Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  I called a play we’d put in just for this game—for a spot just like this. A standard side-out inbounds play, with a few extra twists. Kyle Anderson would take the ball out of bounds, right in front of our bench, which was on our end of the floor. Our guys would line up in a kind of diamond formation, with Myles Mack up top, Jerome Frank and Lucious Jones at the foul line, and Jordan Quick underneath the rim. At the slap of the ball, Jordan was supposed to cut to the corner off a screen set by Jerome. He was our first option, but there were a series of other options off of that. If Jordan didn’t have a good look, he would cut to the opposite corner, setting a screen on Jerome’s man on the way, and Jerome would roll toward the rim off of that, looking for a lob. If the lob wasn’t there, Lucky would cut toward Kyle for a straight inbounds pass—and this turned out to be the option we used.

  Kyle hit Lucky; Lucky dribbled back to Kyle and kind of handed the ball off to Kyle on a dribble exchange; Kyle then moved to the middle of the court just as Jordan set a screen on Lucky’s man. Lucky cut to the basket, and Kyle found him for an easy layup.

  It was a dazzling play. We called it “Diamond,” and we ran it three or four times a year, only in big spots, only in big games at the end of the season. When it worked, it was a thing of beauty—and we spent a lot of time on it in practice, so it usually worked. We’d even worked on it during that North Jersey semifinal against Oratory, so it had been game-tested just two nights earlier. It was fresh. There are so many moving parts to the play, so many cuts to the basket, it starts to look like a piece of choreography, but our guys had all the movements down.

  It takes much longer to describe than to run—in all, it took just a couple seconds.

  We got a lot more than two points off of that layup. Sometimes a successful play does a lot of extra business for your team, beyond the result on the scoreboard. It can change the flow of a game, or get your opponents thinking in a whole new way. Here, it put the crowd on our side. They’d been with us all along, but now they were really pulling for us. The arena was filled with die-hard basketball fans, and they appreciated the movement, the second- and third-look options, the simplicity of the play. You could actually hear the crowd kind of ooh and aah as Lucky went up for the finish, and you could see the St. Patrick players looking a little dazed and defeated on the back of it.

  They weren’t on their heels just yet, but we’d turned the game around.

  Last couple minutes of the third quarter, it’s like the energy in the gym shifted completely to our side. We started finding every loose ball, hitting every open shot. We were up. They were down. And the crowd was completely with us. Basketball fans, they always like to root for the underdog, and we weren’t used to thinking of ourselves in just this way—but we were happy to be the underdog if it put the crowd behind us.

  We were down by just one point at the end of the third quarter, so I reached deep into our playbook and told our guys to be prepared to switch to a zone defense we’d been working on all season. I wanted to throw a whole other look at St. Pat’s as they came down the floor, maybe push them off their game plan a little bit more, and this zone seemed like just the thing. The zone was called “the Amoeba,” and I’d accepted an offer to speak at a clinic in Fresno, California, just before the start of the season for the express purpose of learning it. Essentially, the Amoeba is a 1-1-3 zone used by a lot of coaches on the West Coast. You don’t see it a whole lot in our part of the world, although we’d used it a couple times during the season in small doses—just to give our guys a feel for it. And so, in the huddle between quarters, I said we’d switch to it if we could go up by a couple points, maybe use it to get a little separation and put the game away.

  St. Pat’s came out tired to start the fourth quarter. This alone wasn’t so remarkable. A lot of times teams had trouble keeping up with us for an entire game. They might get off to a strong start, but we were so fit and focused, they couldn’t run with us the whole way, and that’s just what happened here. It was only remarkable, though, if we could find a way to turn the other team’s fatigue into some kind of advantage.

  We started the fourth playing man-to-man, extremely physical. Started forcing St. Pat’s into taking quick shots. On offense, we were able to run the ball, get Myles out in the open court. We really picked up the pace of the game, and as soon as we managed to push the lead to four or five points I had our guys switch to the Amoeba zone.

