PHILADELPHIA — The crowd was standing, the clock was nearing all zeros, the light atop the basket was about to turn red, and one revolution after another, the 3-point attempt from Bronson Koenig of Wisconsin arced toward victory or overtime.
PHILADELPHIA — The crowd was standing, the clock was nearing all zeros, the light atop the basket was about to turn red, and one revolution after another, the 3-point attempt from Bronson Koenig of Wisconsin arced toward victory or overtime.
Koenig knew the ball was going in because he had been practicing that shot — a nifty step-back jumper from the corner, over the outstretched arms of a defender — for three years. Before calling the play, Wisconsin coaches had a brief conversation about it, but no debate. They had been saving it, and now it was time.
In an NCAA tournament teeming with climactic endings, with half-court stunners and disputed dunks and quick-thinking putbacks, and the possibility of more during the Final Four this weekend in Houston, Koenig’s buzzer-beater that deflated Xavier in the second round serves as the paragon of preparation. From conception to execution, it unfurled across those two seconds as precisely as planned.
Players rehearse all season for such a moment, hoisting thousands of shots to train their muscle memory and refine their fight-or-flight instincts. And coaches do, too, devising clever ways to simulate late-game situations that, if bungled, could end their season.
Unlike football, in which coaches often consult the equivalent of a cheat sheet to assist them in situations like clock management and 2-point conversions, there is no such matrix in basketball. There are go-to plays, like Wisconsin’s, but the preponderance of variables — time and timeouts remaining, score, opposing players on the floor and, critically, where the ball will be put into play — demands from its practitioners a healthy dose of intuitive spontaneity.
“I think from my vantage point,” Kansas coach Bill Self said, “it’s kind of by feel.”
Notre Dame abides by similar principles. Although the Fighting Irish drill on potential late-game circumstances at every practice, they do not have many set plays, the assistant Martin Inglesby said. He added that Notre Dame’s coach, Mike Brey, is just as likely to draw up a potential buzzer-beater from an NBA game he watched the night before.
Early on, coaches inculcate parameters. Inglesby said players know how many dribbles they can take based on how much time is left. If 2.5 seconds remain, for example, they can dribble at most twice before they must shoot.
Across its joy ride to the Final Four, blistering opponents by an average of 16 points, North Carolina has been fortunate to avoid stressful endings. To prepare the team for that eventuality, though, coaches cut short what they call the 86-80 drill, in which players must protect that lead — or erase it — over three minutes.
In the waning seconds, coach Roy Williams might stop the drill and demand that the trailing team must get off a shot within four seconds. Williams does not like calling late timeouts, and so this helps players learn to react for themselves.
“We might just run something that we always run in the game itself,” forward Justin Jackson said. “And just be ready for it.”
The Tar Heels strive to exploit their size advantage, passing the ball inside to Brice Johnson or Kennedy Meeks whenever possible, but there is always an alternate option involving a shooter coming off a screen. That shooter could be guard Marcus Paige, who, since he knows where he would expect to be on the court in a given set, practices a series of shots from different spots.
With a laugh, Paige said he could not divulge those locations — “What if I’m in that situation?” — but added that, being 6-foot-1, he is more likely to have the ball out front than in the corner and accounts for such.
“You’ve seen in this tournament, teams that have been prepared to handle those situations have advanced,” Paige said. “You’ve just got to have an idea what you’re doing.”
Koenig began practicing his winning shot as a freshman, when he and forward Nigel Hayes — who, at 6-8, is four inches taller than Koenig — warmed up before games by playing one-on-one. The only rule, Koenig said, was that neither player could drive to the basket, which forced him to calibrate his jumpers to elude Hayes’ fingertips.
“That’s just one of the shots that I have to perfect, basically, if I want to beat him,” Koenig said.
Koenig and his Wisconsin teammates approximate late-game situations at the end of practice, the assistant Howard Moore said, when they are physically and mentally fatigued.
For Koenig to have a chance at taking the shot that he perfected, he needed help from Hayes, who, with 4.3 seconds to navigate the length of the court, persuaded coach Greg Gard that it would be best to call timeout after the team passed midcourt.
That gave the coaches time to decide on the play they had concocted a few weeks earlier, which called for the inbounds pass to go to either Hayes, who was double-teamed, or Koenig, who got into position for the shot by making what Moore called a perfect banana cut.
Koenig realized that taking a wide, curving path — not a straight one — to the inbounds pass would give him the momentum he needed to gain a bit of separation for when he faded away.
He said he knew the shot was going in before the ball left his hand. His coaches were just as confident — in the preparation.
“I think that was the first time we ran it all year,” guard Zak Showalter said. “And it worked.”
