Bob Donnan/USA Today Sports
ARLINGTON, Tex. - Even as John Calipari is doing what might be the best job of coaching he's ever done at Kentucky, when his team might be on one of the great runs in the history of the NCAA basketball tournament, it is UConn's Kevin Ollie who is the coaching story of the season, and this NCAA Tournament. It is because of where he coaches and who he replaced and how he got to this moment, the last Monday night of college basketball.
He was walking off the court after UConn had upset the No. 1 team in the country and the tournament, Florida, early Saturday night. The old UConn coach, Jim Calhoun, one of the most famous coaches in college basketball history, had just walked behind the press table himself, then in the general direction of the UConn locker room.
Ollie walked down some steps and talked for a moment about a couple of tough UConn guards named Shabazz Napier and Ryan Boatright, a subject about which he knows a little something, Ollie does, having been a tough UConn guard himself once.
"It is a team of fighters," Ollie said, "and fighters just keep coming."
Then he finished his walk down the stairs and into the rest of his Saturday night, walking the same route away from the court set down in the middle of AT&T Stadium that Calhoun, his former coach and former boss, had just walked. Maybe it figured. Only this was Ollie's night in Arlington. This is his time, in UConn and college basketball. Understand: It isn't always so easy being Kevin Ollie in Storrs, trying to coach his way out of Calhoun's shadow... Ollie has done it with both his own style, and grace
If this UConn team is both strong enough and good enough to win what would be the school's fourth title in college basketball, tying them with Duke for the most titles since John Wooden stopped coaching UCLA, it is because of the job Ollie has done, and not just this season, but last season, his first at UConn, when he was really showing the whole world how much game he has as a coach, even if nobody outside Storrs, Conn., was really paying attention.
Understand: It isn't always so easy being Kevin Ollie in Storrs, trying to coach his way out of Calhoun's shadow, with Calhoun still very much a presence at the school the way he has been a presence as these tournament games, as the Huskies have made this improbable run, one that really began with a tournament game they easily could have lost if not for 18 out of 20 at the free throw line against St. Joseph's in the first round. It has been about as easy replacing Calhoun as it will be someday at Duke when Mike Krzyzewski finally steps down there.
Ollie has done it with both his own style, and grace. He inherited a team from Calhoun that was under academic probation and ineligible - that close to its last national championship in 2011 - for both the last postseason tournament in the old Big East Conference, but the NCAA Tournament as well. It didn't matter to Kevin Ollie, operating in the shadows in all ways. He coached the living daylights out of the 2012-2013 UConn Huskies, all the way until all the other good teams got to keep playing in March Madness and his certainly did not.
The Huskies went 20-10. They beat ranked teams. They played seven overtime games and won five of them. A real good player like Alex Oriakhi transferred out of Storrs, ended up at Missouri last year. Ollie, who loved basketball so much even after he left college that he played for 11 teams in 13 years in the NBA, just kept coaching his team.
David J. Phillip/AP
"The challenge for Kevin is because everything they've done at UConn before he became the coach there," Larry Brown, who coached Ollie when they were both with the Philadelphia 76ers, was saying on Saturday morning. "But he's been up to that challenge because of who he is. They got a special guy to coach."
Somehow over the last 30 years, because of Calhoun showing up at UConn from Northeastern at the dawn of the Big East Conference, the story of UConn basketball, men's and women's, has become one that stands with any story ever written in college basketball, Storrs, Conn., turning into one of the capitals of the sport this way. Now it has been turned over to Ollie the way Geno Auriemma will someday turn over his program to another coach.
Calhoun is still so very present, at the Garden when UConn upset Michigan State in the finals of the East Regional, at AT&T Stadium, in the lobby of the UConn hotel. Of course you cannot escape the obvious comparisons even with Calhoun's last championship team and Ollie's team, both of them led by tough veteran guards, Kemba Walker in 2011 and Napier now. But UConn men's basketball belongs to an old UConn guard named Kevin Ollie now. A team with as much heart as he always had.
When they were down nine to Michigan State, they came back. When they were down 16-4 against Florida Saturday, they came right back hard and fast and took control of the game and never gave it back. It has been about as easy replacing Calhoun as it will be someday at Duke when Mike Krzyzewski finally steps down there.
On Sunday he was asked about Louisville beating his team by 32 points less than a month ago, and how he and the Huskies came back from that.
"I know we are fighters," Ollie said. "When we got back in on that bus and we got back to practice, I can see the look in their eyes. Dark times are what promote you."
He said: "I'm glad that happened, because we all got together, we knew what we had to do, the challenge that was in front of us. And we got better from that."
Ollie said at the time if that's the best his team had, they were going on spring break. They have gone to Arlington instead. His UConn team doing that, not somebody else's. Trying to make history of its own in Storrs, Conn. Right guy, right place.
Original Post by: http://ift.tt/1oFHkEG
http://ift.tt/1oFHkEG