INTERESTING STUFF

1995-96

• RULES CHANGES

• NOTES

• SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE

RULES CHANGES

NOTES

SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT SEASON

By MICHAEL KNISLEY   The Sporting News

The high-wire act finally is over for Rick Pitino and the Kentucky Wildcats. And as they reached the end of their walk across the tightrope at the top of college basketball and onto the terra firma of a national championship Monday night, they toppled into a celebratory jumble of deliverance.

Deliverance from the enormous burden of the expectation that this title, Kentucky's sixth but its first since 1978, was pre-ordained from the moment Pitino left the NBA to take the job in Lexington in 1989.

Deliverance from the delicate chemical balance that Pitino fused in the laboratory of his players' minds, a balance that has been at the mercy of the fancies of 18-to-22-year-old temperaments since December. One false move over the past four months from a single player unhappy with Pitino's playing rotation, and Monday night's 76-67 championship victory over Syracuse might never have been.

Deliverance from the lesser rap that Kentucky might not have the character to win the close games, a puzzling critique articulated only because the Wildcats so rarely found themselves involved in a nail-biter.

At the Final Four, they defied challenges from top-ranked Massachusetts in a semifinal and from an audacious Syracuse team in the final. Both contests were a test for Kentucky; both tests were passed, including a title game in which the Wildcats led by just two points with less than five minutes to play.

And deliverance, at least temporarily, from the obsession with success that drives Pitino, one of basketball's most enigmatic and charismatic personalities, to the limits of his, his assistants' and his players' endurance.

Kentucky always will be a good basketball team. Tradition demands and sustains it just as the Masters always will be a good golf tournament. This particular Kentucky team, driven by Pitino, took the tradition to new heights. The fall, if somehow the Wildcats hadn't managed to reach the conclusion of the season with a victory, would have been ugly.

That the Wildcats negotiated the length of the fine line on which they teetered since December is testament to the merits of Pitino's obsession with preparation, with talent and with control.

"No film tomorrow!" sang reserve guard Allen Edwards in the Wildcats' postgame locker room.

"You guys are talking about no film, like you have to put the damn thing together," shot back assistant Jim O'Brien, Pitino's videotape editor. "I'm happier than all you suckers rolled into one."

In fact, Kentucky's march through the month of madness might have withered a lesser team. And certainly, the Wildcats' last two opponents gave Pitino's 34-2 team the sincerest scares it experienced all season, outside of a loss to UMass in November and a wake-up call loss to Mississippi State in the Southeastern Conference Tournament final March 10.

The Sunday between the national semifinals and the title game against Syracuse was a 14-hour day of practice, film work and team meetings, Kentucky guard Jeff Sheppard said. And the Monday of the championship game was just as intense. Pitino might have worn his players out before Syracuse did, But at the very least, they were prepared for the Oranegemen.

"I think there's great pressure and bad pressure," Pitino said. "I think great pressure helps you watch as much film as we do. These guys never left the hotel. They just watched film - hours upon hours upon hours. Then they had a shoot-a-round today (Monday) where they were in a deep lather to get ready. That's our system. We believe in that."

The Wildcats needed every minute of the preparation time to cope with Syracuse, a strong-enough regular-season team but a surprising powerhouse in the tournament. Like every team that confronted the Orangemen's baffling 2-3 zone, Kentucky had problems finding an efficient way to score.

The Wildcats shot 48.9 percent this season, but only 38.4 percent against Syracuse. It was the lowest percentage by a winning team in the national-championship game since 1963, when Loyola of Chicago shot 27.4 percent in an overtime victory over Cincinnati.

The Wildcats needed more than every minute of preparation time to find an answer for John Wallace, Syracuse's 6-8 power forward who nearly carried the Orangemen to the title. Wallace scored 29 points before fouling out with 1:06 left.

And Pitino still was preparing even as the game wound down. When Wallace scored on an inside move to cut Kentucky's lead to 64-60, Pitino called a timeout.

"By the time the guys left the huddle, they knew how to shut Wallace down the next time down the court," O'Brien said. "And they shut him down, we went up and scored again and the game was over.

"Rick is always dickering with the game plan, up until the ball goes up. And then, even at the timeouts, he's still dickering with it."

Pitino's obsession with preparation, in fact, may have lessened the stress of a tournament bracket that had Kentucky playing Massachusetts in a semifinal, rather than in the final.

With a week to get ready to play the nation's No. 1 team, Pitino had more than enough time to drive his players and staff to distraction with UMass videotapes, UMass scouting reports, UMass walk-throughs and any other sort of spadework on the Minutemen that might have turned up a sniff of an advantage.

