NEW YORK – The calls have come in from North Carolina State, Minnesota and UCLA, just to mention a few.
But each time, VCU coach Shaka Smart has politely declined, resisting the temptation of a BCS contract to stay put at the Atlantic 10 school in Richmond, where he has continued a tradition started by Jeff Capel and Anthony Grant.
Smart is a rising star in this profession, the best young coach in college basketball. VCU is paying him well, singing him to a new deal that will run through 2023 and platy him $1.5 million a year after he coached the upstart Rams to the NCAA Final Four in 2011. He has won 111 games the past four years and taken his team to three straight NCAA tournaments, transforming this commuter school into the Gonzaga of the East and selling out the Siegel Center 35 straight times.
Smart, a Kenyon College magna cum laude graduate who quotes Shakesphere and read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”, is intelligent enough to know when he has a good thing going.
Like Mark Few of Gonzaga and Brad Stevens of Butler before him, he has helped erase the phase “mid-major” from college basketball’s vocabulary. The Rams wo were selected as the pre-season favorite in the upgraded, still deep Atlantic 10 in a coaches’ poll, ahead of last year’s tournament champion St. Louis and La Salle, which advanced to the Sweet 16,
“It says a lot about our returning players that we were picked first,” Smart said at the A-10 media day here. “I don’t think it really changes much in terms of our approach. We want to make sure we’re the hunter. Being picked first, there are going to be some people coming after us.”
The Rams are another classic example of a team that is narrowing the gap between itself and elite BCS schools that grab most of the media attention.
In the past eight years, George Mason, Butler (twice), VCU and most recently Wichita State have broken through the glass ceiling, making the improbable journey gonig from the First Four to the Final Four with upset victories over BCS powers USC, Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas, the Southwest Regionals’ No. 1 seed. His 29 wins in 2012 were the most ever by a VCU team.
“We’ve narrowing the gap,” Smart said. “But it’s still an uphill climb.Just look at the Top 10 .You’ll see all the blue blood. I would say the gap has been narrowed between the rest of the BCS schools and people like us, so maybe the teams at the middle of the pack or bottom of those leagues, they don’t have those advantages over a program like ours they did maybe 20 years ago.”
The NCAA selection committee occasionally realized that in the past, making St. Joseph’s a No. 1 seed in 2004 and Gonzaga a top seed in the West Region last year. But the bigger conferences have so many more advantages.
That is why it is nice to see a schools like VCU and Wichita ranked in the Top 20 in several pre-season magazines.
VCU built its reputation by creating defensive nightmares for opposing teams with its HAVOC style of full court pressure.
Smart lost his starting backcourt of Darius Theus and Troy Daniels, but he returns six of his top eight players. Two of them– 6-9 senior forward Juvonte Reddic, the best NBA prospect in the conference; and 6-6 guard Treveon Graham– were both selected first team all conference. Junior guard Briante Weber, who will likiely replace Theus, broke a 28-year old school record for steals in a single season with 98. “He’s very, very energetic and enthusiastic. the guy never stops. He’s like the energizer bunny.” Weber is the focal point for a suffocating defense that that has led the nation in steals per game in back to back seasons (11.7 in 2012-13 and 10.6 in 2011-12) and turnover margin.
The style is reminiscent of Nolan Richardson’s “Forty Minutes of Hell” at Arkansas in the mid ’90’s.
“When I was an assistant coach, I had the good fortune to work for Oliver Purnell, Billy Donovan and Keith Dembrodt, who taught me so much about that style,” he said. “Then when I got the job at VCU, I knew we wanted to play uptempo and press. It gives us more exposure. Somebody asks me earlier if it helps us recruit. No. You still got to recruit, hard work and build relationships but at the very least, everyone has seen us play and if they’ve seen us play they have to say,Hey this is going to be an exciting style of play for you there.”
Smart has helped VCU upgrade its recruiting, signing three top 100 recruits — guards Melvin Johnson, Jordan Burgess and JeQuan Lewis– the last two years and adding a committment from 6-8 forward Terry Larrier, a Top 40 prospect from New York City who attends the Phelps School in suburban Philadelphia. Larrier chose the Rams over Florida, Florida State and Marquette. He has also picked up a 6-9 transfer terrance Shannon from Florida State, who couid be the missing link down low against some of the bigger teams in the country.
“Even though we were new to the league [last year], there were certain places we went where people wanted to knock us off, people wanted go after us,” Smart said. “We faced it to some extent last year, and hopefully this year we face it even more.”
He doesn’t seem to be worried about the expectations
