by Bob Hurley
Oh, man, this kid could play—but here in this preseason matchup at Linden High School, we shut him down. We put Tyon Williams on him, and Tyon did a good job taking Michael out of his game, which gave our guys a tremendous boost heading into the summer season. We’d run the table at Linden, winning eight games in a row, and we did it without the two big-time players who’d be joining us in the weeks ahead, so I started to think we might be building a special, special team.
We were already good. And we were about to get better.
Transitions are always difficult. It’s especially tough on your returning juniors and seniors when you bring in a couple former opponents who can really play. You set it up so they’re competing for minutes, competing for certain roles, and even though on the surface that kind of competition can be a healthy thing, it’s never easy. There are hurt feelings, bruised egos, but as a coach, you can’t really spend too much time on that sort of thing. You’re aware of it, absolutely. You talk about it, remind your guys that nobody’s job is safe, and then you go about your business and try to get your players to go about their business too.
As good as we’d been the year before—losing in the state championship game after an otherwise successful season—and as good as we expected to be this year, we were definitely a team in transition. That’s not a phrase you hear kicked around all that much about a team expecting to win, but in high school basketball, one season to the next, you’re almost always looking at ways of bringing new players into the mix and filling in the gaps left by your departing players. There’s a revolving door of talent, same way there is in college basketball, so you’ve got to find the balance between the coming and the going—and here it just so happened that two of our most important pieces were transfers who’d already established themselves among the top players in the state.
One of the ways I tried to bring the team together once Kyle and Myles were able to start playing with us toward the end of the summer was to take a split-squad approach. I had the two new guys play with half the team one game, and then the other half of the team the next game—not because I wanted to highlight their games or put it out that they were now our superstar go-to players, but because I wanted to see how they worked with each and every combination, in each and every role. With two big talents like Kyle and Myles, I needed the integration to cut both ways—I needed my returning players to be thinking how to adapt their games to what their new teammates could bring, same way I needed Kyle and Myles to adapt what they were capable of to their new teammates.
By the time the season started, we were beginning to mesh. We struggled in an early-season contest against Gill St. Bernard’s when we were outplayed, out-hustled … out-coached, probably. But we held on to win. And then, a couple weeks later, we were tested by a strong Massachusetts team, Catholic Memorial, in our holiday tournament up in Boston. We pulled away at the end, but it was close in the first half. They were a well-coached team—and frankly, we weren’t hard to defend. We were slow, predictable.
It was while we were away at that tournament that our guys picked up on a rallying cry that would stamp our season. They were watching a Miami Heat game at our hotel, and Dwayne Wade came on for an interview after the game to talk about how the team was still finding its way. Remember, this was just a month or so into the Big Three era in Miami, the first season Wade was playing with LeBron James and Chris Bosh, and Wade said, “We’re not a championship team, but we’re trying to develop championship habits.”
I heard that and thought, That’s what our kids need to hear. So I made sure they heard it. Over and over. Everything we did from that point on, it was all about developing championship habits. Finding ways to get our new players comfortable playing with our returning players—and our returning guys playing with our new guys. We were still integrating, still getting to know each other, just like a Jersey City version of the Heat.
No question, we had all the pieces.
No question, we had a ton of upside potential.
All we had to do was put those pieces together and reach that potential.
Ben Gamble came up to me after that holiday tournament and said, “We’ll be able to beat anybody in the state by the end of the season. We just need to keep working.”
I didn’t see it just yet. I saw us getting better, but I thought the adjustment period might stretch out for a while; I thought there’d be some bumps. Turned out I was wrong. After Boston, we started to gel on the floor. Kyle and Myles worked beautifully together—they were both exceptional passers, with a natural feel for the game—but soon Jerome Frink stepped up and started working off of Kyle as well. All of a sudden, we were looking more and more fluid, more and more focused. It was like our guys had been playing together their whole lives instead of just a few months.
The defining moment of the first half of our season came at the Hoophall Classic in Springfield, Massachusetts, on national television. We were going up against DeMatha, one of our great rivals on the national stage. Morgan Wootten had stepped down as head coach in 2002, but DeMatha was still a power. They were the number-six team in the country at the time of our meeting in January, with five major college-bound players in their starting lineup. By every measure, it should have been a real test, a chance for our guys to add a couple more championship habits to their gear bags, but the game was a blowout. We won by fifty points. Our guys were just outstanding—and here I don’t think we can put this on the coach. DeMatha was prepared, same way we were prepared. It’s just that we did everything right, played thirty-two minutes of perfect, perfect basketball. No turnovers, no lapses.
Myles Mack wound up outscoring DeMatha all by himself—with twenty-eight points to the other team’s twenty-five—and that was with coming out of the game with about three minutes left in the third quarter. He had a tremendous game, but now that I look back on it, all our guys had tremendous games, and I think what happened was we kind of caught DeMatha by surprise. They knew all about our two big-time transfers, so I think they focused a little too much on Kyle and Myles; they seemed to overlook our homegrown guys like Jordan, Jerome, and Lucky, and those three just killed them. And as we put the game away I started to think I’d been guilty of the same thing. Without really realizing it, I’d overlooked the guys who’d been with us all along. I was so laser-focused on getting Kyle and Myles into the flow of what we were doing, I’d lost sight for a moment at what we were doing. At what we’d done all last season.
