A Magical Season for UConn, Regardless of the Ending
ARLINGTON, Tex. - Shabazz Napier has spent the last few days trying to keep his University of Connecticut teammates' emotions in check. Do not get too wrapped up in the team's success at this N.C.A.A. tournament, he has said. Do not celebrate too soon.
'It's only magical if we get to the end,' he has said, again and again.
But for a senior guard whose mind is as sharp as his shooting, Napier is way off the mark on this.
Regardless of the outcome of UConn's matchup against Kentucky in Monday night's national championship game, he and his teammates have written the script to an astonishing, improbable story.
A year ago, it was painful for these Huskies even to watch the tournament from which they had been barred because of the academic sins of earlier Huskies. But look at them now. As a No. 7 seed, they have felled team after team that was supposed to beat them: St. Joseph's; Villanova; then, on the Madison Square Garden floor, which might as well have been their home court, Iowa State and Michigan State.
Something extraordinary was unfolding before our eyes, but it wasn't until Saturday that people outside New England seemed to notice. That's when the Huskies came back to beat No. 1 Florida, 63-53, despite scoring only 4 points in the game's first 11 minutes.
'It was stunning,' said Bill Walton, the Hall of Fame center. 'They made the No. 1 team look inconsequential.
'Now they find themselves with all you can ask for - something that everybody wants - and that's a chance.'
The lead in this fairy tale has been Napier, who stuck with UConn through good times (a 2011 national title) and bad (the ban) so he could mature as a person and a player. He is on track to graduate next month and is so mature that he says he has refrained from joining Twitter because 'some things that fans say are so disrespectful that it's overboard.'
But he has a sizable supporting cast. There is Ryan Boatright, a junior guard who stepped up his defense and figured out that penetrating and then kicking the ball out to teammates can be just as productive - and as fun - as scoring. And not many would have guessed forward DeAndre Daniels, who led all scorers with 20 points in the Florida game, would emerge as a star after a middling regular season. But not many guessed UConn would reach the final, either.
Kevin Ollie did. He has fixed this team and led it. He is the real hero of this story. Like many of his players, Ollie came out of high school thinking he was going to be a college superstar, then an N.B.A. star. He was neither. As Jim Calhoun's point guard at UConn in the early 1990s, Ollie was a steady role player. In 13 years in the N.B.A., he was an itinerant worker, doing little things that teams needed, making himself useful. With that resiliency and belief in himself, he played for 11 teams in the league, squeezing out season after season long after other players would have given up.
'He once told me that he'd had 12 or 13 10-day contracts,' said Calhoun, the Hall of Fame coach who surrendered the UConn job to Ollie when he stepped down in 2012. 'You know how tough it is to keep proving yourself like that?'
Probably just as tough as following a coach like Calhoun. Ollie spent two years as an assistant under Calhoun before taking his first head coaching job, but he remains his own man. While Calhoun was old-school and a looming presence, Ollie has been paternal and positive.
Tyler Olander, a senior forward, said it took awhile for the team to get used to Ollie's ways. He laughed when he described how hard it was for Ollie to be riled up enough to shout and curse. 'Even when he finally did it, it looked like he felt bad about it,' Olander said. 'But he always believed in us, and that's all we needed.'
Napier said: 'Coach Calhoun was the guy that yelled at you; Coach Ollie was the guy that patted you on the back and kept you moving forward. He's been through a lot. A guy like that who never pointed fingers at anybody but himself through all his trials and tribulations and everything he has been through - you can learn from that.'
Napier, who did not grow up with a father, said Ollie has been a stand-in and a role model for him, so much so that Napier was comfortable enough to sob on Ollie's shoulder during a rough stretch in his sophomore year.
Ollie won 20 games in his first season and 31 (and counting) in his second, but he did not want to talk about that last week. He was prouder of his players' academic records; five of them, including Napier, his star, are on the dean's list.
'Forget the 20 wins,' Ollie said of last season's success. 'I don't really care about that. I care about the way they performed in the classroom, which was remarkable.'
He later added: 'Basketball is second to me. I want them to be better people once they leave Storrs campus. If I did that, forget about the wins and losses, national championship, all that stuff, I think I've done my job.'
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