Find a team on a losing streak and find a coach who has sleeping problems.
Last year, in the many nights, when the Missouri coach Dennis Gates, he was awake beyond midnight by processing how his tigers were heading to a record of regular season 0-18 against opponents of the conference, the worst of school in more than a century, he did not approve them alone. He marked the lifelong mentor Leonard Hamilton, the chief coach in Florida State.
Gates had hung from Hamilton’s word as a semino assistant for eight years before leaving in 2019, from listening to his press conferences to taking notes on his laptop when Hamilton told stories in his office. One that Hamilton transmitted during those sessions was about its 1993-94 season training to Miami, since hurricanes endured a 0-18 record in Big East Play.
Facing his own winter without victories last year, Gates, 45, “called his cell phone at 2 in the morning,” Gates told NBC News.
“If you don’t pick it up, I called your house 2 in the morning, at 3 in the morning. You can hear it clarify your throat. I said: ‘Coach, are you asleep?’ He said: ‘No, I’m waiting for your call’ “.
Hamilton said: “Most of the time, I replied in the first ring.”
He partially predicted by the guide Gates took from those calls, along with a healthier list and an offensive of Buzz Saw, Missouri this season has written a historical change that will continue on Sunday when Missouri listens to his name called as one of the 68 teams in the group for the basketball tour of the NCAA men.
A year after going 0-18 at the Southeast Conference, 0-19 by including its loss of first round in the conference tournament, and 8-24 in general, the Tigers now enter the NCAA tournament to 22-11, having gone 10-8 and tied in sixth place in the SEC, the deepest conference of the nation this season. It marks the first time in the history of the SEC that a school has remained without winning in the conference game a season and then registered victories at the two -digit conference in the next, according to a Missouri investigation.
The Tigers have defeated three teams classified among the top five, Alabama, Florida and Kansas, thanks to an offensive that has jumped the national ranking since 215 in the scoring offensive (72.2 points per game) to Eighth (84.5).
Madness, in fact.
Kentucky coach Mark Pope called the Tigers “one of the great stories in university basketball.”
Gates, whose tigers had gone 25-10 and made the second round of the NCAA tournament during their first season at school in 2023, “he did not forget how to train in a year,” Hamilton told NBC News.
“I think he [transfer] Portal and how it works, sometimes you can recruit good players and good children who do not fit your system, and once you understand that, it is not that players are wrong or the training system is bad. It’s just that when you caught in those situations, you have to find who fits the way you want to play, ”he said. “And I think that’s what he did. He thoroughly evaluated what he needed and what he did not have, of those things that are important to him, and I think they became wiser. “
They certainly became healthier.
The Tigres players lost 111 games for an injury last season, including a foot injury that left the best taxpayer John Tonje for the last two months of last season, Tonje, which since then was transferred to Wisconsin, is one of the best scorers of the Big Ten, and the Caleb Grill key reserve, which played nine games before a wrist injury.
“Disask,” Gates said. “I would like to see any coach at this level to resist that storm of injury.”
The patience shown by the administrators of Missouri was also almost unknown in the middle of the recession at a time when “you have many instinctive reactions in our sport,” said Hamilton. Although the athletic director who had hired Gates in Missouri was gone, leaving Gates with a new boss, the coach not only lost his job but also destroyed his staff.
When asked to explain the change, Gates spent a large part of an interview by proving those around him, from the president of the school to his attendees and specific specialization areas.
“I did not hesitate secondly what we have been doing,” Gates said. “We obtained some talented coaches who obtained a plan that the ads and other institutions covet: how to build something that is at the bottom. … It is easy to start in third base. It is easy. But what happens when you start outside the stadium, not even on a bench, outside the stadium?
But Gates also, “deserves a lot of credit,” Garth Glissman said, an associated commissioner who supervises the Basketball operations of the SEC.
“Many coaches on that stage would simply clean the house, and that is not what he did,” Glissman told NBC News.
“It is not the type of person who runs a group of children with the first adversity sign,” he added. “And so he stayed with the children in this program who wanted to stay with him, and came out and complemented the list with some shocking transfers. But without stretch of the imagination, this Missouri team is a completely different list than last year. There are many key pieces that returned, and that is the credit for the coach of Gates. “
After recovering from your wrist injury, Grill averages 14.2 points per game from the bank while shooting 42% from the range of 3 points and almost 50% from the field in general. Voted as the sixth man of the year of the SEC, Grill is “one of the most improved players in the country, but also, there is no better man in our country,” Gates said.
“They are deep,” said ESPN analyst Fran Frascchilla to NBC News. “They have two reference scorers in Mark Mitchell and Tamar Bates, they have a young shipowner who is a second year student, Anthony Robinson, whom I love, and are an excellent offensive team. They are very optimistic, and take care of the ball. They are a complete offensive team at this time. “
Mitchell was transferred from Duke and immediately became the top scorer of the Tigers and a third -team tribute throughout the conference. Bates, a 6 -foot and 5 -inch guard who played with Mitchell at high school, has fired 60% of his career within the 3 -point arch and 39% higher from his career outside him. Robinson was named for the completely defensive team of the SEC.
Missouri had not scored more than 100 points in any of his first 226 SEC games since he joined the conference in 2012, however, this year he has reached the triples twice. It is not surprising that the tigers are on the way to register their maximum score season since 1989-90.
This is not the first rapid reconstruction of Gates. The state of Cleveland had not played in an NCAA tournament in 11 years when it hired Gates in 2019, but made the tournament in just his second season. The doors of plans used there, and in Missouri again this season, it was developed from the lessons he had learned in part by observing Hamilton in the state of Florida. Although the transfer portal has allowed the teams to make changes in the wholesale list during a single season, the “adjustment” of those players is essential, Hamilton said.
Hamilton, who retires in the state of Florida this season after a race that covers 37 seasons and 660 victories, said it was correct to collect the phone to pay the type of help he received as a young coach when he bounced ideas of mentors, including John Thompson, the Georgetown Georgetwn coach of the NCAA, and George Raveling, a former university coach, a former university coach Long term, Nike executive.
“We have talked about things regularly for several years,” said Hamilton. “I think that has allowed him to relate to some of my trips. But I think it collects all your information, you evaluate which ones you think are the challenges and continue. I mean, Dennis is a great coach. “
