INTERESTING STUFF

1993-94

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• SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE

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SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT SEASON

BY MICHAEL KNISLEY   The Sporting News

It ought to be easy to remember Arkansas this way, because we'll see a whole lot more of the same from the Razorbacks in the next year or two. The way they won this national championship is the way they'll play the game next season, too - with the same players doing the same things to college basketball's same pretenders.

It's the way Duke's Grant Hill will remember them. Early Tuesday morning, asked to close his eyes and visualize how Arkansas held him to 12 points, Hill came up with this memory: "I see a bunch of Hogs in white uniforms, coming at me in waves. I see so many people, on a team that plays so good.

"You have to give them the ultimate amount of respect. They played so well. It was Clint McDaniel, it was Corey Beck, it was Scotty Thurman, it was everybody. And they all did a great job."

Arkansas is the national champion because it is all things to all offenses and all things to all defenses. The Razorbacks rolled through the NCAA Tournament by playing everybody else's game better than everybody else.

When Georgetown tried to belly up and bruise with them in the second round, Arkansas bellied up to an 85-73 victory. When Arizona tried to streak with them in the semifinals, Arkansas revved up a 91-82 victory.

And when Duke tried to discipline them in the title game, the Razorbacks played it nose-to-nose and won again, 76-72. They won it the Duke way.

The case in point came early in the second half, just as Duke scored 13 unanswered points to take a 48-38 lead and appeared to be doing to Arkansas what the Blue Devils did to Michigan in the second half of the 1992 championship game.

In that game two years ago, Michigan led by a point at halftime before the Blue Devils dissected them over the final 20 minutes to win, 71-51.

This time, Arkansas led by a point at halftime, too; and the 13-point run as the second half began had the makings of another Duke dissection. Until coach Nolan Richardson called a timeout.

"My philosophy is that the game is played over 40 minutes," Richardson says. "When we called that timeout, I just said to the guys, 'Listen, we're taking early shots. We're making one pass and taking a shot. Remember, we know how to play the other way, too.' "

So the Razorbacks played the game the other way, at halfcourt, at Duke's tempo. They stifled Hill, the All-American, with a series of defenders and schemes that had him off-balance from the moment he landed on his tailbone in the game's first seconds.

Beck, McDaniel, Thurman and what seemed like half of Little Rock took turns trapping him, while Arkansas' own All-American, Corliss Williamson, bulled his way to 23 points on the inside at the other end.

And as the shot clock dwindled down to nothingness with the score tied at 70 with 50.7 seconds to go, Thurman put a 3-point prayer through the net that effectively ended it.

The Razorbacks are the national champions because they are deep and they are versatile and they are resourceful. They all handle the ball, including 6-foot-9 wide-body Dwight Stewart. They all shoot from the perimeter, including 6-11 Darnell Robinson. They all crash the boards, including Beck, who at 6-2 had 10 rebounds with his 15 points against Duke.

They all have the attitude now, too, that comes with a national championship.

"Coach stressed to us earlier this year how UNLV used to be and how they were after a few years of playing together," Williamson says. "He told us how they used to go into another arena and say, 'We don't care who's here or who we're playing.' Hopefully, we're going to be able to have that same attitude next year, with the experience of winning the national championship.

"We know we're going to be a tough team to beat next year."

They all play Richardson's 40-minutes-of-hellacious defense, and they are almost all coming back next season.

"It's been fun this year. I can say that," Richardson says. "It's been fun because, first of all, I don't think every coach could do what I do. They're all set in their ways. I'm not totally set in my ways, so I can be creative and inventive and have fun doing it. I enjoy it.

"Nothing is written in stone as far as what we've got to do. That's what I tell my recruits. I can recruit so many things, because we're going to be doing so many things."

In fact, Arkansas has more options than a chameleon has colors, and they all befuddle the opposition.

If Richardson needs size, he has it in senior-to-be Stewart and sophomores-to-be Robinson and Lee Wilson, both 6-11. Of those two, Robinson saw more playing time this season, but Richardson says Wilson is "raw, but he's going to probably be one of the best centers that's ever been here before he's through."

Wilson was on the court for only five minutes in the championship game, but they were top-quality minutes: four points and four rebounds.

Arkansas went with its size against Arizona in the semifinals, starting Robinson in place of guard McDaniel and moving 6-6 swingman Thurman into the backcourt In the championship game, Richardson played it smaller, using McDaniel rather than Robinson once the three-minute starting stint he gave his only active senior, Ken Biley, was over.

Robinson's playing time went from 26 minutes against Arizona to 12 minutes against Duke. Same result.

"Against Arizona, we knew we probably wouldn't be able to press their guards as hard," Williamson says. "They're so quick, and they can get the ball up the court. So we wanted to exploit their big men and see what type of inside game they had.

"And against Duke, we knew they had a great inside game, and we felt their weakness was more their guards. So we went after them with our small, quick lineup. You know, Duke had played a hard game against Florida (in the semifinals), and Florida had forced the tempo on them.

"We figured it was time for us to bring back the '40 minutes of hell' type of tempo and try to push the ball at them. We wanted to see if fatigue would play a big factor in the game."

If Richardson needs quickness, well, the Razorbacks run their guards and forwards in and out of their 40 minutes of hell so often that Williamson, the All-American, averaged only 27 minutes of playing time this season.

They're just as quick - or quicker, once they've run the opposition through the first 30 minutes of their hell - at the end of the game as they are at the beginning.

