Point guard Ronald Nored cut his lip and broke a
tooth in an on-court fall several days before Butler's trip.
The Bulldogs had just squandered a 10-point lead in the second half
against the conference doormat Youngstown State, and a freak hand injury
to point guard Ronald Nored added to the insult of their third
consecutive defeat. Nored had ripped open his hand on a metal placard on
the scorer’s table in the final seconds, and the Youngstown team doctor
quickly stitched him up, without anesthetic, after the game. “He
literally just started sewing,” Nored said.
Nored still needed an antibiotic, though, which was why the team bus
idled for a half-hour while the trainer Ryan Galloy fetched Nored’s
medication.
“That was the lowest moment of my 11 years at Butler,” Coach Brad
Stevens said. “No question. I felt like we had a team that was in the
mix for an N.C.A.A. tournament at-large berth, and when you know that’s
gone, that’s a hard deal.”
The Bulldogs and Nored recovered, however, and did not lose again until
they were defeated by Connecticut in the national championship game two
months later. Butler entered last week’s two-game trip to Youngstown
State and Cleveland State in worse shape than last season. The Bulldogs’
record — 13-12 over all, including 7-6 in the Horizon League — put them
in the same predicament as hundreds of other teams: trying to secure a
decent seed for their conference tournament and figure out a way to
start playing their best basketball once they get there. The difference
is that Butler played for the national title the past two seasons.
That success has made Butler an underdog favorite across the country and
a Horizon League bully. The bookish Stevens now finds himself searching
for a way to bring his team together, to begin playing the style that
those around the program call the Butler Way.
Butler officials allowed a reporter and a photographer an all-access
look at the team while it made its way from Indianapolis to Youngstown
and Cleveland for two recent games that loomed ever more important as
the end of the regular season approaches.
“These guys aren’t robots, they’re humans,” Stevens said. “What we’ve
achieved the last five years makes it more difficult. That’s O.K. That’s
what we signed up for.”
Wednesday, Feb. 8: Leaving Home
The Bulldogs operate on Butler Standard Time. With a philosophy that
would make Giants Coach Tom Coughlin smile, Butler’s meetings, meals and
trips all begin five minutes before they are scheduled. Coughlin once
sent Stevens a congratulatory note after one of the team’s Final Four
appearances.
“It’s a culture thing,” Stevens said. “We rarely, rarely have anyone late for anything.”
The team’s bus to the airport was scheduled to leave at 2:45, and the
players had all boarded by 2:35. The players were clad in what Darnell
Archey, the team’s director of basketball operations, calls restaurant
dress — slacks and a collared shirt. (The freshman Jackson Aldridge lost
his dress pants halfway through the trip, forcing him to awkwardly tuck
his Butler polo shirt into his warm-up pants.)
Butler travels in the manner of a high-major team, which means it avoids
the interminable bus trips, the stops at Old Country Buffet and the
smoky motel rooms that many midmajor teams must endure.
For the 350-mile trip to Youngstown, the Bulldogs chartered a flight,
cutting the travel time from six hours to less than one. Butler was
chartering flights before its back-to-back Final Four appearances, but
the program’s recent N.C.A.A. tournament success has significantly
altered its financial reality.
Butler commissioned a study that, it claimed, found that the publicity stemming from its Final Four appearances was worth more than $1 billion
to the university. Applications to Butler, a private university of
about 4,600 students, rose by 42 percent and are projected to remain at
that level this year.
The number of Butler games on TV increased more than 200 percent, and
its licensing revenue grew by more than 400 percent. Its income from
corporate partners and ticket sales doubled, as did donations to the
athletic department, to $4 million from $2 million.
Coach Brad Stevens before a win at Youngstown State
two days earlier. Butler has hovered around .500.
After Butler lost in the 2010 title game, the star sophomore Gordon Hayward
left for the N.B.A. and was drafted by the Utah Jazz. The junior guard
Shelvin Mack declared for the draft after last season’s run and was picked by the Washington Wizards. But time marches on for Butler, and the team continues to show up early, eager to make the most of it.
“There’s not a resignation to this season by them or by Brad,” said
Athletic Director Barry Collier, who coached Butler from 1989 to 2000.
“I think Brad is doing a really good job with what’s his most difficult
challenge.”
Thursday, Feb. 9:
Game Day
Butler awoke at a Hampton Inn to its obituary. On the front page of USA Today’s sports section, an article headlined “At Butler, Glass Slipper Cracks” greeted the team.
