by Bob Hurley
And they were. Turned out we were also one of the best teams they would face all year, so it was a stalemate-type matchup on both sides of the ball.
The game started out as a defensive battle. We were up at halftime by three or four baskets, but it was one of those close games; we couldn’t get any kind of separation on the scoreboard, and Tyreke Evans was a first-team All-American, capable of taking over a game on his own, and that’s what he did to start the third quarter. American Christian went on a bit of a tear, pushed the tempo, and took back the lead. On the back of this, we started rushing our shots, missing some opportunities, relaxing on defense. Basically, the game was starting to slip away from us, so I did what all coaches do in that situation: I called a time-out.
Now, the time-out is one of the great weapons in a coach’s bag of tricks. It’s one of the few maneuvers in team sports that allows a coach to directly impact the flow of a game, but a lot of folks outside of basketball don’t fully appreciate the tactic. These days, when the networks cover college and pro games on television, they stick a microphone in the huddle and listen in during time-outs, and the announcers make a big deal out of analyzing each coach’s strategy or style with his players, but I’ve never believed that what you actually say as a coach matters as much as the time-out itself. In these middle quarters, in the game’s middle moments, it’s a point of pause in a game that might be running away from you, a chance to stop the other team’s momentum and tilt it back in your favor. Yeah, you want to use the time to fill your players’ heads with whatever it is you want them to be thinking about, but mostly you want to slow things down, change things up. It’s a whole different story when you’re running out of time and you need to stop the clock to run a play or to set your defense—those time-outs are all about strategy. These momentum-stalling time-outs are more of a stopgap move—because, hey, sometimes you just need to catch your breath. You’re like a fighter getting pummeled against the ropes who looks to tie up his opponent, to get the ref to separate them and send each man to his own corner to regroup.
Typically, when I’m out to slow another team’s run, first thing I’ll do when we huddle is give our opponent credit for whatever’s been going on out there on the floor. I’d rather start out by praising the other guys for doing something right than by ripping into my own guys for doing something wrong, so that’s what I did here soon as American Christian took the lead. I told my guys they needed to pay better attention to Evans, who was just killing us off the dribble. I reminded them of that line from Coach K I used to open this chapter, the one about five fingers working together to form a fist. It’s a quote my guys hear all the time in practice, and here I thought it would be useful to put it back in their heads that we needed to work as a unit.
There’s a tendency during a time-out to fill your players’ heads with as much information as possible, but this can be a dangerous thing, because you don’t have a whole lot of time. As a coach you might find yourself running through a whole bunch of stuff, almost like you’re reading off a list. You never know what your players will hear, what will stick, but I’m as guilty as every other coach in these moments. I might have some ideas on how to fill the time in theory, how to squeeze the most out of every time-out, but when I’m caught in the moment, I catch myself trying to download every single thought I’ve had since the last huddle.
Here I’d noticed that my guys were trying to take control of the game on a single possession. We were looking to go up by fifteen points, just on one shot, doing it all at once, rushing, so I told them all to calm down, to look for the open man, to swing the tempo back in our direction. I had to give American Catholic credit—they were good, they had us on our heels. But we were good too. We just needed to push back.
Basically, we needed to play our game—not theirs.
Time of possession in basketball is a lot like time of possession in football. If you can keep a team playing defense for a period of time, they break down. They start to tire. So it follows that if you work the clock each time down the floor, you’ll get better shots. Maybe not the first time, maybe not the second time, but over time, over the course of a game, you’ll find more and more openings, better and better looks. This is especially so in New Jersey, where we don’t play with a shot clock, so it pays to be patient with the basketball. Obviously, you can’t do this late in the game, when the clock starts to work against you, but we were only down by a couple points, still in the third quarter, so we needed to slow the pace. And it worked out that we were able to do just that—we ended up reestablishing control and winning the game by eleven points. It was an important win for us, because it was the second-to-last game on our regular-season schedule, so it set us up nicely for a postseason run.
That peak I mentioned earlier in this chapter? Well … we were just about there.
Long as I’m on the subject, let me just slip in another few words on time-outs. In high school ball, you’re allowed four each game, and I always try to leave two on the board for the end of the fourth quarter. Doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s my game plan. I’ve never been big into calling time to chew a player out or to make an immediate correction; I like to see my guys play through their mistakes—or if they can’t, I’ll find a way to communicate with them during the run of play. In this one respect, I’ve looked to a coach like John Wooden as a model. Coach Wooden was famous for letting his players figure things out on the floor. His job, he always said, was to work with them in practice, to prepare them for each and every situation, not to sit on their shoulders and micromanage the game as it developed, so I’ve tried to follow his lead, especially with respect to the careful spending of my four time-outs.
Of course, this approach is subject to change at different points in the season. Early on, when each individual game only matters for what it can teach your players, for what you’re building toward, I’ll sit on my time-outs as long as possible. I’ll let my guys play through pressure or try to withstand a momentum run on their own. But once you get to the postseason, when each game matters most of all, you have to play it a little differently. You have to break a momentum run before you’re stuck behind a big deficit, because you don’t have the luxury of playing through your mistakes.