For the first time, in that DeMatha game, I saw what we were capable of. I saw that even though we were a small team, our skill level was way up. We had some deadly outside shooters. Jerome was our big man, at six-five, and Lucky and Kyle were six-five and six-seven, so we had decent size up front, but we were small in the backcourt. Jordan was five-eleven; Myles was five-nine. But Jordan, Myles, and Lucky were all terrific three-point shooters; Kyle could score from anywhere in our end; and Jerome was capable of doing a lot of dirty work for us around the basket—and he could hit a jumper too.
Basically, it was ten games into the season before I figured this team out.
——
We played some really good teams the rest of the way. Friends Central, out of the Philadelphia area. Mount Vernon, who went on to win a state championship. Boys and Girls, who went on to win the city championship—and those two games came on back-to-back nights, so that was an important marker for our season. And yet, as well as we played, as good as we were showing ourselves to be, the consensus in Jersey basketball was that St. Patrick was the team to beat. They’d been the number-one team in the country for most of the season. We’d been in and out of the top ten in a lot of the polls, but never really made a case for the top spot. We were peaking, playing good, solid ball, but most folks seemed to think St. Pat’s was at a whole other level. Me and my assistant coaches, we didn’t necessarily agree. Our players, we certainly didn’t want them thinking that way either. But we kept our opinions to ourselves.
First game of the state to
urnament, against Hudson Catholic, our guys grabbed an early lead and kept building on it. Ended up winning that game by over thirty points.
Second game of the tournament, the North Jersey semifinal, it was like a repeat of the game before—we jumped out to an early lead, which got bigger and bigger. This game, we ended up winning by over fifty points, so we were feeling pretty good.
St. Pat’s had already beaten Gill St. Bernard’s by over twenty points in their own North Jersey semifinal game the day before, but I thought it was interesting that they didn’t send anyone to scout our game against Oratory. I try to pay attention to stuff like this, and when the game is in your own gym, it’s easy to track who’s walking in the door. If there are scouts in attendance, coaches or assistant coaches we’re about to face, I’ll have my guys play a certain way. I’ll hold back on some of the things we like to do in certain situations—or I’ll put in a new offensive set just for this one game, just to maybe get them thinking in some other direction. We’ll play to win, but I’ll make sure to leave some of our championship habits in the locker room, and throw a few wrinkles into the mix to keep things interesting.
Soon as I noticed there was no one from St. Pat’s eyeballing what we were doing, I decided to break out the entire playbook—and once the game against Oratory was in hand, I had my guys work on everything we might want to use against St. Pat’s. That’s one of the reasons we ran up such a big score, because I stuck to my rotation the first three quarters and because I told my guys to keep playing hard. Wasn’t a question of sportsmanship or playing fair; we were working toward something bigger than just this one game.
All year long, we knew we’d have to beat St. Patrick to take the state title. We’d built our entire season just to get to this one game, and now that it was upon us, I didn’t want our guys to still be going up the ladder, still reaching, still striving, hoping to get to some next level. I wanted them to be at that level. I wanted them at their best, so I had them run through every conceivable scenario, every inbounds play, every defensive scheme.
That Oratory game was on a Monday night, at home. The North Jersey final was set for Wednesday, two nights later, at Rutgers. It didn’t give us a whole lot of time to prepare, but we were ready. Felt to me like the whole world was watching, because it was shaping up to be one of the most talked about games I’d ever been involved in. At this point, we were the second-ranked team in the country, so to have the top two teams squaring off in a game that wasn’t even a state championship game … well, it was almost monumental. Two tiny Catholic schools, and it was like the clash of the titans. The Rutgers arena was sold out, and there must have been about twenty different camera crews in attendance, along with over eight thousand fans.
It was a media circus, and each team had its own piece of spotlight. A crew from 60 Minutes had been following us for the past month, led by CBS News reporter Steve Kroft, so they had me wired with a power pack and a hidden microphone. I was also hooked up with the Madison Square Garden Varsity network, so there was a second mike on me as well—and as these young technicians ran the wires from my belt and set me up, I had time to think, Not bad, Hurley. You’re a television star. On the other bench, St. Patrick coach Kevin Boyle was plugged in to an HBO crew, for a documentary called Prayer for a Perfect Season, so when the two of us met at half-court to shake hands before the game, underneath all these lights and flashes, it reminded me of Bobby Fischer meeting Boris Spassky before the start of the World Chess Championship in Iceland.
Okay, so maybe that’s overstating things a bit, but in our little corner of the world it was epic—probably the biggest high school basketball game ever played in New Jersey, a state with a rich basketball history.
There was a whole lot riding on this one game for each team. As the top two teams in the country, it meant the winner would have a chance to finish the season as the consensus national champion—while the loser wouldn’t even make it to the state finals. In a lot of ways, it was the ultimate win-or-go-home game, because it would put a sudden end to what had been a storybook-type season on each side of the floor.
