Post by elp525 on Feb 22, 2011 8:23:32 GMT -5
February 21, 2011
By Dave Hickman
The Charleston Gazette
MORGANTOWN - Bob Huggins would have you believe that there's no such thing as a good technical foul, no matter how auspicious the timing.
"I don't know what you enjoy about watching guys make two free throws,'' Huggins said Saturday afternoon.
That's his public take on the matter, though. Coaches can't be seen as manipulating officials into reacting to their rants, or those officials will stop reacting. Or, worse yet, they will react when coaches don't want them to react.
But Huggins knows as well as the next guy that technical fouls can be a useful tool in motivating a group of 18-to-22-year-old kids toward a goal.
Now, whether his explosion at Tim Higgins in the second half of West Virginia's 72-58 win over No. 8 Notre Dame was of design can be debated. It was, after all, a spur-of-the-moment thing. Joe Mazzulla drove to the basket, wound up pretzelized on the floor when he ran into the Irish defense and didn't get a foul call.
It was but an instant later that Huggins was being restrained from going any further onto the floor and Higgins was reporting the technical to the scorer's table. Usually, a strategic technical takes a few moments to percolate while a coach rides an official. This one was instantaneous, so either Huggins didn't really plan it or over the last 30 years he's become really, really good at the art.
Again, he would have you believe the former.
"I didn't have any method to my madness," Huggins said when asked that very question. "I thought there was a foul, and I kind of expressed that, maybe a little too vehemently. I don't know, you're not supposed to have any emotion, I guess."
That's when he made the crack about not particularly enjoying watching Notre Dame's Tim Abromaitis step to the line and make two free throws to cut West Virginia's lead to 50-42. But then he did admit that all was not lost in that sequence.
"I thought we played with a lot of enthusiasm after that," Huggins said.
The question, though, is did the technical foul - whether it was intentional or not - accomplish anything? Again, that's always a matter for debate because of the uncertainty surrounding what might have happened sans the incident, but the results were hard to argue with on so many levels:
After Abromaitis made the two free throws, Notre Dame didn't score for nearly 21/2 minutes, and by the time the Irish did it was 57-42 and the outcome was all but decided.
The next time Notre Dame had the ball, Mazzulla stood his ground under the basket, took a charge from Scott Martin and got the call. Then, two West Virginia possessions later, Mazzulla drove to the basket again and Notre Dame star Ben Hansbrough stood his ground and tried to take the charge. He didn't get the call.
And in reaction to that, Notre Dame coach Mike Brey rushed the court and drew his own technical. Now, technical fouls on the road are a little trickier than those in front of a home crowd. Brey's merely served to charge the atmosphere even more, and the Irish were never within single digits of the lead again.
Of course, what is lost in all of this is that West Virginia probably didn't need to be charged up at the time of the technical. To wit: With the clock approaching the 12-minute mark, Notre Dame was within 45-40. Kevin Jones then made a nice 3-pointer, the two teams traded turnovers, John Flowers blocked a Hansbrough drive and Truck Bryant hit a 10-footer off the glass to make the score 50-40.
It was on the next possession that Mazzulla drove and Huggins got the technical. So it wasn't as if things were going badly and West Virginia needed a pick-me-up. The bottom line is it came smack in the middle of a 12-2 WVU run.
So maybe the whole thing was overblown.
Still, when two subsequent coin-flip calls both go in your favor and it drives the other coach into a road technical that served no positive purpose, well, it can be argued that it certainly didn't hurt (even if Notre Dame's only two points in that nearly five-minute stretch came on the technical free throws).
"We had the home crowd behind us and Coach usually gets fired up if he doesn't think a call is right," Jones said afterward. "But emotionally it made us step up our game. When the technical fouls happened, we just came together even more.''
Mazzulla perhaps gave Huggins too much credit, saying he was sure it was an intentional technical.
"He kind of came over and told us that he got that one on purpose. And we fed off of it. Not only us, but the crowd fed off of it, and we were able to sustain that,'' Mazzulla said. "If there's one thing about Huggs, he never gets an unnecessary technical.''
