Huggins, Floyd put on a show
At least oddball coaches help to make 1st round a bit more entertaining
MINNEAPOLIS -- Part of the joy of these early games is getting to see coaches become lunatics.
Let's start with Bob Huggins, the West Virginia coach, who became legendary as the semi-insane head man a few years back at Cincinnati.
Huggy-Bear is now somewhat mellowed, or at least detoxified, but his court demeanor is still unparalleled.
As he watched his No. 6-seed Mountaineers go down slowly to No. 11-seed Dayton 68-60, he scowled, rolled his eyes, laughed sarcastically, stared laser holes through the refs, turned to the crowd and asked questions, and then actually lost with dignity.
Along the way Huggins, who has let his suit coat out about two feet since he started as a grad assistant at West Virginia in 1977 after playing there for four years, did his best wound-up, pure-Huggy stuff.
And that is telling tales to the scorer's table as the game is progressing, and randomly and periodically wrapping an arm around one of his players, perhaps a kid sitting cluelessly on the bench, to explain the horrors of bad officiating, such as his team is receiving just now.
It's not clear how well feisty and fast Dayton will do against No. 3 seed Kansas in the next round. But those underdogs can take inspiration from Huggins' appraisal of his own Big East Conference: ''You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.''
And then there's USC's Tim Floyd, the man in the white shirt and flapping tie who moves along the sideline the way a duck in a shooting arcade bounces from wall to wall.
Travelin' Tim studies his card full of notes, ponders the wooden floor, stalks to the baseline, squats, twitches, comes back and tries to sit in his seat, then invariably begins screaming commands or persecutions.
He's not like Huggins, who back in his nutty Bearcat days would get into heated arguments with his own players during games.
But Floyd is intense and wordy.
Still, you can sometimes see the method to the madness.
With 10 minutes left in the game, for instance, and Boston College taking the ball out near its own basket, Floyd raced out and screamed maniacally to forward Leonard Washington to ignore the passer and double whoever might cut to receive the inbounds ball.
Washington did this, and sure enough, he deflected the ball, and the shot clock expired, and USC regained possession.
That is the kind of micro-managing that wouldn't have worked back in Floyd's days as coach of the Bulls, mainly because pros don't listen, but also because such hyperactivity would kill a coach over an 82-plus game season. And when Floyd was going 49-190 with the Bulls, it nearly did.
As it is, Floyd has his manager hand him a piece of nicotine gum on a regular basis, sort of the way a speed freak gets a refill for his meth pipe.
Floyd has the remarkably gifted, 6-7, 220-pound freshman forward DeMar DeRozan (18 points) working for him. And 6-9 junior forward Taj Gibson went 10-for-10 from the field (game-high 24 points) against BC.
Indeed, Floyd's team seems to have come together at the end of this season in a remarkable way, beating UCLA and winning five in a row en route to USC's first Pac-10 Tournament championship.
A month ago, USC lost six of seven. ''People wrote us off back in February, and I can understand why,'' Floyd said.
But it would be silly to do that now.
Big and rugged No. 2-seed Michigan State, which plays USC on Sunday after overwhelming Robert Morris, will be hard-pressed to match the Trojans' athleticism and, yes, coaching.
Another example: As the clock ran down, USC guard Dwight Lewis looked at Floyd to see what he should do. The BC defender guarding Dwight looked at Floyd, as well. No matter. As both studied his face, Floyd screamed for Lewis to move and shoot it.
Lewis did, and his swishing three-pointer made the final score 72-55, USC.
''It was a very good team effort,'' Floyd said. But when grilled as to whether he brought up last year's quick loss to Kansas State in the tourney as a pregame warning to his team, as one his players had stated, the coach shrugged.
''I'm 55, I can't remember what I said.''
He may be aging, but Tim Floyd sure isn't winding down.