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Tim Abromaitis believes that slowing Notre Dame's offense down has also improved its defensive effort.
At that point, Mike Brey’s squad was 19th in the nation in scoring offense, averaging 79.2 points per game and possessed one of the country’s most free-flowing attacks.
However, something wasn’t working.
When Irish shots weren’t falling, opposing teams were getting easy scoring opportunities on the other end in transition, and Notre Dame was falling out of contention in the Big East.
Notre Dame ranked 255th in the nation in scoring defense, ceding 71.9 points per game.
Faced with the tall task of going into Freedom Hall and playing the Louisville Cardinals three days later, Brey knew he had to tweak something if he was to salvage the season.
What he did was round up the team in practice before the Louisville contest and tell them to forget the style of play that they had become known for.
He asked them to change their identity.
Rather than to put up shots quick into the shot clock and look for fast break chances, Brey asked his team to slow down the pace of the game, work the shot clock and pass the ball multiple times in each series.
Tory Jackson remembers his reaction when Brey first told the team.
“My initial reaction was,” he started before pausing in an uncertain speechlessness simulating his first response to the adjustment in philosophy, “… that. It was just kind of quiet. I didn’t know what to expect but when you see it, it made me a better player. It’s crazy.”
According to the Irish coach, not much went into the decision to give the squad’s offense the dramatic makeover. In the midst of the losing spell, a transformation was necessary.
“It was about survival,” Brey admitted. “Quite frankly. We’re up against the wall, so it wasn’t very agonizing. A lot of the decisions you make coaching in this league are about surviving and that was basically it, survival.”
After the switch, Notre Dame was extending its possessions, finding better opportunities and spreading the ball.
Consequently, the Irish defense improved as opposing teams had less offensive possessions to work with.
Using the strategy for the first time against Louisville, Notre Dame may have played its hardest-fought contest of the entire season. The Irish matched Rick Pitino’s Cardinals shot-for-shot, taking the game into double overtime, but eventually falling, 91-89.
Despite the defeat in the trial run of the new strategy, the adaptation was considered a success.
“It’s a change,” Carleton Scott said. “It definitely helped us. I was thinking, we have to work on it and it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re definitely getting it down now.”
After the Louisville loss, Notre Dame went on a four-game winning streak over conference heavyweights Pittsburgh, Georgetown, Connecticut and Marquette, thrusting the program back into NCAA Tournament talks.
In that span, the Irish averaged 66.75 points per game, almost 13 points off its production just weeks earlier.
Perhaps even more beneficial to the squad was Notre Dame’s improved defense. In the Irish four-game winning streak, Brey’s squad allowed just 56.75 points per contest, well below its midseason average.
In a sense, slowing the game down offensively has helped the Irish put forth a full effort defensively.
“I think when we’re trying to push it and we’re rushing a little bit on offense, then everybody would come back on us and get easy shots,” Tim Abromaitis said. “We really haven’t given up anything in transition and I think our whole pace has just really been more relaxed, but at the same time more focused on every little detail.”
Regardless of the public opinion of the coaching job that Brey has done in the Irish program, there is no doubt that he has recently accomplished one of the most difficult challenges in all of sports.
In perhaps the toughest stretch of the schedule, Brey asked his team to completely overhaul its identity.
Whereas some coaches would never attempt to do so this late in a campaign, the strategy has proven to be the onus of the revival that has seemingly brought Notre Dame back to the NCAA Tournament.
“I’m fortunate of the kind of guys that I have here,” Brey said. “In the midst of losing a couple, I make a drastic switch and they buy in and really try to execute and that’s on Jackson and [Ben] Hansbrough. Because of the way we play on offense, we need our guards to be good with it at the end of the clock. And if those guys don’t want to make it work, it’s not going to work.”
Jackson, meanwhile, deflected the praise back to his teammates and coaches.
“Who gets better this late in the season?” Jackson asked. “Teams don’t get better this late in the season. You really don’t see that. For us, it shows a lot — where we’ve come from, the players we have on the team and the coaches we have.”
There is no question that Notre Dame is a different team than it was a month ago. Confidence has returned and hopes are high.
However, outsiders should not classify the Irish as a grind-it-out team simply because of the recent trend.
“We’re not slow all the time,” Tyrone Nash said. “We can speed it up and change the pace. We want to play the tempo we want to play at. Whatever tempo we want to play that day, we’ll set the tempo.”
According to the junior, now the program has an added dimension, making it even harder for an opponent to anticipate what to expect when squaring off with Notre Dame in the future.
“It’s awfully hard to prepare for us now,” Nash said. “It’s only good for us because they won’t know how to prepare for us. I can’t wait to show them in the Big East.”
Starting Wednesday night against Seton Hall, he’ll get his chance. |