Stevens would not normally address an article, but it is impossible to
avoid free newspapers in hotels. Stevens sent a text message to the
assistant Terry Johnson and told him to put together a highlight reel of
Butler’s 20 best plays this season. In the team’s game-day film
session, Stevens sounded more like a shaman than a coach, stressing the
importance of a clear mind and about not thinking twice about shots.
“Don’t write our obituary until we’re dead,” Stevens said. “That’s one
thing that our team has that a lot of other teams don’t have. We still
have time left.”
While Butler’s game day did not begin until 10 a.m. — after a meeting
with a sleep expert, Stevens has shied away from the morning practices
he favored the past few seasons — its most endearing player was up
three hours earlier.
Nored, Butler’s senior captain and an elementary education major, sat in
a conference room to participate, via the Internet, in a meeting for
his role as a student teacher. His first lesson? How to tell time.
As Butler has slogged through this season, Nored’s fat lip and capped front tooth from a gruesome on-court fall
are indicative of the team’s struggles. He remains relentlessly
optimistic, Stevens’s on-court counterpart. Minutes before tip-off in a
locker room that lacked hot showers, Stevens passed out Butler’s season
statistics to his players.
“What you did yesterday has no bearing on today, unless you let it,” he
said. “This is your first make tonight; wad that up and throw it in a
trash can and let’s get in a line and get out of here.”
Nored yelled, “We’re getting buckets.” Other players joked about dunking
on Archey and the manager Jared Todd, who was standing next to the
trash can.
Butler did not call to mind Jimmy Chitwood,
but the Bulldogs made 5 of 16 shots from 3-point range in a 68-59
victory. More important, Youngstown was 3 for 17 because of Butler’s
tenacious man-to-man defense.
And for Nored, with time running out on his senior season, the 60-mile
bus trip to Cleveland went by a lot faster without a pit stop at CVS.
Friday, Feb. 10:
The Day Between
Brad Stevens claims to not be superstitious. Except when he is. The
Bulldogs stayed in a different hotel in Youngstown after losing there
last year. After Butler lost at Detroit this season, Stevens got on the
bus and immediately barred the radio analyst Nick Gardner, a former
Butler player, from taking halfcourt shots at the end of shootarounds.
(Butler was 0-3 when he made one.) Stevens did not even mind a
pedestrian shrimp pasta dish the night before the Cleveland State game,
saying that Bulldogs had a good record when he had bad meals. (The
team’s best superstition belongs to the assistant Michael Lewis, who
keeps an index card in the pocket of his suits with their record. A
loud, pinstriped brown one improved to 1-1 at Youngstown.)
When Stevens walked to the bus after the win, he declared, “That Hampton Inn just got some points.”
But at his core, Stevens relies far more on analytics and film study
than karma. That is why he relished waking up at 6 a.m. to prepare for
the one-day turnaround before playing Cleveland State. He brewed two
cups of coffee in his room and drank it black, joking that cream and
sugar were a sign of youth and weakness. He called ups all the relevant
statistics, relied heavily on the analysis of kenpom.com, and lost himself in figuring out a game plan.
“That’s one of my favorite times in all of coaching,” he said of the quiet morning in his hotel.
Stevens, 35, has a story so corny that it is almost hard to believe. He quit a high-paying job
working for the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in 2000 and became
essentially a volunteer manager at Butler. One day before Stevens was
scheduled to start a job at a local Applebee’s for supplementary income,
a Butler assistant coach was arrested for soliciting a prostitute and
Stevens became the full-time operations assistant under the former coach Thad Matta.
When Matta left after one season, Stevens became an assistant to his
replacement, Todd Lickliter. Stevens became the head coach six seasons
later and led Butler to its first Final Four appearance in 2010.
Stevens cares so little about self-image that he took only one suit to
the Final Four last year, just as he does on every two-game trip. He
said he was reluctant to accept free suits because he did not want to
pay the taxes. In a coaching scene filled with slicked-back hair and
Armani suits, Stevens does not know what brand he wears. He pulls his
jacket off the hanger and shows the label: it reads, Versini, made in
Vietnam.
Stevens eats Raisin Bran. His players can count on one hand the number of times they have heard him swear, and his assistants have never seen him drink more than one beer in a sitting. Jars filled with bubble gum and chocolate-covered almonds sit atop the desk of the basketball office secretary, Donna McCleerey. Butler’s reserves have a tradition of playing hangman in the locker room during N.C.A.A. tournament news media sessions.