  The great thing about the Amoeba is that it’s deceptive. It looks like you’re playing man-to-man. You pick up the other team’s ball-handler at half-court, with just one defender. Your other guard is positioned back near the foul line, and he’ll start to defend off the first pass, and here again it looks like man-to-man. But then what happens is that the initial defender who’d been up top drops back toward the lane, and you’re able to play much more aggressively than you would in a typical zone. It’s a very confusing zone to go up against if you’ve never seen it before—and even if you’ve seen it a time or two, it can be unsettling.

  St. Pat’s didn’t really recognize what we were doing, couldn’t really respond to it, and we got a couple big stops to really put the game away. At one point we shut them down for almost four full minutes, and by the time they figured out what we were doing the game was out of reach. We outscored them 23–5 in the final quarter, to win 62–45, and as I left the arena that night, after the excitement and the hoopla died down, I reminded myself that momentum can be a powerful force in a basketball game. We’d pushed all the right buttons, at all the right moments, and managed to turn a great team into a team that did not play like a great team. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, a great player who did not play like a great player, couldn’t solve our defense or turn things around. He scored only seven points—none in the second half—and I had to think it was all about using momentum to advantage.

  We went at it hard, all game long, and once the game swung our way, we went at it even harder.

  The win vaulted us into the number-one spot in the national rankings—but more important, it put us back in the state finals with a chance to avenge last year’s loss to Trenton Catholic. At least, that’s the way it looked on paper, but Trenton Catholic ended up losing in an upset to Cardinal McCarrick in the other semifinal game, the South Jersey final.

  For the second year in a row, our guys boarded a team bus on a Saturday morning for the trip to the Ritacco Center in Toms River—only this time we made double sure the driver knew exactly where he was going. Show up late one year for the state championship, it’s just a screwup, a onetime thing. Show up late a second year, you’re a Mickey Mouse program. You teach your guys to carry themselves like the 1927 New York Yankees when really you’re like the 1962 New York Mets.

  This time we left an hour or so earlier, just to be on the safe side. And this time we came out on top, even though we weren’t as sharp as I would have liked. Clearly, our guys had peaked in that semifinal game against St. Patrick. That ladder we’d been climbing all season? That game against St. Pat’s was the top, and everything fell the right way for us so that we were at the top of our game, but we still had a couple games to play.

  We kept teetering on the top of that ladder, but just barely. We got past a strong Newark Central team in the semifinal game of the Tournament of Champions the following Friday, even though we weren’t nearly as good as we’d been against St. Pat’s at Rutgers a week earlier. We were tired, flat. And then we staggered past a feisty Plainfield squad in the Tournament of Champions final on Monday—once again not looking anything like the world-beating team we’d put on the floor against St. Patrick. As we gathered in a team huddle after the game, I thought back to the triple overtime loss the year before and the momentum shift that seemed to kick in just after that. I thought of the great good fortune we had to add two stud players like Kyle Anderson and Myles Mack, the championship habits we’d been able to call upon as we integrated our two new players with our returning players … and it all added up to this right here.
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br />   11.

  2011–2012: THE SURVIVORS

  TODAY I WILL DO WHAT OTHERS WON’T, SO TOMORROW I CAN ACCOMPLISH WHAT OTHERS CAN’T.

  —Jerry Rice

  IT’S WHAT YOU LEARN AFTER YOU KNOW IT ALL THAT COUNTS.

  —John Wooden

  Coach long enough and you start to notice a framework to each season. Literally, a framework. Every year there’ll be some matchup early on that repeats itself late. Or there’ll be some carryover from one season to the next, some echo or answer—almost like we’re following a script. In 2010–2011, it was the run-in with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and his St. Patrick teammates in that preseason camp at Linden High School, which set the stage for our North Jersey final. After that, it looked for a while like the state final that followed would be a rematch of the year before—only Trenton Catholic couldn’t get past Cardinal McCarrick, so we started in on a new story.

