Good article in the Milwaukee newspaper this weekend on Marquette head coach Buzz Williams and his emphasis on building a 'tough' basketball team:What does toughness mean to Buzz Williams and how does he measure it?
"It is difficult to quantify. When you have 15 players on a team, four or five coaches on a team, how do you quantify in a distinct way what Marquette toughness is?
"One of the things we used last year was we don't want to be just game-tough. We want to be road-team tough. We don't just want to be TV tough, we want to be everyday tough. It is a daily possession-by-possession, minute-by-minute goal of our program, of our team."
Williams bolted throught a catalog of specific basketball aspects of toughness.
"We do want to sprint to screens. We do want to sprint off the screen. We do want to pop our feet when we set a screen. When the shot goes up, we want to take up space, whether we are on offense or defense. Everything we do is battle for space. We never want to give teams space."
Williams started signing a line from a Graham Nash song, "Teach Your Children," performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young- "You, who are on the road/must have a code that you can live by."
His point: "That code is what toughness is"
Toughness for Williams is not merely a function of defense.
"Guys who are tough when they penetrate offensively, their eyes are always on the rim. Their eyes are not on the help side. You have to be tough enough to initiate offense in the channel in a half-court possession. If the pressure applied by the defense is making you go east and west, then you are not tough enough to do what you need to do. We are going north and south.
"It does apply on both sides of the ball, but more importantly it applies to the culture in which we work. It is in practice, in the weight room, in the film session, everywhere, no matter if a ball is included or not."