By Dave Hickman
The Charleston Gazette
MORGANTOWN - Bob Huggins would have you believe that there's no such thing as a good technical foul, no matter how auspicious the timing.
"I don't know what you enjoy about watching guys make two free throws,'' Huggins said Saturday afternoon.
That's his public take on the matter, though. Coaches can't be seen as manipulating officials into reacting to their rants, or those officials will stop reacting. Or, worse yet, they will react when coaches don't want them to react.
But Huggins knows as well as the next guy that technical fouls can be a useful tool in motivating a group of 18-to-22-year-old kids toward a goal.
Now, whether his explosion at Tim Higgins in the second half of West Virginia's 72-58 win over No. 8 Notre Dame was of design can be debated. It was, after all, a spur-of-the-moment thing. Joe Mazzulla drove to the basket, wound up pretzelized on the floor when he ran into the Irish defense and didn't get a foul call.
It was but an instant later that Huggins was being restrained from going any further onto the floor and Higgins was reporting the technical to the scorer's table. Usually, a strategic technical takes a few moments to percolate while a coach rides an official. This one was instantaneous, so either Huggins didn't really plan it or over the last 30 years he's become really, really good at the art.
Again, he would have you believe the former.
"I didn't have any method to my madness," Huggins said when asked that very question. "I thought there was a foul, and I kind of expressed that, maybe a little too vehemently. I don't know, you're not supposed to have any emotion, I guess."
That's when he made the crack about not particularly enjoying watching Notre Dame's Tim Abromaitis step to the line and make two free throws to cut West Virginia's lead to 50-42. But then he did admit that all was not lost in that sequence.
"I thought we played with a lot of enthusiasm after that," Huggins said.
The question, though, is did the technical foul - whether it was intentional or not - accomplish anything? Again, that's always a matter for debate because of the uncertainty surrounding what might have happened sans the incident, but the results were hard to argue with on so many levels:
After Abromaitis made the two free throws, Notre Dame didn't score for nearly 21/2 minutes, and by the time the Irish did it was 57-42 and the outcome was all but decided.
The next time Notre Dame had the ball, Mazzulla stood his ground under the basket, took a charge from Scott Martin and got the call. Then, two West Virginia possessions later, Mazzulla drove to the basket again and Notre Dame star Ben Hansbrough stood his ground and tried to take the charge. He didn't get the call.
And in reaction to that, Notre Dame coach Mike Brey rushed the court and drew his own technical. Now, technical fouls on the road are a little trickier than those in front of a home crowd. Brey's merely served to charge the atmosphere even more, and the Irish were never within single digits of the lead again.
Of course, what is lost in all of this is that West Virginia probably didn't need to be charged up at the time of the technical. To wit: With the clock approaching the 12-minute mark, Notre Dame was within 45-40. Kevin Jones then made a nice 3-pointer, the two teams traded turnovers, John Flowers blocked a Hansbrough drive and Truck Bryant hit a 10-footer off the glass to make the score 50-40.
It was on the next possession that Mazzulla drove and Huggins got the technical. So it wasn't as if things were going badly and West Virginia needed a pick-me-up. The bottom line is it came smack in the middle of a 12-2 WVU run.
So maybe the whole thing was overblown.
Still, when two subsequent coin-flip calls both go in your favor and it drives the other coach into a road technical that served no positive purpose, well, it can be argued that it certainly didn't hurt (even if Notre Dame's only two points in that nearly five-minute stretch came on the technical free throws).
"We had the home crowd behind us and Coach usually gets fired up if he doesn't think a call is right," Jones said afterward. "But emotionally it made us step up our game. When the technical fouls happened, we just came together even more.''
Mazzulla perhaps gave Huggins too much credit, saying he was sure it was an intentional technical.
"He kind of came over and told us that he got that one on purpose. And we fed off of it. Not only us, but the crowd fed off of it, and we were able to sustain that,'' Mazzulla said. "If there's one thing about Huggs, he never gets an unnecessary technical.''