  These big-time games against our big-time rivals frame our seasons, and I’ve come to think it’s what we put inside the frame that gives the true picture of how things were. Like this year, we struggled in that preseason scrimmage against Gill St. Bernard’s, which we ended up losing. Back of my mind, I had a feeling we’d see Gill St. Bernard’s again. At the time the score didn’t really matter one way or the other, but it started to matter as we moved through the tournament field; it started to matter that Gill had already seen us when we weren’t at our best.

  Why did it matter? Well, it mattered because I never liked to give an opponent a reason to feel confident going into a game against us. It mattered because the Gill St. Bernard’s coach, Mergin Sina, now had a book on us, even though a lot of that information was slightly off or out-of-date. I like to be the coach with a book on my opponent. I like to know as much as I can about the team we’re about to play, and I like it even more when the opposing coach knows next to nothing about us.

  But like I said, it was only a back-of-my-mind sort of worry. A lot of things had to break just right for us to meet up with Gill St. Bernard’s in the finals, but as the tournament got going that’s just what happened. It’s like the matchup was inevitable. After that one-sided game against Oratory, with Kyle Anderson showing the basketball world what he could do, we beat Dwight Englewood in the North Jersey semifinal by another big score. Meanwhile, on the other side of the bracket, Gill St. Bernard’s was running through its half of the draw, beating St. Patrick and Cardinal McCarrick, setting up a possible showdown in the state final.

  Probably, I was the only guy at St. Anthony thinking back to that preseason scrimmage, which came about by pure chance. Probably, I was the only guy regretting that game—not that we’d lost, but that we’d set it up in the first place. Normally, I don’t like to play a meaningless game against a team we might meet later on in a meaningful game, even if it’s just a scrimmage. I repeat myself, I know, but it’s an important point. There’s a lot you can reveal about the way you play, your tendencies, your strengths … even if you make an effort to hold some things back. Here we’d made no such effort, and it was starting to worry me, until I reminded myself that the St. Anthony team we were running out on the floor for the tournament looked nothing like the St. Anthony team we had run out at the start of the season. Back in December, we’d had a whole different cast of characters, a whole different look and feel to our team. We had Jimmy Hall before he’d been suspended. We had Tim Coleman before his season-ending injury. We had Rashad Andrews, who was serving an early-season suspension but still figured in our plans. Jerome Frink had been out with the flu, and a lot of his minutes went to Kentrell Brooks, who likely wouldn’t see a whole lot of time in the final unless the game went lopsided, one way or the other. And we were without a big effort from our two terrific junior guards, Josh Brown and Hallice Cooke, who had yet to play consistently at an impact level but who’d each been coming on strong.

  Still, I was getting ahead of myself with these worries, because we first had to get past a resourceful Hudson Catholic team in our North Jersey final, while Gill St. Bernard’s had to face an always dangerous Trenton Catholic squad. Turned out we had an easier time of it, with a 53–30 victory to push our record to 29-0 and earn a spot in the state final. Gill St. Bernard’s had a tougher time of it, going down 16–2 to Trenton Catholic at the end of the first quarter, but somehow they battled back to tie the game at the end of regulation and came out on top by a single point in overtime.

  And so there we were, back at yet another state final—again at the RAC. The way it worked out, our guys handled Gill St. Bernard’s pretty well. Jaren Sina, the coach’s son, had a killer outside shot, and he was able to get his points, but we didn’t give these guys anything down low. They had a six-seven big man named Dominic Hoffman, on his way to Bucknell, and our guys essentially took away his inside game. The Gill guards kept looking for an entry pass that just wasn’t there. We came at them with a balanced, purposeful game plan—and we stuck to it, especially in the second quarter when we just buried them, 19–4, putting us up 28–8 at the half.

