by then Florida coach Billy Donovan shortly after Stevens was named head coach at Butler. The clinic featured several NBA assistants. As they started to explain how they scouted opponents and developed players, Stevens was amazed by their advanced methods. The pros were way ahead of anything he had seen at the college level. For a basketball nerd like him, coaching in the NBA seemed like the ultimate learning experience.

  After Hayward and Mack entered the league, Stevens bought the NBA’s television package so he could keep track of his guys. He grew ever more fascinated by the pro game and looked for ways to bring an NBA methodology to his own program. In 2012, he became the first college coach to hire a full-time staffer devoted to analytics, Drew Cannon. He had discovered Cannon’s work while Cannon was living in his parents’ basement in Raleigh, North Carolina, and working for a national recruiting service. Stevens made Cannon his graduate manager. Though Stevens bristles when people call him an “analytics guy”—“99.9 percent of the time, the numbers don’t drive decisions, they validate them”—he also concedes that most of the time he trusts the data. Alex Barlow recalls a game at Saint Joseph’s during the 2012–13 season when Hawks guard Chris Wilson made four three-pointers in the first five minutes. Stevens had told his guys to leave Wilson unguarded because he came into the game shooting 28 percent from behind the arc. Rather than making an adjustment, Stevens opted to stick to the game plan and wait for Wilson to revert to the mean. Sure enough, Wilson only made one three-pointer the rest of the game, and Butler went on to win by six.