DETROIT — For Syracuse 42nd-year head coach Jim Boeheim, timeouts seem to be getting longer and longer. But he’s keeping his words to a minimum.

“I think if they get one thing that you say, you had a good timeout,” Boeheim said on Saturday afternoon. “There’s many times that we put one thing in and we’re coming out of the huddle and I see one guy going, ‘What play are we running?’ If you take a timeout, you’re just trying to sit them down and get them on track.”

Across college basketball, timeouts are a precious commodity. Each team has only four per regulation, in addition to the four media timeouts per half. In the spotlight of the NCAA Tournament, how teams utilize the precious minutes between game action helps dictate who goes home and who dances on. On Friday night, the 11th-seeded Orange (23-13, 8-10 Atlantic Coast) face No. 2 seed Duke (28-7, 13-5) in Omaha, Nebraska, in the Sweet Sixteen. The two winningest coaches in Division I men’s hoops, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Syracuse’s Boeheim, will go head to head. And the coach who better spends his timeouts may very will come out on top.

Sometimes, timeouts are a stop-the-bleeding mechanism. Other times, they are more purposeful, such as late in tight games or at the end of the first half. Coaches, Boeheim included, often call timeouts before the half to design a last-shot play. All coaches diagram plays and demand that timeouts be run with precision, because they realize their effectiveness.

There may be no more choreographed element of a college basketball game than the timeout. Student managers react like a NASCAR pit crew to set up chairs and distribute water bottles and towels. Director of basketball operations Kip Wellman tracks a number of stats from the previous four minutes of play, and he informs Boeheim of foul trouble, game trends and opponent tendencies during the stoppage. Before games, Wellman also studies film solely on opponent in-bounds plays and relays to Boeheim whatever trends he notices.

“I never used to believe timeouts really helped that much,” Boeheim said. “But I think I’ve learned over the years, I think sometimes it does help. Coach (John) Wooden used to say whoever takes the first timeout is going to lose the game. I’m not sure that’s really true, but he was pretty smart.”

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Villanova, the 2016 National Champions, has managers form a wall behind the bench to block out fans. Other teams increasingly take chairs onto the court for players while the coach kneels.

Syracuse leaves the chairs and the players on the sideline. There is no order for where they sit, junior center Paschal Chukwu said, as long as the five players in the game are seated. A towel may hang over their shoulder and a bottle of water clenched in their hand.

The head manager, senior Ricky Pasternak, hands Boeheim a clipboard and a marker as Boeheim sits. The rest of the team huddles around him, giving Boeheim their fullest attention.

Timeouts mainly serve for Boeheim to dish out pointers. Assistant coaches may grab a player 15 or 20 seconds before play resumes and give them some feedback, SU associate head coach Adrian Autry said. When timeouts end, managers grab the bottles, stools and clipboard, and they stow them away. Until the next timeout.

Late last month, Chukwu made a “bad mistake,” Boeheim said, that hurt Syracuse in an upset try against then-No. 10 North Carolina. With 32.6 seconds left, Syracuse came out of its timeout down two points with a chance to tie or take the lead. The Orange in-bounded to junior point guard Frank Howard and Chukwu set a high ball-screen instead of the down-screen that Boeheim had called in the timeout.

“Coach drew up a play,” Chukwu said after the game, “and I thought it was a different play.”

That’s exactly why Boeheim tries to keep things simple. He may call a timeout to slow down the opponent’s momentum, alter an intricacy in the 2-3 zone, draw up a specific play or give his thin lineup rest without substituting. Boeheim has also called timeouts this season to “ice” an opponent’s free-throw shooter near the end of the game and to implement a full-court press. But regardless of the situation, the message is to the point.

“Wherever there’s space, that’s where we go,” Chukwu said. “It gets crowded. It’s all about Boeheim, he tells you what you did wrong, how you can correct it. Players can voice out what they see. It’s all about having a conversation.”

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In 2015, the NCAA reduced the number of timeouts from five to four, with no more than three being carried into the second half. There’s a stricter enforcement of resumption of play coming out of all timeouts, and team timeouts with 30 seconds of media timeouts become the scheduled media timeout.

Timeouts don’t always come easy. Coaches are required to give referees a visual signal that is usually a “T” sign formed by placing the palm of one hand over the upright fingers of the other left hand. Oral signals are “time” or “timeout.” But in loud, fast-paced games, officials don’t always blow the whistle right away. Boeheim occasionally will walk 10 or 15 feet toward an official, making a “T” with his hands, begging for the thing he once hesitated to call.

“I’m sitting there for at least two minutes, not saying anything, because they’re going to get about 30 seconds worth that they’re going to remember,” Boeheim said. “So the other two and a half minutes is just looking around. So they get that rest. That’s very helpful.”

Published on March 21, 2018 at 12:06 am

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