Tune in to “FOX Sports Live” next week for Reid’s one-on-one interview with Sean Miller.
TUCSON, Ariz. – There is an inordinate amount of pressure on Sean Miller’s 45-year-old shoulders this season.
Aside from Kentucky’s juggernaut of McDonald’s All-Americans, there’s no team better equipped to make a run at the national title this season than Miller’s Arizona squad. Sorry, Duke and Wisconsin, but it’s Arizona that appears to have it all. The Wildcats have the talent, with two players projected as possible lottery picks (freshman Stanley Johnson and sophomore Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, both versatile multi-position guys) and two players projected as later NBA draft picks (sophomore power forward Brandon Ashley and junior center Kaleb Tarczewski). They have the coaching, with a choking pack-line defense that was the nation’s most efficient a year ago and which players have told me will be even better this season.
They have unselfishness on offense, which Miller told me is a direct result of focusing on defense first and foremost and letting the offense flow from that. And they have that rarest of elements among today’s elite college basketball teams: experience — most important, a senior point guard in T.J. McConnell who often will be joined in the backcourt by the team’s top returning shooter, junior Gabe York.
Of Miller's Final Four-caliber teams — and there have been a few in his decade as a head coach at Xavier and Arizona, none more so than last season’s Arizona team that lost an Elite Eight overtime heartbreaker to Wisconsin — this one is closest to having all the right pieces: chemistry, defense, depth, offensive balance and desire.
Which means that, as Miller begins this new season in sole possession of the title of “best coach who hasn’t made a Final Four” — taking it over from Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan — all eyes will be on him to take that next step.
But here’s something you might not know about Sean Miller: Of all the coaches who could be in this pressure-packed position, I’m not sure if there’s a single one whose life has been crafted to handle that pressure more than Miller.
It starts with his father, John Miller, a no-nonsense high school coach from near Pittsburgh who has prepared his sons for the big basketball stage since they were in the crib. (Sean Miller’s younger brother, Archie, also made the Elite Eight last season, with Dayton.) It carried on through his teenage years, when Miller barnstormed around the country doing trick dribbling exhibitions at halftime shows, even appearing on Johnny Carson and in the film “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh” alongside Julius Erving, and then into college, when he was the preternaturally calm point guard behind those talented Pitt teams of the 1980s that had future NBAers like Charles Smith and Jerome Lane.
Dealing with the pressure of making his first Final Four when his team seems to have all the ingredients to win it all?
That’s not pressure.
Pressure is an elementary school kid stepping into an NBA arena to be the featured performer in the halftime show of a Philadephia 76ers playoff game against the Washington Bullets back in the 1980s. Pressure is walking past Erving and Moses Malone and knowing you’re heading onto that court to be the center of attention instead of them. Pressure is doing what Sean Miller did for a huge chunk of his childhood, putting those do-anything-with-a-basketball dribbling skills — the skills that turned the undersized, not-particularly athletic point guard into a Division I star — on display on the biggest of stages.
I was in Tucson recently to talk with Miller for an interview that will air on FOX Sports 1 next week. I asked him about how his unique life experience helps him deal with today’s pressure of being a head coach, and how it helps him counsel his post-adolescent players to deal with similar pressure.
“There’s an amazing amount of pressure when you’re doing a halftime show,” Miller told me. “They’re in a playoff game, and you’re doing a halftime show, and no one really cares or came to the arena to see the halftime show. They’re caught up in an emotional level with the game that’s hard to explain. You feel that, and there you go. You’re out there. In that case (of the 76ers-Bullets playoff game), I would have been in grade school. So you either sink or swim. There is no like, hey, half applause. They either like what you do, or they don’t like what you do.”
What do Miller’s trick-dribbling exploits as a kid have to do with him today?
Nothing. (Except that his players tell me he’s still got a better handle than them.)
But also everything.
“Any pressure that you’re under now as a coach or a player, I think in a way you’re immune to it,” Miller said. “You’re numb to it. You’ve been through it so much. You’re calloused from so many years. In my case, really from the time I was about 8 years old until now, I’ve been under the microscope or the heat in some way.”
Since even before he played point guard at Blackhawk High School for his father, a four-time Pennsylvania state champ, Sean Miller has been preparing for pressure-packed moments like the ones he’ll inevitably face this season.
“I was hard on both of them, made them really pay,” John Miller told me about coaching his sons. “I was that dad that didn’t want anybody thinking the coach’s son got an easy ride. I thought early on that Sean would get into coaching. He studied the game a little harder growing up, seemed to be more in command of the group.”