“We really are hokey,” Matt Graves, the associate head coach, said with a laugh. “It’s true.”
That lack of pretense, though, cannot mask the team’s competitiveness.
Stevens has driven his team hard this season. The veterans Garrett
Butcher and Emerson Kampen
said he had been more animated and agitated this season, as the young
roster — Butler has seven new players — has struggled with what Stevens
calls controllables: free-throw rebounding, loose balls and plays in
which toughness makes the difference. Nuances like defensive rotations
that were second nature to last season’s team seemed like calculus in
the early going.
And Butler, a team that desperately needs a shooter, is surrounded by
them. Archey and Graves were two of the best shooters in Butler history,
and the local star Kellen Dunham,
Butler’s second top-100 recruit, is among the best among current high
school seniors. Rotnei Clarke, considered one of the best shooters in
college basketball, is sitting out this season after transferring from
Arkansas.
Meanwhile, this year’s team ranks last in the Horizon League,
and 337th out of 344 Division I teams, in 3-point accuracy (27.7
percent).
“We’re statistically one of the worst 3-point shooting teams in the
country, and every day you see the best shooter in the country,” Kampen
said of Clarke.
Saturday, Feb. 11:
Game Day
Everyone uses something different to help him wake up. Graves and
Johnson, the Butler assistants, enjoy a morning Mountain Dew as much as
Stevens loves black coffee. The Dew-versus-coffee dynamic is so
prevalent on the staff that the former Butler player Drew Streicher
conducted a mock study of which was healthier. “Coffee might as well be
green tea and Mountain Dew might as well be sugar cubes,” Stevens said,
pithily summarizing Streicher’s findings.
Butler needed caffeine for its 11 a.m. start at Cleveland State. Stevens
noticed center Andrew Smith and guard Chrishawn Hopkins both appearing
to zone out during a pregame meeting about inbounds plays.
So in the minutes before tip-off, Stevens had half of the team memorize a
group of five numbers on the board in seven seconds. He had the other
players scream numbers at them, an effort to both sharpen focus and
communication while waking his players up a bit.
“You can create chaos,” Stevens said. “You can yell your phone number,
you can yell your girlfriend’s phone number. You can do whatever you
want.”
The freshman Roosevelt Jones calmly recited the numbers — “4-10-13-5-8” —
which left Stevens momentarily dumbstruck. He had planned his pregame
lecture around his players’ inability to correctly memorize the numbers.
He recovered. “If it’s quiet or loud, focus on your task at hand,” Stevens said.
He complimented Jones before adding with a laugh that the other players were not very good at yelling numbers.
Jones has been Butler’s best player, and he epitomizes both the promise
and the struggles of the program. He has giant hands, so big that in
third grade his teacher drew an outline on the board and had his
classmates put their hands up to compare. “I haven’t even tried to put
gloves on,” Jones joked.
On the court, his hands act like catchers’ mitts laced with pine tar, as
he locks down seemingly every loose ball and rebound.
“If the ball is there for the taking,” he said, “I’m going to make sure I can take the ball.”
Jones also has arguably the most artless shot on the team, an awkward push that can make better players wince.
Cleveland State Coach Gary Waters also pointed out that Jones is unable
to drive left. Still, despite his lack of a jumper and a predictable
move — to the right, toward the basket — Cleveland State couldn’t stop
him.
He finished with 17 points on nine shots, and after Butler squandered a
10-point lead, Kameron Woods, a lanky freshman dripping with potential,
made one of the game’s biggest plays. He kept a rebound alive with two
tips, his extra effort leading to a Hopkins jumper for the winning shot.
(Butler’s three leading scorers Thursday and its two top scorers
Saturday, including the sophomore Khyle Marshall, were underclassmen.)
Butler won the Cleveland State game the way it won so many N.C.A.A.
tournament games the past two years — with a key defensive stop.
Hopkins stripped Tre Harmon in the waning seconds when he rose for a
3-pointer and Butler held on to win, 52-49, despite making no
3-pointers.
In the locker room, the players belted out their fight song and
projected their confidence. The wins pushed Butler’s record to 15-12
with four games left.
Winning is the Butler way. And Stevens knows that his team still has the
precious present to forge a future long into March. The Bulldogs still
have time.
“Don’t let anyone write your obituary,” he reminded them in the joyous postgame locker room, “until you’re dead.”
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