Coach Cal, Memphis, and the State of U.S. Basketball

By: D.K. Wilson

Free throws came back to haunt Memphis.

For all their previous bluster, Chris Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose went 1-5 at the charity stripe down the stretch and it cost the Tigers the game.

CDR and Rose choked.

Rose “should have had enough basketball IQ to foul” Sherron Collins.

The players have to take the lion’s share of the blame.

Is that it? Is that all the game comes down to – the players “choked”; low “basketball IQ?”

No.

The Kansas-Memphis NCAA Championship game was what all the pundits like to call a “statement game.” However, it was not the type of statement so referred to by the opinion-makers of collegiate hoops.

This game made a statement about how far U.S. basketball, as an entity, has fallen. It made a statement about the fractured nature of our country. It made a statement about the lack of coaching acumen and lack of fraternity in the college coaching ranks.

And the missed free throws by Douglas-Roberts and Rose were merely manifestations of those statements.

At one time, no matter where you went in America, the same basic game of basketball was being taught to youngsters. It didn’t matter if you were in a ghetto, a grotto, a backwoods, redneck town without paved streets, or on a farm in the middle of “nowhere.”

The game was the game – period.

Sure there were nuanced differences in points of emphasis depending on which environment was yours. There was, generally, a little more “flash” in the ghetto, a little more rebound the ball toughness in the grotto, a little more play like the ghetto in the backwoods, and a little more peach basket rigidity on the farm - but the game was the game.

Everybody growing up knew somebody else who either knew themselves or knew someone who had a firm grasp of the fundamentals of the game; there was always a one-time college player who wasn’t quite good enough for the pros or whose injuries kept him from greatness, or who simply couldn’t take being away from what he knew most come back from being a fingertip away from playing with the gods to the stomping grounds of home.

Those boys turned men returned to the corner, to the factory, to the farm with knowledge passed down by men greater than they to pass down to the next generation of kids whose gifts were made of hardwood.

They passed down dribbling equally well with both hands, the proper way to shoot a layup with either hand, proper way to shoot a free throw, the proper way to run a two-on-one or three-on-two fast break… the proper way to play the game. It was then left to the kids to put their individual spin on the proper way. But when necessary, that kid turned young man turned man would always and forever be able to rely on the proper way to play the game of basketball.

Today, those men are fewer with each passing day. Once gone, they stay away. Going home again is a last want instead of a first choice. The game is played to escape from where they were instead of a raison d’etre. It is a more a calculation than a joy; the choice between the NBA’s guaranteed contracts and a potentially longer career and the NFL’s huge bonus dollars, with a back end knowledge that you can be released at any moment, and the fear of your career ending on one play, being unable to walk by age 40, and an average life span of 56.

Fewer and fewer players who know the proper way to play the game return to the courts where they learned to teach those who now want to know.

And so, today, the proper way to play the game is the exception rather than the rule. Its provenience is the strata of the suburban or rural high schooler or the mid-major conference; the artifact is the slow-footed, stiff-playing white boy, “gym rat,” more student than athlete.

The “game” today is played by “ballers.” It is stratospheric hoops; barely toned-down “And 1″ types fly around the court at previously unseen speeds. Instead of the game, today’s “game” resembles men’s attempts at controlling a tempest before it touches down to ground level and destroys every artifice in its path. “The Princeton offense on steroids” is what John Calipari called his Memphis team’s tempest; it is what black kids are said to “feel” so as not to be forced to “think” and what white kids are said to aspire to be before giving in to their “natural” limitations.

Hoods no longer are filled with neighbors. They are much more amalgamations of parents hustling to get by whose children – when found to possess talent – are used as sources of competition and further alienation from “next door,” the perception being that there are so few opportunities that there is no time for growing up together as friends, only (at best) as amicable competitors vying for the same slice of the economic pie.

College basketball coaches know this, recruit against one another using this information like arms depots use blood diamonds to purchase arms. They come into fractured homes in fractured hoods, into fifty story grottoes, into backwoods bungalows, and into lonely homesteads and tell a parent or parents with all the assurance of benevolent surrogate that if their son attends the coach’s university he will become part of a sacred patrimony with bonds found nowhere else on the planet.

In actuality, their sons often become one of many constituting a den of thieves led by monocratic megalomaniacs. And though it may ready them for the ersatz life of an NBA player their college “experience” can in no way be transferred to most sectors of everyday life.

The one-and-done stars, the cut throat scholarship games the rest of the players play (and the coaches advocate), the watered down offensive and defensive schemes, and the win at the cost of teaching is all part of today’s college basketball, which becomes part of today’s NBA basketball, which becomes part of international basketball, where its deficiencies manifest most.

It is in the arena where the game is slightly altered – a trapezoidal lane, a shortened 3-point shot, relaxed goal tending rules, liberal hand-checking, moving picks - which NBA players have failed to adjust and have fallen apart. Despite the fact of heightened international competition, a group of American professional basketball players steeped in the game’s fundaments, with their athletic ability as a determining factor, should be able to adjust to and deflate anything players of collectively less ability throws their way.

But as it has been recently shown, even when the U.S. does succeed in international tournaments, the games can be a struggle.