  We eventually pushed the lead to 34–8 at the start of the third—a deep, deep hole for any team. But I wouldn’t let my guys see me celebrate just yet. Wouldn’t let my own thoughts get out in front of the game clock, but I knew there was no way Gill St. Bernard’s could climb out of that hole. Rest of the game was all about preserving our lead and keeping our guys fresh for those Tournament of Champions games after the state final.

  After the game, I started telling reporters that this group was the best defensive team I’d ever coached. This was true enough, but I said it mostly to motivate my guys. All season long, we’d been a team without a defining personality. Yeah, we had one of the top players in the country in Kyle Anderson, so in some respects Kyle defined our style of play, but that didn’t get close to describing how we played as a team. Kyle was a big part of what we’d been able to accomplish—going 30-0 to that point, on our way to the school’s twenty-seventh state championship—but he was only a part. We had big, game-stamping contributions from five or six different guys over the course of the season, and it was tough to predict where those contributions would come from, one game to the next.

  One reason I had such a tough time assessing our team was that our lineup had been in a constant state of flux. The cast of characters kept changing—and there were stretches in there, with all the personnel problems we were having, when some of my players really did seem like characters. (Like a bunch of clowns, really.) But then, as I looked back at how our guys had played, the numbers they’d been putting up, the stops they’d been accumulating, I started to realize that this was a special, special group on the defensive end. We’d taken teams out of their game all season long.

  You have to realize, I’d also been telling reporters and folks who followed St. Anthony basketball that we were a perfectly imperfect team. I’m afraid I rubbed the shine off that phrase over the course of the season, but the sentiment behind it was fresh each time I said it. Our record might have been flawless, but we were flawed. There were holes in our game that our opponents had yet to find a way to exploit. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t come up against a team that could figure us out—just that nobody had done so yet.

  On defense, that’s where we excelled. Just look at the stats: through this state final game against Gill St. Bernard’s, which we won by a score of 67–39, we’d given up an average of just 35.6 points per game. That’s a historically low number, especially when you look at all the big-time teams we’d played this year, against all those big-time players. And in four state tournament games, we’d only given up 30.7 points per game against the best teams in the state, winning by an average margin of about forty points.

  In this, we were led by Josh Brown, who had kind of willed himself into becoming an outstanding perimeter defender. He’d shown flashes of his defensive abilities the year before, as a sophomore in a limited role, but he was on and off during the current season. He’d shown he could be a force with the ball too. He’s
lightning quick to the basket, with a solid outside shot and a steady handle, but it was his ability to read his opponents and stay one step ahead on defense that set him apart.

  Trouble is, we’d never know which version of Josh Brown we’d get. These past few games, he’d been mostly excellent, but there’d be some games where he was hardly a factor. Even more troubling, there’d be some practices where his head seemed to be someplace else, and around the time I had to suspend him for that one game against Long Island Lutheran I started to think there was a deeper problem. Really, I’d become so concerned with Josh’s erratic performance, his unpredictable energy levels, his occasional inability to focus, I started to think he was hanging with the wrong crowd away from the gym. Making poor choices. Maybe smoking weed. Really, I didn’t know what to think.

  Soon as I confronted Josh with my concerns, he was up front about what the problem was: he wasn’t eating. Not enough, anyway. And not any of the right foods, in the right balance, at the right time of day. Wasn’t exactly his fault. Wasn’t anybody’s fault, really. But it was still a problem. This was a kid who was being raised by his father, who was almost never home. His father worked two jobs. So it fell to Josh to take care of his own food, and he wasn’t doing such a smart job of it. He ate take-out Chinese a couple nights a week. The rest of the time, he ate leftovers, or not at all—and during the school day he was usually running on an empty stomach.

  It’s tough enough for a kid to get through school without a healthy breakfast or a balanced lunch, but to then make it through a practice—one of my practices … well, it’s no wonder Josh was flagging.