Williamson was on the court for more than 27 minutes a game through the NCAA Tournament. But he didn't log the 38 minutes that Hill did in the championship game, or the 40 minutes that both Hill and Cherokee Parks did in Duke's 70-65 semifinal victory over Florida.

Hill pooh-poohed the fatigue factor Monday night, but it was there in the Blue Devils' 23 turnovers.

"Some guys on some teams may want more playing time," Williamson says. "But when you're playing the style of basketball coach Richardson wants you to play, you don't want to play 35 minutes. You know after the game, you're going to be struggling just to walk to the bus. You'll have to stop and catch your breath.

"Believe me, I'm happy with the minutes I get. It's great to know we have a deeper bench than the teams we play."

Of all those guards and forwards, only Biley and Roger Crawford won't be back in '94-95; and the Razorbacks didn't have, or need, Crawford, who broke his ankle, in the tournament's last four games.

Try to apply your own defensive pressure to Arkansas, which Arizona did Saturday, and watch all the options come at you at once.

"When you do that, you have to be very careful because they will put five skilled players on the floor at one time," Mississippi State coach Richard Williams says. "When you're pressuring and trapping and double-teaming against five skilled players, they're going to throw the bail to the open man, who has the ability to put it on the floor or make an open shot.

"Most teams don't have the luxury of playing five skilled players all the time, so you can trap and make that team throw the ball to maybe a less-skilled player - a guy who can't do anything off the dribble or a guy who can't hit the open shot.

"But when you're pressing Arkansas, they can run up and down the floor, and all of them can make open shots. You can't help but give them opportunities for open baskets."

When Crawford broke his ankle against Georgetown in the tournament's second round, the Razorbacks simply changed their game. They didn't press fullcourt from buzzer to buzzer because Crawford, off the bench, was the depth that made the press a risk worth taking. Crawford was the key to Arkansas' full-court pressure.

So Richardson sat on it through the regional round of the tournament in Dallas. And he sat on it through the first 33 minutes of the semifinals against Arizona in Charlotte, especially as Beck played with four personal fouls through most of the second half.

Then, seven minutes to play and the Razorbacks behind by four points, he sprang it. Suddenly. For the first time in the game, for the first time in weeks.

From out of nowhere.

"I stayed away from the press almost the entire tournament," Richardson says. "But I knew it was going to come. You just don't know when."

It leveled the Wildcats. In a 66-second span, Arizona turned the ball over twice. Thurman converted the first turnover into a basket, and Dwight Stewart turned the next opportunity into a 3-pointer. Arkansas had made up the four-point difference and taken the lead.

"Coach has a knowledge of the game," Thurman says. "He knows at what particular moment things need to be done. We just have to go out there and respond to what he wants.

"If we hadn't tried to press a little bit right then, I think we would have lost the ballgame."

It was a beautiful move. If the perception that Richardson isn't a solid bench coach exists at all - Richardson is the only one who talks about it, and he talks about it incessantly - the Arizona game ended it.

It gave the lie to his odd and incongruous insistence, too, that most great coaching gets done on the practice floor rather than from the game bench.

"I've always felt like I don't have a whole lot of things I need to do when the games start," he says. "I've got to substitute and make sure my players aren't tired. And from time to time, I'll make some changes. Coaches who say they do a hell of a lot in a game, I think are lying."

In fact, Richardson simply might be a victim of his talent for recruiting.

Coach of the year awards - his lack of them - is one of his favorite subjects, although the handful he picked up last week ought to force him to look elsewhere to manifest his paranoia. But, as Georgia coach Hugh Durham points out, "a drawerful of players as stuffed as Arkansas' often doesn't leave room in the kudos corner for the coach."

"Sometimes, it's easy to penalize people because they have good talent," Durham says. "You don't appreciate that just because somebody has good talent doesn't mean it's an automatic win.

"That's one of the things that kept John Wooden from being Coach of the Year on a lot of occasions. People just looked at him and said, 'Well, he's got talent; he's supposed to win.'

"But not every coach who has talent does win.

"So if you take talent, like Arkansas has, and blend it with outstanding coaching, you can understand why they're a legitimate No. 1 team."

Duke's run to its seventh Final Four in the last nine years didn't come with anything close to the depth that Arkansas brought to the tournament table. And for the first time in four seasons, the Blue Devils didn't come to the postseason with Bobby Hurley at point guard.

This Duke team didn't play the up-tempo game that brought coach Mike Krzyzewski a pair of national championships.

The adjustment didn't keep them from another title game.

"We liked to run a lot more, and we had the athletes on the wings to do it when I was there: Brian Davis, Thomas Hill, Grant Hill," says Hurley, who was in Charlotte for the games as he continues his recovery from a traffic accident.

"We had guys who could run the floor. This team tries to run occasionally, but mostly it sets up and looks inside to let Cherokee and Grant operate. Without the five-second count, Grant can really control the ball well for the team."

Hurley might have helped against Arkansas. Hill handled the ball for the Blue Devils this season, which took him out of the wing, where he is the most effective. And the Razorbacks took him out of everything else on Monday night.

That's the way Krzyzewski will remember Arkansas, too, when he closes his eyes and visualizes the way the Razorbacks played.

"I just see relentless pressure, and that comes with hard work and quality depth and really good substituting," Krzyzewski says. "They keep constant pressure on people. And we don't have a bevy of ballhandlers, so that's something people will try to do against us."

Arkansas did it. But, then, the Razorbacks did it to everybody, with every body.