Butler Basketball

Clank. Clank. Clank.

It was an ugly sound, heard early and heard often Monday night in Texas.

It wasn't supposed to end like this.

It just wasn't.

A year after enduring game-ending heartbreak against the Duke Blue Devils in the National Championship, the Butler Bulldogs this year dealt with an entire night of torment in this 2011 Final.

The Bulldogs shot terribly in the first half, but still managed to head to halftime with a 22-19 lead after Shelvin Mack banged home a three to beat the clock on an ugly opening stanza of basketball.

Somehow, Butler turned in an even worse offensive during the second half. Their hustle and team defense could only keep them in the game for so long before UCONN wore them down with their size and athleticism. 

19 percent shooting won't win you many games, and it certainly didn't do the job against the Huskies—who tickled the twine to a comparatively robust 36 percent.

While it was apparent early on in the game that UCONN's length would give Butler trouble, not in Brad Stevens' worst nightmare could he have imagined his team playing so poorly on the offensive. 

Shelvin Mack was off. Matt Howard was beyond off. Shawn VanZant fired blanks. Andrew Smith couldn't finish up close.

If the Butler offense had a "star" of the night, it was Chase Stigall, who hit a trio of treys, but also managed to miss eight of his 11 shots from the field.

I'm no old-timer, but I can't recall watching a major college basketball game with lower quality offense. 

And that's a shame, as this tournament was one of the greats. Both Butler and UCONN played with heart and tenacity throughout their journey to the big stage.

Sadly, neither team brought their best under the bright lights, resulting in a painful finale.

It simply wasn't supposed to end like this for Butler. Not after the little-engine-that-could heartbreak of last year.

This was their year. This was their destiny. 

They had survived scares and gotten the buckets they needed at every turn.

But on a night when nothing came easy against a tenacious Huskies defense, the Bulldogs couldn't convert the tough plays or the rare open look.

Butler sent home just three of 31 two point shots, and that won't get it done.

Brad Stevens ran out of answers last night. Mack and Howard couldn't answer the questions either, and no one stepped up when they stumbled.

It was supposed to be a Hollywood ending, but movies don't end this way.

Jim Calhoun and UConn's dogged defense made sure the movie never gets made.

53-41. Not your average National Championship game, huh?

In a wild college basketball season where there has been no clear cut best team, it has finally come to an end—an ugly end, in fact. The Connecticut Huskies won their third National Championship Monday night, grinding it out against the feisty Butler Bulldogs in a low-scoring, cold shooting battle.

You simply do not expect games like this in the National Championship. 

Both teams struggled all night shooting the basketball, with Butler shooting a shocking 12-64 from the field. For those of you counting at home, that is 18 percent. All tournament long, Butler had been shooting well and got timely buckets out of guys like Shelvin Mack and Matt Howard.

That was not the case tonight, however. 

Butler could never get into a rhythm offensively, missing shot after shot. They never could get going inside the pain, scoring a grand total of just two points from inside there. In the first half alone, Butler shot 22 percent, got out-rebounded by eight and got out scored 14-0 in the pain. Yet somehow, they led by three points.

That had to be promising for Butler, and it could only get better, right?

After back-to-back Shelvin Mack threes—including one at the buzzer to put the Bulldogs up 22-19—you thought that just maybe, this could be the start of something. Could Butler carry this momentum into the second half?

Things started off perfectly in the second half as well. Chase Stigall started things with a three-pointer to put the Bulldogs up six points, but there was no more of that to come. Little did Butler know that they would score just sixteen points the rest of the game.

After a Jeremy Lamb three-pointer to put Connecticut up 26-25 with 17:49 remaining, the Huskies never looked back. Butler could never make a run, and their bid for a National Title ended. 

Connecticut frustrated Butler all night with their length, out-rebounding them 51-40, and out blocking them 10-2. Every time Butler tried to go inside, they had no luck.

Let's not sit here and act like Connecticut played a perfect game, however. But for how this game was played, they did. The Huskies shot just 34 percent from the field, but their defense was the key. But as Jay Bilas pointed out, no defense is good enough to hold a team to 18 percent shooting. There was also some luck involved. 

This was a painful game to watch rooting for Butler, and I cannot even imagine how painful it must have been for the Bulldogs themselves. After coming oh so close a season ago against Duke in the National Championship, Butler made another improbable run this year, and wanted to finish off what they could not do last season. Unfortunately though, it was not a fairy tale ending. Instead, Jim Calhoun joins John Wooden, Bob Knight, Adolph Rupp and Mike Krzyewski with three national titles.

As for Butler, they have so much to be proud of after what they've done the last two seasons.