Let me just pull back a bit and reset the scene. Our team bus couldn’t even get into the lot adjacent to the arena. We had to park way away from the facility, and as we walked toward the front doors we could see lines of people trying to push their way inside. Fans were scalping tickets, snapping pictures, asking our guys for autographs. It was unreal, surreal. Soon as we got inside and settled, I sat my guys down and told them to soak it all in. I said, “Look around. This is gonna be some experience. Enjoy this.”
But then I tried to get them to shut out all the noise and commotion. My idea was to acknowledge it, maybe even celebrate it, and then set it aside, because I didn’t want it to cloud our focus. In our pregame talk, I tried to get our guys to concentrate on our opponent, not the atmosphere. That’s why I thought it was important to talk about the crowd and the media straightaway, so we could get past it.
As I spoke, I saw Caroline Kennedy sitting in one of the front rows. Her daughter was an intern on the HBO project, I learned later, so she’d come to show her support, but it was a strange thing to see, a strange thing to have to think about—Caroline Kennedy, out of the corner of my eye, in a packed arena to watch us play. The fact that I noticed her at all in the middle of such a big moment meant I wasn’t doing such a good job tuning out all the distractions myself.
Going into the game, I was back and forth with my assistants on how to match up against Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, whose game had only gotten better since we saw him at the Linden camp over the summer. I’ll say it again: this kid could play—one of those singular talents who could destroy an opponent all on his own. My first thought was to put Jerome on Gilchrist, but St. Patrick had two other big men Kevin Boyle tended to alternate in and out of his lineup, and I thought I’d need Jerome to neutralize their size. My next thought was to have Kyle guard Gilchrist, but I worried this would put Kyle into foul trouble; Gilchrist was a smart player, and he might look to attack the rim more than usual, which would have left Kyle vulnerable.
Last time we played St. Pat’s, we had Tyon Williams on Gilchrist, but Tyon was hurt, so I looked finally to Lucious Jones. This was no easy decision. Last year, down the stretch, Lucky hadn’t been so lucky for us—he couldn’t guard anybody, which was why I’d been worried about him heading into this season; I worried how he’d respond to the pressures of leading the team in big games as a senior. But guess what? He’d really turned things around on the defensive end. Jordan Quick too. I think having guys like Kyle and Myles around really took some of the pressure off my two returning seniors, so Lucky got the assignment, and I knew he was up to it.
Our warm-up was crazy. The crowd noise was unbelievable. The arena had a real NCAA tournament atmosphere to it—didn’t feel like a high school game by any stretch. I’d coached over 1,100 games at that point, and I’d never seen anything like it, and as our guys tried to get loose I worried that the size of the crowd and the moment would go to their heads.
St. Pat’s won the opening tip and pushed the ball down the court for an easy layup to start the game. Three seconds in, and we were already down 2–0, and that set the tone for the first quarter. St. Patrick put nineteen points on the board, but somehow we managed to score thirteen, so it was only a two-possession game. Trouble was, it felt to me like the St. Patrick points came easy and our points were a struggle.
Second quarter, our guys tightened things up on defense. Whatever nerves or jitters they’d been feeling as the game got under way appeared to settle, and we started to play much better. We ended up outscoring St. Pat’s in the quarter by a point, which made it a five-point game, only here we were better able to dictate the pace and flow. Now the St. Patrick points were a little harder to come by, and the St. Anthony points were a little less of a struggle.
At halftime, I huddled with my guys and put it on them to analyze our first-half performance. I said, “What’s holding us back? What did
you feel like out there?”
I went up and down the bench, polling every single player, and each one talked about how nervous he’d been. I’d expected nerves to play a factor, but not to this extent. A couple of my players said they’d never been more nervous in their lives, so right away I thought this was something we could use. I thought if I could get them to see that once they got into it, once they adjusted to the crowd and the noise and the magnitude of the game, they played better. Whatever jitters they’d been feeling when the game started, they’d managed to set them aside.
I said, “Relax.”
Just one word … relax.
And here again, I tried to match my demeanor to the message. My insides were churning, but I knew I had to appear relaxed to these kids if I wanted to put my point across.
I let it sink in, then I reminded everyone that we were the underdogs in this game. It wasn’t a role we were used to playing. Wasn’t even a role I liked. But it helped to have the crowd pulling for us. We’d survived the first few minutes of the game, after being down by as many as ten points. We’d cut it to a five-point lead. We’d been having good possessions. And now the crowd was pulling for us even more.
I said, “Let’s go out in the second half and try to be a little more relaxed on the offensive end. If you have an open shot, take it. Look for the open man. Do the things you’ve done all season long just to get here. Don’t let these guys take you out of your game.”
The third quarter tilted our way at first. We went on a nice run to take the lead, but then St. Pat’s answered with a run of its own, to go back up by five. We were back and forth, up and down, but when St. Pat’s pushed the lead back to five, I thought I had to do something to put a kind of stamp on the quarter, so with about three minutes to go in the third I called for a time-out as we brought the ball across half-court.