Ego can be a deadly disease on a college basketball team, particularly with the lure of early entry to the NBA. But Ohio State reached the Final Four by generally controlling it.
John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer"I love to score," says Ohio State's Deshaun Thomas (right, with Jared Sullinger during a press conference in Boston last weekend). But Thomas and the rest of the Buckeyes have been willing to submerge their prime desires to do what's right for the team. That's one of OSU's greatest Final Four accomplishments, says Bill Livingston. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The player who waits for his turn on some basketball teams becomes an eternal decoy. There are no "turns" if a teammate has no conscience. Scoring is the game's most powerful drug.
"That thrill you got on the playground as a kid when you saw that ball go through the basket is the most beautiful and at the same time most insidious force in the game," said the late Chuck Daly, once a Cavaliers coach. "You can never forget that thrill. You also can never forget it's a team game."
Difficult before the shameful one-and-done rule for NBA eligibility created a generation of hired guns, coaching college basketball becomes especially thankless when players try to improve their NBA draft standing by going for their own statistics.
"I tell our guys this: At the conclusion of each game, there's only one set of parents that's happy with me and that's the leading scorer's," said Thad Matta, coach of the Final Four-bound Ohio State Buckeyes.
Matta remembered when he was a young assistant coach at Butler under Barry Collier, for whom he had also played. "Barry used to stand before and after practice and he'd be like, "Team, team, team, team." And as an assistant I was like, 'Come on, man, let this stuff go,'" he said. "And the day I became a head coach I understood what he was doing."
The era of instant text messaging and other distractions doesn't help. "Every time you break a team huddle, the first thing guys do is grab their cell phones, and every player has one," said Matta. "I tell them what they did wrong and then they pick up their phones and everyone is telling them what I did wrong."
For Ohio State, players' egos could be a growing problem, given the postseason dynamic on the team. Instead, the threat has lessened with their success.
The only senior, Will Buford, does not like the phrase "ups and downs" in reference to his career, preferring "highs and lows." If that lends itself to interpretation at all, it might be that "ups and downs" seem to depict the actual fluctuations in his game, while "highs and lows" are static measuring points, things he considers aberrations from the norm.
It doesn't work, though. Although Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin called Buford "the Ray Allen of the college game," and although Kansas coach Bill Self said a certain amount of erratic production is built into the game of an outside shooter, Buford has experienced a lot of lows. When the pressure is highest, in Buford's last five NCAA tournament games -- dating to the loss to Kentucky last year in which he shot 2-for-16 -- Buford has made only 15 of 60 shots from the floor, or an abject 25 percent.
Matta has to keep self-doubt from mastering Buford. "Team, team, team" seems to be working.
"You never know who is going to lead the team in scoring each night, or each half. You have to put your egos aside if you want to make it this far, to the Final Four," Buford said.
Said Buckeyes' sophomore point guard Aaron Craft: "It is something you have to get adjusted to and understanding my role might not be scoring, but there are so many other ways to impact a basketball game to help the team be successful. And it's trying to find that and trusting the coaches when they tell you what you should do. It can be tough at times."
Deshaun Thomas is the other extreme from Buford. The sophomore forward has become more selective with his shooting, but he still cannot suppress the innocent braggadocio typical of great scorers. It's easy to see that he has not forgotten the playground thrill.
"I love to score," Thomas said. "I mean, high school coaches had the ball in my hands 110 percent of the time. That's what I do."
He jokes about his "one assist per game" going to Buford, but actually he has become a much more willing and appreciably better interior passer with Sullinger. Like Buford, he always carefully praises teammates for setting "great screens." But Thomas also will note when he himself sets one of those "great screens."
Matta speaks of "the look" Thomas has when he is not focused. In it, he stares off to the left, over his coach's right shoulder. "Before the Syracuse game, I said, 'You've got that look,' and he said, 'No, I'm fine,' and I said, 'Deshaun, you have to trust me, why would you not trust me now, we've come too far together?' When I can get him to smile, he's in good shape."
Thomas was smiling broadly after the victory over Syracuse. When a reporter asked him to comment on the critical "floater" swished by Lenzelle Smith Jr., the surprise scoring star of the game, Thomas first recounted his own jack-knifing, banked, floating beauty.
There was a small chance he misunderstood the question. Basically, though, it showed that the genial Thomas can conceive of few plays better than his own. It's his world in March.
But at least he's sharing it.
On Twitter: @LivyPD