The players on the team have bought into Brad Stevens, and they play together as a team as good as anybody in the country. It's a shame they could not win a National Championship either of these seasons. But with Stevens aboard, I get the feeling that this is not the last you will hear of the Butler Bulldogs. 

The 2011 NCAA Tournament will go down as the year of the Underdog. The year of Cinderella. The year of the upset. There was the No. 11 seed VCU and No. 8 seed Butler in the Final Four. Didn't the Bulldogs get the memo? They had their miracle run already.

All of the No. 1 seeds were eliminated before they could get to Houston.  Even UConn and Kentucky, as No. 3 and No. 4 seeds respectively, had a little bit of Cinderella to them.  March Madness lived up to every ounce of the buzzer-beating hype, which has become increasingly difficult to do.

Usually the bracket chaos starts to fizzle out by the Sweet 16 and the blue-bloods of the sport start to separate from the pack.  Not this year.  Kansas had a path to the Final Four that included no team higher than a No. 8 seed, but they could not clear that final double-digit seeded hurdle.  The hoops-loving world was treated to a beautiful thing for three weeks.

And then Monday night happened.  It is difficult to explain the championship game between Butler and UConn in other words.  It just happened.  The game was not played so much as it was survived.  Points were more difficult to come by than water in the Sahara.  It took Butler a buzzer beating three-pointer at the end of the first half just to break 20 points...and they were winning!

The joke at half time amongst the commentators became that the first team to score 50 points would win the game.  It turns out it was not a joke.  UConn was the first (and only) team to 50, and they won the contest.  Apparently that is all a team has to muster to win a national title these days.  Butler, on the other hand, was happy to get their point total out of the 30s, which it finally did.  Barely.

Everyone understood that if Butler was going to win, it was going to be an ugly game, and just about everyone outside of Connecticut wanted Butler to win.  However, to subject college basketball fans to that type of punishment and then not even have the decency to pull off "Hoosiers: The Sequel" was just cruel and unusual punishment.  Even worse, it was an unworthy performance by both sides to cap off an otherwise legendary March Madness.

Twenty national championship games have been played since 1990, and twenty times the big boys have won.  Until Butler’s magical run to the Finals last season, a mid-major hadn’t even sniffed an appearance in the championship game since two decades ago, when the famed UNLV Runnin’ Rebels, led by the outspoken Jerry Tarkanian, thrashed Duke in a way nobody imagined.

So how does a darling like Butler overcome losing its’ top player and a sluggish start to the season?  By returning to the scene of the crime one more time, this time intent on winning.  That’s overcoming adversity.

Though ask any analyst or casual fan, and the term “adversity” is being thrown around to describe their counterparts, the UConn Huskies.  Adversity over not being ranked to begin the season (Butler was ranked 21st), adversity in losing four of five to end the regular season, adversity in the countless recruiting violations brought upon the program and Coach Jim Calhoun.

But should a team be rewarded for overcoming adversity it brought upon itself?  Should you be rewarded for cleaning up milk you spilt?  No, which makes the role reversal in tonight’s game all the more shocking.           

USA Today reports that Calhoun said, “I've said before that I took full responsibility as the head coach, for anything that happened within our program,” when questioned about the ongoing Nate Miles situation.  “So, therefore, I accept that responsibility. I said my own personal and private thoughts would be kept personal and private.”

Miles was a former player for Calhoun and the Huskies, a four-star shooting guard who would be a junior on this team, and could have been a major weapon.  Instead, he’s been expelled from UConn, and is currently telling his story as another athlete who received improper benefits that he claimed Jim Calhoun knew all about.

“I don't have a thought about it because right now I'm thinking about Butler,” explained Calhoun, who would rather be asked about how teams will try to shut down his current star guard Kemba Walker than hear the name “Nate Miles.”

Too bad—that’s not how adversity works.

Take a look at Butler’s roster—not one single 5-star recruit.  UConn has three, one of which is Walker, who if not for Jimmer Fredette’s incredible season, would be a slam-dunk for national player of the year.

If that's not enough, look at the NBA.  Four players have ever made the NBA or ABA after attending Butler.  None played more than three seasons, none scored more than 1,000 career points, or was anything more than a name on a stat sheet.  Gordon Hayward is the only current player from Butler in the NBA, and he's currently averaging 4.5 points per game, while struggling to find playing time with the Utah Jazz.

UConn's pedigree in the NBA?  They've sent 30 players to the big-time, including All-Stars such as Ray Allen, Rip Hamilton and Rudy Gay.  Seventeen of their players have scored at least 1,000 points, and eleven are currently active in the NBA.

