Most of the half-week leading up to Friday night’s East Regional focused on the ability of Tom Izzo to create something out of nothing with his Michigan State teams in March.
By all measurements, Izzo deserves every last ounce of praise he gets. He’s made multiple Final Fours with seeds below No. 4. If you do it once, it can be chalked up to a run of luck (Kevin Ollie says hello), but if you do it multiple times while also taking a No. 7 seed to the Elite Eight, as Izzo did in 2003, well, you must be pretty good at getting a flawed team to become organized and unified at the right time.
Izzo is a March mastermind. With that having been said, another active coach is right there with him in terms of pulling a team together when the lights are brightest and the stakes are highest.
Friday, in the first of two East Regional semifinals in Syracuse’s Carrier Dome, Rick Pitino took a Louisville team that coughed, wheezed, and sputtered its way through the ACC regular season and planted it in the Elite Eight. The idea of Louisville winning more than one NCAA tournament game seemed laughable a month ago. Now, the Cardinals are within one win of a Final Four appearance. What’s also staggering is that the Cardinals are on the verge of two Final Fours as a No. 4 seed in the past four seasons.
The Kentucky Wildcats are clearly the better program in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, having beaten Louisville consistently in Decembers and Marches over the years. Yet, with a win Sunday in the East Regional final, Louisville would have three Final Fours in four seasons — that’s not a bad second fiddle in your own state. How in blazes is Louisville in this position?
The Pitino difference in the Sweet 16 is the undeniable answer, manifested in the quality of his players’ performances. There’s a reason Pitino is now 12-1 in Sweet 16 games. You don’t collect that kind of a record at this stage of the Big Dance by accident.
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During much of the regular season, what did observers notice in Louisville on the floor?
They noticed Montrezl Harrell coming and going, being forceful and brilliant for brief stretches of time but then fading into the background just as quickly… and for longer periods of play.
They noticed a cluttered, confused halfcourt offense with no clear plan of attack.
They watched the Cardinals’ guards driving pell-mell to the rim, but without body balance or a sense of control.
Louisville doesn’t mind creating chaos with its defense, but the Cardinals were chaotic and disorganized on offense, making many of their games the unwatchable dumpster fires that have generated so much criticism from college basketball pundits and television viewers alike. Thrust into the pressure of the Sweet 16, and placed in a dome-shooting environment that was not going to help their three-point shooters, how was Louisville going to find enough offense against a North Carolina State team that limited Villanova to 31-percent shooting from the field and outmuscled the Wildcats’ bigs in the paint?
The answer was simple: Louisville had to transform itself into a highly efficient offensive team… the kind of team it wasn’t for the vast majority of the regular season. The true surprise in this game was that the Cardinals were actually able to achieve such a metamorphosis.
Louisville hit 50 percent of its shots against North Carolina State, and that wasn’t the product of “a hot day when shots were simply falling.” No, Louisville’s guards made patient, controlled incisions in N.C. State’s defense. They explored with the dribble, got to the elbow areas, and made bounce passes to big men either on the low block or cutting from the baseline. If the bigs were guarded, Terry Rozier and Quentin Snider attempted eight-foot floaters with free shooting hands. Louisville’s starters were armed with a good plan, but their ability to demonstrate patience at almost every turn stood out more than Pitino’s plan itself.
This team you saw on Friday was a team whose veterans collected themselves and became different players compared to January and early February. Louisville’s starters moved and reacted with noticeable clarity at the offensive end of the court. The game slowed down for this team instead of careening out of control. The players deserve the credit for looking within themselves and finding their best stuff after months of ragged showings. Yet, clarity doesn’t just happen; it is instilled and preached and planned for. Rick Pitino does this in March as much as Tom Izzo does.
As a final important note, it’s worth mentioning that Louisville’s starters and high-minute players weren’t the only ones to possess an unusual and conspicuous inner calm in this game.
Late in the proceedings, after the team’s most formidable three-point shooter, Wayne Blackshear, picked up his fourth foul, reserve Anton Gill provided a pivotal infusion of added offense, a seven-point burst which put Louisville over the top. Gill — duplicating what rarely-used reserve Zak Showalter did for Wisconsin a night earlier in the West Regional semifinals against North Carolina — turned a small amount of minutes into a large contribution. Gill’s contribution didn’t occupy the stat sheet the way Montrezl Harrell (24 points) and Terry Rozier (17 points, 14 rebounds) did, but his timing was just as exquisite, if not more so.
That word — timing — really puts this Louisville win into its proper place. The Cardinals couldn’t have played much better. That they did so in late March, not the middle of February or early January, reminds us that the elite coaches of the sport are remembered not for what they do over the course of four-month middle-distance races, but in the sprint known as March Madness.
Tom Izzo’s March reputation speaks for itself, and all the week-long ink he gained is something he very much earned.
Rick Pitino, under the radar compared to Izzo in this 2015 NCAA Tournament, showed Friday night that he hasn’t lost his sense of timing in college basketball’s most memorable month.