It’s win or go home—and at St. Anthony, we’re never ready to go home, not when winning is an option. Here against American Christian, it didn’t much matter if we won or lost. It only mattered later, in the final accounting, when we’d strung together a season full of wins and found ourselves looking at another undefeated season. And so at that point, absolutely, this game against American Christian was critical, but when we were in the middle of it, it was just a chance for our guys to respond to the kind of pressure they’d yet to see all season.
The kind of pressure they’d surely see again.
Back at school, away from the court, Sister Alan was struggling—and her St. Anthony family was struggling right along with her. She’d been a fixture at our games for nearly thirty years, but even more than that, she’d been the heart and soul and spirit of our school. Remember, she came to our school as a young nun, on her first open-ended teaching assignment. And now, to see her in such declining health, to think she might be losing her long battle with cancer … well, it was a deepening sadness for our entire community.
We all felt it among the faculty and staff. But the students felt it too—my players especially. Ever since Sister Alan connected with Ben Gamble’s group back when he played for me in the early 1980s, she’d formed a special bond with each and every team. She became like a surrogate mom to a lot of my players—making sure they ate properly, stayed on top of their homework, dressed warmly in winter, whatever. She worked the crowd at our games, talking to the refs, talking to our players, like a homegrown, sanctified version of Spike Lee. She was our biggest, loudest, proudest cheerleader, but even more than that, she had our backs. As athletic director, she worked closely with all of our student-athletes, but with our basketball players in
particular she was the one who helped to make sure their transcripts were all in order, that they were NCAA-eligible, that they had what they needed at home in order to do their thing in the classroom and on the court.
Even when she left the classroom to take on a more administrative role, she found a way to teach, to inspire.
Meanwhile, Sister Alan struggled. Her presence continued to be felt in our building, but she herself couldn’t always be there, and we started to notice a whole bunch of gaps. I suppose we might have anticipated this, on one level. She’d had her fingerprints on just about everything at our school. She ran our Ring Day ceremony for the junior class; she led the programming for all of the religious holidays; she upheld all of the traditions that had become a part of the fabric of our school—and in some cases, she started new ones if she felt they might knit us together as a community. And then, all of a sudden, when she couldn’t be in our building every day, we began to see the spaces she’d filled for us.
Left us wondering how we’d get along without her.
Sister Alan hated that she had cancer, and she fought like crazy to beat it. For one thing, she didn’t like to lose. (She got that from us, I liked to think.) But for another, she didn’t want to miss out. Her life had become so fundamentally intertwined with the life of our high school, with the lives of our students, that she wanted to stick around to see how it all would turn out. She worried about this or that student. She worried about our budget. She worried over both the big picture and every last detail.
Over the last years of her life, we all took our cues from Sister Alan and started worrying about her. She had a doctor over at Sloan-Kettering who had her on all kinds of exploratory drugs. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. She had good days and bad days. On the good days, she’d make it into school, and the whole place would be lifted, but then there’d be a stretch of bad days when Sister Alan literally couldn’t lift herself out of bed, and her absence would be felt throughout our building. I’d sit with her sometimes as she ran through her laundry list of side effects and weird reactions to all the different drugs and treatments she was taking—like the one that burned the bottoms of her feet—but she was quick to turn the conversation to some other topic.
She hated that she had cancer, yeah, but she also hated talking about it. She would have much preferred to talk about how our season was going, how I thought we’d do in the tournament, how she wanted nothing more than to see this group of seniors finally get their rings. And she did. It would be the last group she’d have a chance to cheer, and I think we all knew it, so it was a bittersweet moment for the St. Anthony community.
Sister Alan died the following year, and one of the great tributes to her life and legacy was that almost every one of my players, past and present, found their way to her wake at Felician College. The place was filled to overflowing with former students—not just my guys, of course, but I noticed my guys most of all. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they found a way to make it back to Jersey to remember Sister Alan, and it was a wonderful thing to see. As I sat with my wife, Chris, and took in the scene I realized that a lot of these kids hadn’t had any kind of organized religion in their lives when they came to the school. Whatever faith and focus they’d taken away from their time at St. Anthony—that is, the faith and focus that had nothing to do with basketball—was mostly due to this wonderful woman. A nun from Philadelphia who knew as much about the 76ers and the Eagles and Villanova and LaSalle as they all knew about the Giants and the Knicks and Fordham and St. John’s. Who made religion accessible to a group of hardscrabble, hard-charging kids who all needed a little direction in their lives.
She would be missed, that was for sure, but I realized, looking at all these kids filing in and out of Felician College, filling the chapel for her funeral, seeking me out to talk about some conversation or other they might have had with Sister Alan over the years, that she’d continue to be a big part of St. Anthony basketball. That she’d be with us always.