UConn has tens of millions of dollars to recruit with, a state-funded school with an endowment of over $250 million dollars, and nearly 30,000 students.  Butler has an endowment half the size, with a student population of just over 8,000.  They don’t play in an arena, they play in a fieldhouse built in 1928, one most famous for its role in the movie, “Hoosiers.” 

So when Butler takes the court on Monday night, to again attempt to win one for the little guys, they will be the only team overcoming any sort of real adversity, attempting to leave any sort of legacy.  Not that senior forward Matt Howard has stopped to notice.

“You know, I don't think that's something that we need to worry about right now. Hopefully we're focused on the task at hand. All that takes care of itself. That's essentially the way I'm approaching it. I think the rest of the guys are doing that as well.”

And that’s the Butler way. 

The famous Persian poet Sa’di once said “A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity.”  Butler has tasted their adversity.  They’re now out for their relish of prosperity.

It is impossible to know what lies ahead in the future. However, taking a look back in history is always a fascinating way to understand what happened or could be learned about events that shaped people’s lives.

Forget the Fab Five documentary about Michigan on ESPN; the Disney movie about the Butler Bulldogs will be far more entertaining.

In five or 10 years, will Brad Stevens be considered the smartest basketball coach since John Wooden? Will Butler have taken the place of DePaul in the Big East? Will Butler and Stevens make Gonzaga look like a quaint story, as they moved from mid-major to major powerhouse of the Big East and become perennial Top 10 preseason pick?

Can Stevens become such a force on the college basketball landscape that Butler replaces Duke and North Carolina as the place to play for the finest high school players in the country?

Those are all seemingly ridiculous questions to contemplate, unless Butler defeats Connecticut on Monday night for the national championship.

After five games of this NCAA Tournament, Butler has earned a movable label that every broadcaster and analyst wants to place a stamp on.

Some will chime in that the Bulldogs are a tenacious defensive team that offers no quarter, yet Pittsburgh shot 56.5 percent against this group and Florida scored at will in the paint until the Gators guards got nervous and started hoisting up threes like an Irishman drinking beer on St. Patrick’s Day.

Others will point to how fundamentally sound Stevens’s team is in rebounding the ball and controlling the glass, yet they were out-rebounded by 11 by Pitt and only had an edge of three over Old Dominion in the first game of the tournament.

Opposing coaches will lament how physical the Bulldogs are (despite a lack of fouls called on Butler), while they wish they could get their players to play as hard as this team from Indianapolis does game after game.

Steve Kerr is a very astute basketball analyst who made an early reference in Butler’s Final Four matchup against Virginia Commonwealth that the Rams were better at every position on the floor except for point guard Shelvin Mack. Kerr deserved to be forgiven for having a Tim McCarver moment for stating the obvious, since Butler is always facing a superior team with better athletes except for most Horizon League encounters and the occasional guaranteed win on the schedule versus a truly inferior opponent.

For my money, Brad Stevens is the best college coach in basketball right now. He made an up-and-coming Butler program a back-to-back NCAA tournament finalist. His genius lies in the fact that he does not get greedy as a tactician; he’s able to break down film expertly and take away the most important aspect of foes.

In this tournament alone, his club took away Old Dominion’s offensive rebounding, did not let Pittsburgh’s guards become a huge factor, had defenders contest each Wisconsin shot and made Florida hit the panic button with late comeback with superior execution.

On Saturday, Butler did what five other teams in the tourney could not do: stop VCU’s Joey Rodriguez from penetrating into lane area. And on the occasions when he did, they covered up the Rams' three-point shooters, making Rodriguez a reluctant shot-taker.

Can Butler really stop Kemba Walker and Jeremy Lamb from scoring and dishing assists? Will the Bulldogs Matt Howard and Andrew Smith really be able to hold off Connecticut bigs like Alex Oriakhi and Charles Okwandu from dominating the glass like they did against Kentucky? Will Mack be able to overpower defensive demon Shabazz Napier?

Connecticut is the obvious choice, favored by 3.5 points, having the more talented players on the floor, led by Walker, who’s become the most prominent name in this event since Danny Manning and the Miracles from Kansas in 1988. The Huskies are well-documented 13-0 on neutral floors this season (and 12-1 against the spread), and a win would elevate Jim Calhoun among the greats with three NCAA titles.

But betting against Butler is not practical, since it is roughly two to three inches on a 50-plus foot heave from defending its basketball championship. The Bulldogs are improbable 10-1 straight up and against the spread in this event the past two years. Stevens has cultivated what every coach, CEO of a corporation or sales manager would love to have: a team that is better than the sum of its parts.

Butler knows how to win close games and, barring unforeseen circumstances, will give UConn all it can handle and possibly a lot more on Monday night as they look for their one shining moment.