He knew all along what he was doing.
He scheduled all of those brutal road games on purpose, to give his team the baptism by fire that has resulted in its Atlantic 10 rebirth. If he had access to some sort of roundball time machine, there’s no way he’d want to change a single date on the early-season slate that left the Massachusetts men’s hoop team at 2-9.
Would he?
“I’d trade it in a minute,” Coach James “Bruiser” Flint said. “When you’re 2-9, I don’t think that helps anybody.”
So much for the master plan theory. Despite his team’s 360-degree turnaround and subsequent climb to the top of the A-10, Flint dismisses the notion that learning how to lose taught this team to win. As a matter of fact, he says that there is no clear-cut answer, no secret recipe for UMass’ sudden success.
“Everybody keeps asking me what we’re doing differently now,” Flint said. “We really haven’t done much. We’ve slowed things down a little bit; we’re being more patient and taking care of the ball by not turning it over. We’ll still run when we have to, but we’re trying to stay in control more.”
The team may be in control of more than just the basketball; skeptics who called for Flint’s firing not so long ago are pointing to the team’s conference domination as the one possible way for the fifth-year coach to avoid an off-season dismissal. But was the team’s early-season stumble really a by-product of poor coaching?
It seems at least possible that a lot of fans got caught up in the team’s record and failed to look past how the Minutemen were losing to where they were losing.
“My thing about the schedule is that you’ve got to play at home,” Flint said. “It’s hard to win on the road in the first place, especially with who we’ve played – Carolina, Oregon, Marquette. It’s tough to go out and win at those places.”
An easy remedy for that, should Flint be back on the UMass sideline next year, would be for him to line up a slew of also-rans for the Minutemen to pummel over the first few months of the season. That way, they could enter A-10 play with a bloated overall record and not have to weather the storm of controversy that faced this year’s squad after it dropped six straight heading into the holidays.
And if the toughness of the non-conference slate doesn’t affect A-10 play anyway isn’t this, in the words of our most famous b-ball grad, a “no-brainer?”
“I’ll never play a cupcake schedule,” Flint said. “We’ll always play tough teams – I would just like to play them at home.”
Flint points to his heralded predecessor, John Calipari, as giving the UMass team its identity as the consummate roundball road warrior. Of the school-record 35 wins that the Calipari-led 1995-96 team racked up, 26 occurred away from the friendly confines of the William D. Mullins Center.
The team took tremendous pride in winning on the road, a task made monumentally easier by the team’s personnel at the time, according to then-assistant Flint.
“I blame Cal,” Flint said. “That Any Team, Any Time, Any Place stuff is OK when you’ve got Marcus Camby and Lou Roe.”
But the current UMass team has its own marquee player, whom Flint feels is as singularly responsible for the team’s resurgence as anyone. Senior tri-captain Monty Mack has been nothing short of explosive in conference play, averaging 22 points over the team’s seven victories. His 21 points in the first half against Rhode Island was one point less than the entire Ram team over the same period.
“Right now, Monty is the most valuable player in the Atlantic 10 by far,” Flint said. “He’s the biggest reason why we’ve been able to turn it around in the second half of the season.”
And as long as Mack and company continue to dominate, they will continue garnering fans who more than likely were booing the team earlier this year. That brings up one aspect of the turnaround that Flint will cop to: the Minutemen learned how to pull together as one and shoulder the responsibility collectively instead of making excuses and pointing fingers. So even as the crowd on the bandwagon continues to grow, this team already has all the support it needs – from the inside.
“This is a fleeting business,” Flint said. “When it’s going good, you’re going to have people in your corner. When you’re doing bad, that’s what you’ve got your team for.
“You just can’t let it bother you. You’ve got to make sure your team stays on point.”
