Miami Survives All of Its Storms

Two players were suspended. One of them then quit for good in February. The team moved on, battled harder and made the NCAA tournament field of 64.

Oh, and the 11th-seeded Miami Hurricanes’ first-round opponent Friday at the Georgia Dome had some problems this season too.

While UCLA shuffled through the Jelani McCoy-Kris Johnson soap operas--complete with Coach Steve Lavin repeatedly explaining that he was facing unparalleled difficulties--Miami Coach Leonard Hamilton endured a fascinatingly similar series of disruptions.

In late January, the heart of the Big East season, Miami, which was 14-4 at the time, suspended starting swingman Lucas Barnes--who had led the Hurricanes in their Jan. 6 victory over Connecticut--and key reserve guard Johnny Hemsley for unspecified violations of team rules.

Barnes quit the team on Feb. 5 and Hemsley rejoined it on Feb. 15, the same day McCoy quit the Bruins.

And the Hurricanes’ 7-foot back-up center, Nick Donovan, had blown out his knee only five games into the season.

All this on a team that had not made the NCAA field since 1960, that had dropped basketball from 1971-1985, that went 0-18 in its first season of Big East play seven years ago.

“Whew,” said Hurricane senior point guard Kevin Norris, when asked how the team reacted to the disarray. “We knew we could still win without them, but it’d take a little while to get the chemistry down. And that’s what happened.

“And then [Hemsley] came back, so we had to get back into sync. We were in sync, then we got out of sync, then we had to get back into sync. . . . You know what I mean?”

Anybody who followed UCLA this season knows precisely what he means.

Lavin argues that, because of the suspensions of Johnson and McCoy at the start of the season, then Johnson’s return, McCoy’s return and, finally, McCoy’s departure, he has coached four different teams this season.

Using the same logic, Hamilton has coached five, with no future NBA first-rounders, but with a ferocious defensive mentality.

“We’ve had our share of distractions,” said Hamilton, who led the Hurricanes in prayer after their at-large selection was announced Sunday. “And I know what [the Bruins have] gone through.

“We’ve had some difficult problems we’ve had to deal with, but we’ve put them behind us. I don’t want to talk about them. We’re not dwelling on them at all.”

The Hurricanes, not exactly potent offensively these days, held opponents to 37.7% shooting, the NCAA’s best defensive mark. No opponent shot 50% or better, and only Syracuse and West Virginia scored more than 80 points.

“We’re definitely a defensive team,” Norris said. “That’s it. That’s the job. We play good defense, we win the game.”

Even against UCLA?

“Against anybody. That’s how we beat everybody we beat. Man to man, that’s our bread and butter. Man. To. Man.”

Without Barnes’ explosive offense, Miami scrambled freshmen and sophomores around Norris and junior forward Tim James, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder.

Miami finished the season on a 4-5 tumble, but got the NCAA selection by virtue of its victory over Connecticut and then a crucial late-season 70-66 defeat of West Virginia

After a first-round loss in the Big East tournament to Georgetown last week, which gave the Hurricanes an 18-9 record, 11-7 in regular-season league play, Miami had to sit and wait for the selections.

“I thought it was a 50-50 chance--well, maybe 40-60,” Norris said. “We had to wait until the end of the show, but when ‘Miami, Fla.,’ was put on the screen, it was like a Toyota commercial. Everybody jumped up and went nuts.”

Said Hamilton: “I felt we were going to make the tournament, felt that all along, said that all along. I’ve always had a positive approach to what we can do with our team. We’ve made significant strides.

“Obviously, it’s a tremendous accomplishment for our program to have reached this point of success. But you need to keep it all in perspective.”

For Hamilton, perspective means remembering the brutal times in the early ‘90s, when the Hurricanes were fodder for Connecticut and Syracuse and Villanova. When he had to field a team of only seven players for a few weeks.

When nobody had any idea that Miami’s football team also had a basketball-playing sibling.

“The football team was winning for so long, it really didn’t matter what we did,” Norris said. “But if the basketball team was to start winning a lot, I think it’ll be a big difference around here, a real big change.

“There’s just so many things going on right here, that football’s not even the talk of the town now. It’s all about whoever’s winning around here. This is a bandwagon town. The Marlins? They’ve moved on, you know?”

For a while, whenever Miami looked as if it would field a competitive Big East team, there would be a rash of injuries or, like last season, a late-season swoon.

At one point in the early years, Hamilton admitted to the New York Times, he closed the door to his office, cried and prayed that he could make it through.

“He’s a very low-key coach, laid back,” Norris said of Hamilton. “He’s not your typical head coach, all hollering and fussing on the sidelines all the time about this and that. . . . “

“Obviously, it was tough,” Hamilton said. “Miami didn’t have basketball for 14 years. When they brought the program back, they did not have an affiliation with a conference at all. It was obviously a tough situation, but we expected it to be tough.

“It appears we weathered the storm.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FRIDAY’S GAME

UCLA vs. MIAMI

WHERE: Atlanta

TIME: 7:10 p.m.