Had Kentucky played Massachusetts in the championship game - a scenario many would have preferred, since that matchup pitted the consensus two best teams in the country - Pitino's getting-ready time would have been curbed.

"We were happy, believe it or not, to play Massachusetts in the first game rather than the other way around because we felt we are tough with preparation time and we wanted a long time to prepare for UMass," Pitino said.

As it was, the Minutemen showed Kentucky nothing it hadn't scouted. The Wildcats' coaches, keeping a keen eye on UMass Coach John Calipari and his assistants, were able to call out Massachusetts' intentions to Kentucky's players before they happened.

It wasn't as devious, perhaps, as a baseball team stealing signals, because a basketball coach can't disguise his voice or conceal his hand motions when he's calling for a play or setting a defense during the flow of a game. But the effect is the same.

For instance, when the Minutemen sent the ball to Marcus Camby in the low post - which is an enormous part of the UMass offense - the Wildcats were there to double- or triple-team him as the pass arrived.

"We didn't miss a call. We knew every one of their calls," said O'Brien, who was with Pitino as an assistant in the NBA with the Knicks and rejoined him two seasons ago after five years as the coach at Dayton. "Rick's style is to prepare our team like we do in the NBA. Rick's style is to know every single one of the other team's calls. It's a lot of film work, frankly. It's from playing them the first time back in November. It's watching them on 10 to 15 videos of their games. It's talking to people that have played them. And you keep on working until you get every one of their calls. And then you try to yell out what is coming to your players that will maybe give you a little edge.

"We knew everything. And so did our players."

Camby scored 25 points and had eight rebounds against Kentucky, but he wasn't the dominating presence he was for most of the season. It may have been his final game for UMass. Camby - everybody's national player of the year - now must make the choice that faces all talented big men in the college game.

Does he leave school a year early for the NBA's riches and the relative freedom of the pros' man-to-man defenses? Or does he return to UMass for another year of the sagging, collapsing interior defenses he has seen from nearly every opponent?

Despite all of Kentucky's legwork in the week leading to the national semifinals, Massachusetts trailed by just three with a minute to play, a tribute to Calipari's wizardry. No team in the nation plays a better halfcourt game than Massachusetts, and most of its showdown against Kentucky was played there.

But as they would do two days later against Syracuse, the Wildcats matched UMass, possession by possession.

"That was the best halfcourt defense I've ever seen Kentucky play," Providence Coach Pete Gillen said. "I've never seen them play halfcourt defense as well as they did against Massachusetts. I think it's just the passion that they bring to the game. Rick is possessed. The team is possessed. I don't know if I can say they prepare any harder than some other teams do, because Roy Williams does that at Kansas. Dean Smith does it. We try to do it at Providence. But they are fanatical about it. Maybe they know their fans will kill them if they don't win."

In fact, Calipari says the semifinal game unfolded as the Minutemen had hoped - at their pace. But Kentucky made the plays down the stretch that Massachusetts didn't, a function at least in part of the Wildcats' intensive scouting, O'Brien said. "They don't prepare like we do," he said. "That's not their style to prepare."

Neither, apparently, is it Wake Forest's style to prepare the way the Wildcats do. A week earlier, in the Midwest Regional final, Pitino's preparation did the same thing to Tim Duncan and the Demon Deacons that it did to Camby and Massachusetts.

The only difference was that the Wildcats had only two days to prepare for Wake Forest, as they had for Monday's final with Syracuse. And the 'Cats anticipated every move Duncan made, too. They knew Duncan would stay in the low post with his back to the basket, just as they knew Camby was likely to step into the lane to force the action.

"If you wanted us to go out on the floor right now and run all the Wake Forest stuff - everything they do - we could do it," said senior Mark Pope, Kentucky's 6-10 reserve center. "With no notes or anything. We could just run through it. And beyond that, we knew the best way to guard them. Not that we were going to stop everything they do, but before we stepped on the floor, we knew where they were going to go and really what they were going to try to do. Our coaches just make the game so much easier for us."

Scouting as thorough as that isn't easy to accomplish under any circumstances, and it's even more difficult than ever in today's game. In an effort to cut costs, the NCAA last year forbade coaches from scouting opponents in person. Pitino couldn't send anyone to Amherst, Mass., or Winston-Salem, N.C., or anywhere else in anticipation of a tournament showdown.

But Pitino learned long ago how to scout through the miracle of videotape and the hard lessons of four years, two as an assistant and two as a coach, in the NBA.

