As a former college basketball head coach who roamed the sideline for more than two decades, I’ve seen just about every kind of league postseason result. Top seeds cruising to a conference tournament title. Lower-ranked teams pulling a series of upsets and earning the league's only NCAA postseason bid. Major favorites losing in the first round.
I’ve had three teams reach the NCAA tournament, each of which achieved their bids in different manners. With conference tournaments now under way, let’s take a look at the approach coaches need to have in the league tournament, in all different types of situations.
Sell the players on the special team moment
It’s all about pride. It’s all about having a moment that you can share with your team for the rest of your life. When you walk in the arena years from now with those players, part of the group is hanging in the rafters. That’s the challenge that you have for those guys. You’re playing for a lifetime moment, which I think is important. That’s the automatic bid, the tournament champion. There’s something to be said for that. The league passes out the ring for the conference tournament champion, not the regular-season champion.
Don't overcoach
In the conference tournament, you’re more familiar with your opponents’ system and personnel. But this time of year, everything's principle-driven anyway. How are we going to guard the ball screen? How are we going to guard the post? What sets are we going to run? We might attack certain matchups, but if you’re reinventing yourself and overcoaching in the conference tournament, quite honestly you’re not a very good team.
In the conference tournament, playing back-to-back games, it’s all about being who you are, defending off of principle, defending off of personnel and then figuring out what you want to attack. What matchups do you like? Then you run sets and plays as you’ve done all season. You play to those sets and matchups -- your players know the personnel.
Make sure players know their role...
You want to win and lose with your best players in the conference tournament. You shorten your bench a little bit. Make sure your best players are going to be in decision-making positions to win the game for you, and you really spend time with your guys to define their expectations and roles. If they champion their roles, then we are playing for the good of the group. It’s really important to embrace your role. If everyone does what they do well, collectively we’ll be the best “we” we can be.
...but don't let one guy feel overburdened
One year at Virginia Tech we lost to Miami (Fla.). It was absolutely brutal as we controlled the entire game, but they made some plays down the stretch. As a team we played really well, but we had one player put so much pressure on himself that even though he was a terrific player, he almost suffocated himself. That’s what you have to work against -- guys who think they have to do it themselves. We tried to alleviate some of the pressure off our players and make the focal point just going out there and winning the game. The players have to trust one another, themselves and the system. You need to do it as a team with strength and power in numbers. That’s so important. That way it’s not all put on one player’s shoulders. Everything had to be a collective responsibility.
Steal baskets via special plays
Special situations are crucial in the postseason. We beat Nevada in the Big West finals one year when I was at Long Beach State because we were so good coming out of timeouts. We put in two or three special plays coming out of timeouts that were new, and we worked on them from the Sunday before the tournament started. The kids were confident, and we scored out of them. There are no secrets a lot of times in conference tournaments, so you have to steal baskets. Those often came during special situations -- out of timeouts, under the basket, and on the side out of bounds.
If you're an underdog, visualize your best basketball
We won the Big West tournament twice as a middle-of-the standings team. I tried to get my guys to look back at when we played our best basketball. We would do a lot of video work with our guys and show highlight films around the idea of “this is what we’re capable of doing.” We set up the whole year into three seasons -- the first obviously being nonconference play and league play being the second phase. We want to be playing our best basketball entering the conference tournament.
If you're the favorite, remember what got you here
Back when I was at Long Beach State, if you won the league and got knocked out of the conference tournament, there was not even a guarantee you’d be in the NIT. But you can never project that. You have to make sure your team is as confident as they can be without being overconfident. Your goal is to have your team be the aggressor and attack. Everything you did mentally with your team resulted in earning that place. Your team doesn’t have to reinvent itself; it just has to be who it is. If that’s good enough to win the league championship, the conference tournament will take care of itself. It’s important not to overthink it and just play your game. Get your opponent to adjust to you, not you to your opponent. It’s a little bit like the John Wooden philosophy of being more concerned with what you do as opposed to what your opponent does.
Typically when you’re a top seed, you have a bye at the start of the tournament. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that’s bad. If it’s a one-bid league, there is that period of time where you have to kind of settle into the game. A team that’s already had a game on that floor has an advantage because they have gotten through the anxiety of the start of tournament play. And many times -- like during my last season at Long Beach State -- we weren’t even allowed to get a shootaround at the site of the event, yet the team we played had already competed in a game there. Our team was at a real disadvantage.
The other factor is you’ve put in this body of work and won a conference championship. But in a lot of ways, now, that championship is insignificant. You’ve got to get your team ready for 120 minutes of basketball, 40 minutes at a time. Typically it’s a team you’ve already beat, and sometimes you’ve beaten them twice. Then revenge becomes a factor, which is a concern. Often a desperate team, per se, is not afraid to take chances -- whether it’s changes in its playing style, substitution pattern or how it approaches the game.