The jump from high school basketball to that of collegiate hoops should be so vast that the average freshman is nearly lost in learning the game. And by the time that freshman is a senior he should be readied by his coach to step into any pro environment and succeed. The player who can leave college after only one year at a university should be the rare savant; the player not only gifted physically but most importantly in a genius-level understanding of the game.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson was such a player, as were Moses Malone, and Isiah Thomas. Today those players can be Shavlik Randolph, Marvin Williams, and from this year’s crop potentially Arizona’s Chase Budinger and LSU freshman Anthony Randolph. These four players would never consider making the jump to The League of the 1970s and early 1980s. Today, with good showings at the Portsmouth Invitational where college talent that is NBA bound is evaluated under game conditions, any or all of these four can be first-round draft choices.

While NBA head coaches are steeped in myriad styles of play, only the very top college coaches approach something approximating that level of coaching acumen. The vast majority of head coaches in the college ranks force fit their recruits into their systems. And if the player does not fit the system, it is the player who will suffer – to the point of losing his scholarship or being forced to transfer – not the coach.

These men who promised wary and trusting parents homes away from home for their children very quickly can appear more like serial psychological teen abusers than adult mentors.

And, as head coaches, they aren’t even that good.

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After the championship game Memphis coach John Calipari said of the final 10 seconds of regulation:


“When Derrick went to the line, I sat there and I said, ‘Lord, if he makes these two, we’re supposed to be national champs. And if that’s your will, I’m fine with it. If he misses them, and we’re not, I’m fine with that too.’ I’m probably not supposed to say that, but that’s where I was.”

Additionally, Calipari said that he did not want the Kansas players to get a rest nor did he want Jayhawks head coach Bill Self to be able to set up a play after Derrick Rose shot his free throws.

However, the last trip up the floor for the Tiger Chris Douglas-Roberts missed badly on two free throws. Fortunately, Memphis procured the rebound and Rose ended up with the ball in his hands getting fouled and needing to make two foul shots to make the score 64-60 and effectively end Kansas’ hopes of winning the game.

But rather than call a timeout and tell his players something like, “When Derrick makes these free throws I want whichever Kansas player has the ball to be fouled when he reaches mid court. With one hand reach for the ball and wrap your other arm around the player so you avoid the intentional foul.”

It is an end of game tactic coaches speak of frequently: Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith, and John Thompson, Sr. all have talked at length about just this maneuver. It involves recognizing that a coach is dealing with young men for whom the situation might be the most important of their lives to date. It involves imparting positive reinforcement to a player about to shoot free throws that can alter a game – and perhaps a player’s, team’s, coach’s, or school’s legacy.

Depending on the situation they may or mat not foul the opposing player, but they make it a point to, in some form or fashion, provide a positive atmosphere for their free throw shooter - and for the team.

But Calipari left his players - including Rose, a freshman - to their own devices while he…

Prayed.

Memphis blew a nine-point lead in the game’s final 2:12. Calipari called a grand total of one timeout in the second half, with :44 remaining in the game and the score at 62-60. Calipari admitted in the post game press conference that he rolled the dice and left Rose and Douglas-Roberts beyond their normal rotations in the second half in order to win the game in regulation. He reiterated that he felt Kansas was tiring and did not want them to have a break on his account.

Yet Self was able to keep his team somewhat fresh as the Jayhawks did not run out of timeouts until there was 1:44 left in the game and the score 60-53.

At what point did Calipari recognize that his players needed a break from the crushing weight of trying to win a national championship and in the process break a 35-year-old Memphis (previously Memphis State) jinx?

When Calipari failed to stop play after Douglas-Roberts made the second of two free throws with 1:39 remaining, it was certain that the game would be won or lost by the players, only. So the timeout with :44 left in the game was an almost frivolous gesture, more a ‘gee, wouldn’t a timeout make it look like I’m having an impact on the game’ move than a stoppage to impart end-of-game strategy to his charges.

This lack of planning was made obvious when directly out of the timeout, Douglas-Roberts took an ill-advised jumper only 13 seconds into the shot clock.

If the Kansas players were tired they certainly caught plenty of breathers with the timeout and the stoppages of play due to fouling Douglas-Roberts and Rose. So the ‘Kansas was tired’ excuse was bunk. And even if they were, Calipari owed it to his players to gather them one last time in regulation with :10 remaining in regulation.

The result was Rose going 1-2 at the line and though he did foul Sherron Collins, the bump was inadvertent, as witnessed by the fact that Rose put up both hands in a classic, ‘I didn’t touch him’ plea to the trailing referee, who readily complied with Rose’s request and allowed the moment to play itself out.

And – outside of Kansas - every player come back home, every coach of nine-year olds, and every present player who knows the game, groaned at the sight of Rose, out there on an island on national television sending a distress call, playing on poor instincts, and compounding his mistakes with every passing second.

Mario Chalmers elevated and hit an in-rhythm three to tie the game and effectively ended Memphis’ chances to win the championship. All that was left for Rose and his teammates was to lose —— alone.

In the lead up interviews to the game Calipari made the point quite a few times that Memphis was in the Bible Belt and was a “spiritual city” where religion plays a great part in everyday life.

So, in the last 10 seconds of the most important game of his life, “Coach Cal” got religion? For a control-freak like Calipari it is a patently ridiculous statement. But it probably played well with the many thousands of people in and around Memphis who thought Memphis would finally win a championship in men’s basketball.

And it probably played well with the boosters who are responsible for Calipari’s paycheck.

At least that’s what Coach Cal hopes.

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D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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