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CHAPEL HILL – All those years when Hubert Davis either sat there as a player or assistant coach during timeouts in stressful situations looking at and listening to some of the game’s most legendary coaches surely rubbed off on him.
Or, rather, soaked in.
So, when his first North Carolina team limped to the bench after blowing a 25-point lead over the final 10 minutes of regulation last Saturday in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, Davis needed to say something to ease their anxieties. And they were quite stressed.
Davis may not have called up something specific that Dean Smith, Pat Riley, Don Nelson, or Roy Williams have told teams in similar situations, but all of those years so close to masters doing their thing had to filter through UNC’s coach to some degree.
“Well, I did learn from all of them that the team feeds off of my emotions,” he said during a press conference Tuesday at the Smith Center in advance of the Tar Heels’ trip this week to the Sweet 16 in Philadelphia. “When we were going into overtime, the most important thing for me to express to the team was confidence and poise.
“The first thing I said in the huddle, I gave them a little joke. I said, ‘This is awesome, we get to play five more minutes. Isn't that really cool?’ They looked at me like. ‘I don’t know about that coach.’”
Hindsight is 20/20 vision, but looking back it was pure genius.
Davis’ team regrouped using two reserves and beat Baylor, the top seed in the East Region, 93-86. All five players scored in the overtime, each significantly impacting the most important victory of the season.
The Heels said last Saturday that Davis calmed them down, and now everyone knows how. Perhaps it was a page out of Smith’s book, as former players of his have often said, when on the road and the crowd going wild as the opponent is on a run, Smith would gather his team during a timeout, and to ease their tensions reminded them that a billion Chinese couldn’t care less about the outcome of the game.
It may have turned a few heads, but those players said to a man it accomplished one of two things, and both were positive: It put the moment of the game into perspective; and it got the players thinking about something other than the actual stress of the game for a few seconds. And often that was enough for them to hit a needed reset button.
Davis then offered up a bit more psychology to his club.
“I said, ‘Guys, if I came to you the day before and I said we have five minutes against Baylor to go to the Sweet 16, it’s a tie score, would you take that’” Davis said he asked the team. “And they all said ‘yeah.’
“And I said, ‘Okay, then we are here, let's enjoy it. Let's embrace the moment regulation has passed and let's just make sure we play our best.’”
This was without Brady Manek sitting on the bench, as he was tossed out of the game for a flagrant 2 foul after throwing a high elbow at a Baylor player, and Caleb Love, who fouled out with 6:15 remaining in regulation.
So, Davis eased the tension and got his kids’ ears. Then came the actual game instruction.
“I said, ‘For the next five minutes, let this be the strongest five minutes this team has played the entire game. Let's just see what we can do,’” he said.
“I told them, ‘Guys, regardless of making shots or whoever is in the lineup, it comes out down to our team with three things. Defend, rebound and take care of the basketball. I said, if you guys do those three things we will be right there in the game, and we will have an opportunity to win here in overtime.’”
And they did just that.
A few words to calm the nerves, a little joke, some honesty, and a short plan were more than enough for Davis to inject his team with enough of the good stuff to take care of business.
It was very Hubert Davis-like, as people are starting to learn, and it was very Smith-Riley-Nelson-Williams-like, too.
