The Games Before the Games
Coach Jeff Bzdelik resorted to tactic No. 1,378 in the coach’s handbook and it worked well enough to help get his Deacons past UNC Wilmington 87-78 last night at Joel Coliseum.
Good for him and good for the Deacons, who matched last year’s win total of eight before Christmas and, at least in the final 10 minutes, looked good doing it.
Brian Mull is a friend who writes for the Wilmington Star-News I’ve gotten to know and like over the recent games between the Deacons and Seahawks. Last season, after UNCW won its first game ever over Wake Forest, Mull was writing a blog in which he inserted his personal observation that C.J. Harris of the Deacons should probably be playing for a school in the Colonial Athletic Association, the loop in which UNCW plays.
The clipping was either saved, or retrieved, and Bzdelik read it in front of the team before last night’s game. The ploy had its intended effect, as Harris played as well as I’ve ever seen him play, scoring 23 points (only one off his career-high) while taking only seven shots from the floor. He savaged the Seahawks’ defense with his mid-range game and got to the line for 14 free throws, of which he made 13. And he turned the lights out on the Seahawks’ last ray of hope.
Freshman guard Adam Smith, a second-team Parade All-American from Jonesboro, Ga., was as hot in the second half as a player can be without spontaneously combusting, The Deacons held him in check in the first half, but then left him open about five minutes into the second half in their haste to push the ball upcourt. Smith nailed the resulting 3-pointer and boom, boom, booom he nailed the next three he took for good measure—all in the span of two minutes and 24 seconds. Wake Forest bolted back ahead by scoring on 19 of its last 21 possessions, but Smith’s sixth of seven 3-pointers pulled the Seahawks back as close as 76-70 with plenty of time, 1:50, remaining.
Wake beat the pressure,spread the court and passed the ball around burning clock. Harris took control of the proceeding with eight seconds showing. He drove from the top of the circle into the lane, but not all the way to the basket, and hit a sweet fallaway for an eight-point lead.
“He read it before the game,’’ Harris said of Bzdelik. “It was something along the lines that I’m like a CAA player – what’s the conference? So they felt like I was that caliber player.
“I just had a chip on my shoulder because it really made me mad from at the beginning.”
I’ve known hundreds of coaches of all kinds of different sports in my life and I’ve never met one who wouldn’t play as good a card as was given to Bzdelik last night. You use what you’ve got, and if the source of the offending slight happens to have no direct association with the team you’re getting the player fired up to play, then that falls so deep in the fine print of aforementioned coach’s handbook that it would take a legion of lawyers to ferret that out.
And by then the coach of the other team is telling us how much Wake has improved from last year and how the Deacons’ guard play—and the play of Harris in particular—is largely responsible.
“I’m a big believer,’’ Buzz Peterson said. “You’ve got to have guards at ever level. I’ve been in the front office in the NBA and I’m telling you, you’ve got to have guards. I know Michael (Jordan) is excited about Kemba Walker. I know that. But you’ve got to have guards. Guards will take you a long way.
“And I know for sure Wake Forest has improved guard play. C.J. Harris looks much more comfortable on the wing than he does at the point. That to me—if you have to say what is it about their guard play?—I would have to tell you that C.J. on the wing is much better.’‘
He’s of course not telling us we all didn’t know, but more people are apt to listen to Buzz Peterson than they are to you or me. They’re also probably more apt to listen to Buzz Peterson than Brian Mull. But it was Mull who said what Wake Forest could use, and that didn’t keep Jeff Bzdelik from using it.
I’m sure Mull understands.
I would.