And that frenetic defense we saw at Arizona last season? You can trace that back to John Miller, too. And not simply because Sean Miller’s dad was an early adopter of the pack-line defense that’s become so popular in college hoops these days. I’m talking about the fact that he ran these boys ragged.
“Our motto was always that we will be the hardest-working players around,” John Miller told me. “Sean, at the beginning, I’d say to him, ‘You’re going to be the hardest-working sixth-grader in the country. If you’re in the top 10 hardest workers, you’ll be a guy who can rise up on the ladder.’ ”
It’s that work ethic that has plenty of people talking about Sean Miller at age 45 already being one of the top coaches of his generation. It’s a work ethic that, despite the millions Miller earns at Arizona, still harkens back to when his dad was a high school teacher earning an extra $3,000 a year to be the basketball coach. It’s a basketball-obsessed work ethic from his childhood, when Miller would be walked to the Little League park and dribble a basketball the whole way, when he’d put up 500 threes after an intense practice.
It’s a work ethic that has him near the top of the college basketball world and only rising higher. Here’s what one of his former assistants told me: “When Coach K and John Calipari ride off into the sunset, Sean is next. If he wants to be the Lakers head coach, he can.”
But first, he’ll need to shed that ultimate backhanded compliment as the best coach who hasn’t made a Final Four.
I asked Miller about whether he cringes when he hears that title.
“No, I actually embrace it,” he said. “The one thing I’m aware of is there’s some great coaches. And part of what I learned when I came to Arizona is — and this is why I respect our tradition and Coach (Lute) Olson so much — that he went to four Final Fours at Arizona, and one of those Final Fours translated into a national championship in 1997. But if you really look closely at the history of Arizona basketball, he competed for the national championship maybe a dozen or so times.
In other words, it was him and however many teams that were capable of winning of tnational championship in that given year. Sometimes it was met with an early exit in a tournament. Sometimes it met with a painful defeat in the Elite Eight. And sometimes it happened in the Final Four where, yes, you’re in the Final Four, but you ended the season with a loss. And you said, God, one of the four teams, one of us could have won it, and it could have been us. So from my perspective we’ve only been here as a coaching staff at Arizona for five years. (And) I know where our program was when we got here.”
And where was Arizona basketball in 2009 when Miller, with a recommendation from and the prodding of his longtime friend Calipari, came to Tucson? It was heading toward the doldrums. It was on its fourth coach in as many seasons, as Olson’s prolonged illness and retirement had put the program in the uncertain hands of interim coaches. Recruiting had fallen off because of the uncertainty. Because of a dearth of talent, in Miller’s first season as coach, Arizona missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in a quarter-century.
Since then, Miller has made two Elite Eights in four years and lost a one-possession in a Sweet 16 that easily could have meant a third Elite Eight. Plenty believe he’s the nation’s best recruiter not named Calipari. Last season he had what I thought was the nation’s best team until Ashley was injured in February, leaving the team without one of its top three-point shooters, not to mention without Ashley’s big body. Yet the Wildcats were still as close as you can get to a Final Four without making it.
“If we or I get caught up in the fact that it hasn’t happened yet … that I can’t win the big Elite Eight game, I’ll flip it and say, if we have a chance to be in this year’s Elite Eight game — and you’re telling me that’s a guarantee right now — I’ll take it,” he told me. “And if it doesn’t happen, then I’ll say three times in six years we’ve knocked on the door. But I think in all sports – the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball – that program, that franchise that constantly is there, eventually, you break through. And I’m confident in saying that that time will come.”
His answer was telling. It’s something we ought to keep in mind when we judge high-level coaches not by the hundreds of wins on their résumés but the unfair metrics of a few losses in March. So much of March is about timing and luck, about being in the right place at the right time and having the ball bounce your way.
And Sean Miller’s time will come. Personally, I think it will come this season. There’s a top tier of three or four other teams who should get consideration — Kentucky, Duke, Wisconsin and maybe Kansas — but right now, Arizona is my pick to win it all.
And if Sean Miller doesn’t win it all? If he doesn’t break through and make that first Final Four?
Well, he’ll be OK. Because Arizona already has one of the nation’s top-ranked recruiting classes coming in next season. Things will keep rolling Tucson. Sean Miller will keep knocking on that door until, eventually, it opens.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
