How Important Is Joe Hillman to the Hoosiers? : He’s No. 1 With Knight

He is second on the team in scoring and ranks first in assists and steals, but for a true measure of Joe Hillman’s importance to Indiana’s basketball team, we take you to a hallway deep within the hallowed walls of Assembly Hall, the Hoosiers’ home arena.

It is halftime of a Big Ten game against Minnesota last month and Indiana is trailing by six.

Coach Bob Knight, not a happy Hoosier, locks his team out of the locker room.

It is up to Hillman, a senior with five years’ experience of dealing with such predicaments, to keep the situation under control. Indeed, the eyes of a dozen teammates show that they are counting on him to do so.

“Hey, I don’t want to look back and say if it wouldn’t have been for that Minnesota game we would have won the Big Ten,” Hillman says as he gathers the team in a huddle around him. “We’re down six. It’s not like we’re down 20. Let’s just settle down and do what we’re supposed to do.”

A fly-by-Knight speech it was not. But it worked. Hillman made certain of it. He scored 14 points in the second half, 20 in all, and Indiana went on to win the game, 66-62, and its coveted Big Ten title.

“I wouldn’t have sent them out of the locker room if I didn’t think I had somebody out there smart enough to talk to them,” Knight said later.

Is it any wonder, then, that Indiana’s coach of 18 seasons considers Hillman, who was a scoring machine at Glendale Hoover High School, the embodiment of an unselfish team leader?

“None of the things he’s done statistically approach the kind of leadership he’s given,” said Knight, whose eighth-ranked Hoosiers will play George Mason Friday in a first-round National Collegiate Athletic Assn. playoff game at Tucson.

So, perhaps in a bit of a promotional ploy, Knight gave his 6-foot-2, 190-pound guard a most memorable introduction during a senior farewell ceremony last week after Indiana’s final home game.

Knight used the occasion to endorse Hillman for most valuable player in the Big Ten by telling a crowd of more than 17,000 stunned Hoosier fans that anyone who dared question Hillman’s qualifications should know exactly where they could put their opinions.

“The most valuable player is not the best player,” Knight had said earlier in the week. “It is the player who has done the most to get his team where it is. It is an absolute clear-cut situation that Hillman is the MVP. Period.”

Opposing Big Ten coaches seem to agree.

“Anyone who knows anything about basketball knows Hillman is their glue, the guy who keeps them together,” Purdue’s Gene Keady said.

“There’s a difference between being a great player and being MVP,” said Lou Henson of Illinois, the only team to defeat Indiana twice this season. “Hillman is unbelievable, the points he gets . . . and, more important, all the intangibles he provides.”

With the team struggling early this season, Knight told his players that they might be wise to listen to the voice of experience.

“I said, ‘I know some of you guys won a state championship or something when you were in high school, but Hillman here helped us win a national championship,” Knight said. ‘There isn’t one . . . in here that’s ever done that, so let’s pay attention to what the hell he’s telling you.’ ”

After a 3-4 start, Indiana won its next 13 games.

“He’s been extremely patient with this team,” Hillman said of Knight. “He knew this was a young team, but it had possibilities of doing well.”

Hillman said a 13-point loss to Notre Dame in early December was the turning point.

Instead of reacting to the loss with anger, Hillman said that Knight became optimistic.

“He said, ‘Hey, we’ve got three guys doing exactly what we need. Now all we’ve got to find are two more,’ ” Hillman recalled.

The Notre Dame game was important for another reason. It was the first game this season in which Knight stuck with a three-guard offense. Hillman, Lyndon Jones and Jay Edwards played on the perimeter, with Todd Jadlow and 6-9 freshman center Eric Anderson banging away inside.

“It allows me to get into the flow of the offense more,” Hillman said. “I don’t have to handle the ball as much. I get involved in the screening before I handle the ball.”

The result: More shooting opportunities. Hillman’s 269 shots this season were 53 more than he had in the three previous seasons combined.

But that represents only about eight games’ worth of what he was used to in high school at Hoover. As a senior, he averaged 41.3 points a game, third best in Southern Section history.

“I think people understand now that I did what I had to do to play the first few years,” Hillman said. “I didn’t need to score a whole lot. But now that I have the opportunity to shoot a little more, I’ve done more of that.”

Perhaps the only negative is that with three guards on the floor, somebody gets stuck guarding a forward. Usually, it is Hillman.

“Joe Hillman is the most mismatched and overmatched player in college basketball,” Knight said. “It’s not even remotely close.”

With that, Knight ran down the list of Big Ten opponents. Against Illinois, Hillman was matched against 6-5 Nick Anderson.

“Three inches taller, probably 35 pounds heavier and a great athlete, which Joe isn’t,” Knight said.

Against Michigan, he drew Glen Rice, the conference’s leading scorer with an average of 25 points a game. In two games against Indiana--both one-point Hoosier victories--Rice totaled 26 points and shot 38%.

“He doesn’t get anybody that he’s either quicker than or bigger than,” Knight said.

The truth be told, Knight doesn’t even consider Hillman to be among the better athletes on Indiana’s team.

“He’s a competitor,” Knight said. “That allows him to do things he by rights shouldn’t be able to do.”

Among those: Becoming the coach’s favorite player.

When Indiana defeated Purdue, making Knight the Big Ten’s winningest coach, Hillman presented him the game ball.

“Keep it,” Knight said, “and practice your free throws.”

And to think that Hillman was willing to pass up all this fun to play professional baseball. Well, at least he could have indirectly blamed it on Knight, who encouraged him to play baseball during his sophomore season.

Hillman, a right fielder and designated hitter at Indiana, was drafted last June by the Oakland Athletics in the 25th round. After signing, he reported to the A’s Medford, Ore., rookie team, for which he batted .310 and drove in 27 runs.

So impressed were Oakland scouts that Hillman was invited to the Arizona Instructional League, which ran into October--two weeks after the Hoosiers were to start practice. Having already graduated from Indiana with a 3.33 grade-point average and a degree in business and real estate, Hillman figured it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He called Knight to break the news, expecting the worst possible reaction.

But Knight had only one question: “After that, do you want to come back?”

Knight said: “The first day he was back he knew what we were doing better than anybody who had been there for the two weeks.”

Until Hillman, Knight had never recruited a player west of the Mississippi. He hooked up with Hillman through mutual acquaintances in California.

Knight, in fact, asked Hillman to play at Indiana without ever having seen him play.

“We’ve taken a lot of kids I haven’t seen,” Knight said. “Unfortunately, not all of them have worked out like Hillman.”

Already being recruited heavily by both USC and Stanford, Hillman chose Indiana even though Knight at first didn’t have a scholarship to offer.

“I wanted to play for a national championship,” Hillman said.

He got his wish of course. A picture reminding him of that is the centerpiece of his off-campus apartment.