For all our worries over whether we’d see either Paterson Catholic or St. Pat’s in the state tournament, it worked out that we had to fight our way through both teams. We drew Paterson Catholic in the North Jersey semifinal, but we were prepared for them. They were bigger, but we were stronger. Despite our size, we played a power game, but we did it with quickness and skill and efficiency. We won 84–71, which was hardly a one-sided score, but it felt to me like we were in control the entire way. Felt that way to my guys too, because they came off the floor with a ton of confidence, which is what you want to see in the postseason, especially when you know your next opponent is watching.
The North Jersey final, against St. Pat’s, was a whole other story. For this game, we came out tight, tight, tight. The contrast was startling. We’d played Paterson Catholic on our own terms, in our own way—meaning we were extremely patient with the ball—but all of that went out the window here. In fact, it looked early on like we were reverting to some of the bad habits that had nearly cost us that game against American Christian. Once again, we were rushing our shots. We weren’t making them guard us. We were trying too hard individually.
Ty hit a shot to tie the game at the end of the first half, and I headed into the locker room thinking we were lucky to have kept it this close. Defensively, I thought we’d done a good job in the first half. We’d bothered their big man, kept them from easy shots. Overall, I thought we’d matched up well against St. Pat’s. Their size wasn’t bothering us. We were doing okay on the boards. But we were playing a kind of hurry-up offense that was taking us out of the game, so I sat my players down and got them thinking back to that time-out against American Christian. Got them thinking about taking control of the game, setting a new tempo. Basically, I wanted them to relax, spread the floor on offense, move the ball a bit better, find better looks at the basket.
At that time, the offense we were running was called a “dribble-drive,” which basically meant that, with all those ball-handling, perimeter-type players—five Division 1–bound guards—featured in our rotation, sometimes all at the same time, we were constantly looking to drive the gaps, penetrate, maybe kick it back out to a shooter with an open look. Most high school teams would have a tough time matching up with four or five ball-handlers who could all hurt them off the dribble. However, in running that kind of offense, our guys would sometimes go rogue and play more of an individual style of game and maybe start to rush their shots.
Our biggest problem, first half of this game, was that we weren’t working together. Our defense was fine. We’d had some turnovers that led to some points. But our biggest problem was we were too quick trying to make plays when we had the ball. We weren’t patient enough—same way we hadn’t been patient enough in the early going in that American Christian game. And so I hit those same notes in my talk. It’s a lot like in football, I reminded my guys, where time of possession is all important; the same principle applies. You need to make your opponents play defense. You want to make them work, make them spend at least as much time guarding you as they spend attacking at the other end.
One of the things I try to get my guys to do is reverse the ball from one side to the other on offense, to make our opponents play both sides of the court, which allows us to attack the basket a little more aggressively after the ball’s been reversed. But that doesn’t happen if the first guy who touches the ball tries to make a play.
We were in the home locker room at the Rutgers University Athletic Center. It was like a hundred other halftime talks. These kids had heard it all, but they needed to hear it again. I told them they were a little hyper, told them to slow things down, move the ball around, weaken the defense. And as I spoke I tried to model this behavior in my demeanor. I tried to keep calm myself, which is how I usually play it during big games. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever yelled in a state tournament locker room. There’s no reason to. Our kids are so well prepared, so zoned in to their performance, that the flaws in our game almost a
lways have to do with them trying too hard. Trying to do too much, too quickly. So my tone, my delivery, is meant to counter that. Yeah, during the season I’ll yell like crazy. During practice I’ll yell like crazy. But halftime in a state tournament locker room, that’s not the time or the place for me to yell like crazy. It puts out the wrong message. Yelling is for when you’re not a team yet, when you’re trying to get everyone’s attention. Yelling is for when you need to motivate an individual player in practice. But by the time you finish a twenty-six-game regular season, you should have solved all of these problems and the focus needs to be on the game situation, so yelling goes out the door. The thing to do is keep calm, help your players take in the big picture. Make your adjustments.
Second half of the game, we turned it around. We were dominant, but it was a patient, painstaking kind of dominance. By that I mean we didn’t do anything too terribly different on defense, but we started to take our time with the ball. Didn’t happen all at once, but we started to have better possessions, make fewer mistakes, and the scoreboard reflected that soon enough.
The turning point of the game came on a remarkable three-point play by Tyshawn Taylor in the fourth quarter. It was one of those electric, highlight-film plays that can really stamp a game. Ty took the ball down low and drove baseline, and as he did one of the St. Pat’s big men came across the lane to block the shot. Ty was somehow able to just hang in the air for the longest time. It looked for a beat or two like he was levitating, but that’s the kind of natural athlete he was—he could get his body to do all sorts of incredible things, and here he pulled the ball down just as he was getting whacked, and then laid it back up again for a not-so-easy basket. The foul itself was huge, because it was the big man’s fourth foul, and it effectively took him out of the game the rest of the way, but the fact that Ty was able to stay with the play and somehow make the shot really lit something in our guys.