In fact, much of the product Pitino puts on the floor for Kentucky has its roots in his two seasons of running the Knicks, including his talent collection. The Wildcats' ability to go nine or 10 deep is a luxury for most college teams, but a necessity in the pros. That kind of depth gives Pitino the ability to structure his substitution patterns and matchup situations as he did when his Knicks were among the higher-scoring teams in the NBA.

But all those players make for a different set of difficulties at the college level, which, in the end, was the wonder of the Wildcats' success. Somehow, Pitino kept them all happy, even as they had to divvy up the playing time and the celebrity that would have focused more brightly on any of them in most other programs.

"At Kentucky, it's more of a problem because all of these guys are so high-profile," Providence's Gillen said. "Rick's done a phenomenal job. I mean, how does he keep Ron Mercer happy playing 12 minutes a game? This guy was maybe the No. 1 high-school player in the country last year, according to some magazines or newspapers or gurus. Rick's got to be the greatest psychologist since Sigmund Freud. He's my idol. He could sell freaking snow to the Eskimos. It's unbelievable."

Actually, Mercer, a 6-7 freshman from Nashville, Tenn., averaged nearly 19 minutes a game and his playing time increased in the season's later stages. In the championship game, Mercer scored 20 points and was outshined by only Wallace and Wildcats guard Tony Delk, who tied a title-game record with seven three-pointers.

But at another school, Mercer would have been claiming the headlines that went to the nation's other terrific freshmen, Georgia Tech's Stephon Marbury and California's Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Mercer, under Pitino's spell, was content with an adjustment period to the college game and Pitino's public promises of future stardom.

Antoine Walker, a sophomore and probably the most talented Wildcat, did the same with his 25 minutes of time. Walker averaged 15.3 points in Kentucky's championship season, a number far less than what he would have put up somewhere else. But Pitino keeps promising that Walker will turnout as well as Jamal

Mashburn, which, at least for now, apparently is enough for the 6-8 Walker.

Derek Anderson, a junior transfer from Ohio State, lives a similar life with the Wildcats, and expresses a similar sentiment with the national championship in hand.

"For us to sacrifice the way we did ... I mean, I go from averaging 15 or 17 points a game at Ohio State to averaging nine or 10 here. I mean, come on. Your average is supposed to go up," Anderson said. "I thought I was going to get a lot of publicity and this and that when I came to Kentucky, but it didn't happen. But then I realized we could win it all, and I stopped worrying about it."

The sales job Pitino does of convincing his stars to accept roles is made easier by Kentucky's press-intensive style. No one, Pitino insists can hold up for more than 25 or 30 minutes a game when he is applying fullcourt defensive pressure and playing the Wildcats' transition offense.

Both coaches in the championship game, in fact, managed to sustain an equilibrium all season between the greater good of the team and the individual development of their better players - never an easy chore in today's high-exposure atmosphere.

Delk spent his final year of preparation for a pro career averaging only 26 minutes at a position he won't see in the NBA. Delk, at 6-1, won't be the offguard in the pros that he was at Kentucky. He'll have to play the point.

For a few brief moments at the start of the season, Pitino tried to accommodate Delk's future, starting him at the point in the team's first two games. But down by 19 points against UMass in November, Pitino scrapped the experiment. From the time Delk moved back to offguard and Anthony Epps became the starting point guard, the Wildcats flourished.

"I think people know that I can handle the ball, and that I'm a scorer," said Delk, named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. "I think the NBA knows that I do more than just score. I play defense. I come in and I get rebounds. I know what I can do. It's just on this team that I have to be a two-guard because we have Anthony, who's a steady guard, and he's been in the system for a while and he knows how to run the plays. Not to say that I didn't, but I think Coach wanted me to be a scorer more than a passer."

Delk led Kentucky in scoring during the regular season and shot the Wildcats over Syracuse's zone and to the national championship with his seven three-pointers and 24 points Monday.

So Pitino made it all work, somehow. And as soon as he did, he began preparing again. To make it even better.

"I'm not relieved," he said in the wake of the championship game victory. "We've got to go out and get ourselves a big man, so recruiting is on my mind right now. ... We've got to get a big man because we're losing two really special seniors (Delk and Walter McCarty)."

And if Pitino thought the expectations were high in Kentucky before, wait till he spends a season as defending champion.

How long, Anderson was asked, will it take for the folks back at their ol' Kentucky home to start thinking about next year.

"Probably tomorrow," he said. "Hey, we're in Lexington, man."