I’m not among those who had a rooting interest in the recently completed NCAA basketball championships.
Kansas defeated an excellent Memphis team in overtime, a game that Memphis could certainly have won, with any luck at all.
The "winning" Kansas Coach, Bill Self, is of course now looking for a new multi-million dollar contract with, as he called it, "security". (How many millions a person needs for security is a topic for another day.)
But the comment from Self that I found noteworthy revolved around the fact that after Memphis missed some opportunities to score and salt the game away, one of Self’s Kansas players made a key shot to send the game into overtime, whereupon Kansas won going away.
Here’s the context for the comment from Self, as it appeared in a web story on ESPN.com
On Monday night, Chalmers' shot fell and Self soon had a national title on his resume. Still, he said he didn't think of himself as a different coach. "I don't think just because a guy makes a guarded shot with 2.1 seconds left makes me any different than if he hadn't made the shot," Self said.
Exactly.
How often in sports do we glorify the player whose shot went in, sometimes with a lot of luck, and then say, "what a clutch shot. He’s a great pressure player."
Another player might make a similar effort, but see the ball hit the back rim and not fall. Does one ‘made’ shot—sometimes the result of good fortune--make one player "better" than the other?
There's one particular game I'll always remember: Game 7 of the NHL Stanley Cup finals in 1971. The Blackhawks were leading the Montreal Canadiens in Game 7 in Chirago. It was 2-0 about mid-way through the game. The Habs could get nothing going against Chicago goalie Tony Esposito. The Hawks had already scored twice against Montreal rookie phenom Ken Dryden.
Hawk star Bobby Hull took a blistering wrist shot from just inside the blue line that clearly beat Dryden over the shoulder. The puck rocketed off the cross bar.
Not long after, Montreal forward Jacques Lemaire scored on a seemingly harmless slap shot from beyond the Chicago blue line, a puck that Esposito lost sight of but would normally have been a routine save.
Another fortuitous bounce a few minutes later off the back boards, and Montreal had tied the game 2-2 and went on to win 3-2 to capture the Cup.
The legend of Ken Dryden was born in full.
The point is, if Hull’s great shot has bounced off the cross bar and "in" to make the score 3-0, the game was over. It was simply good fortune, not great goaltending by Dryden, that saved the day. Hull made a great shot, it just didn’t go in, by a fraction of an inch.
But the Habs indeed took advantage of good breaks, and earned their victory.
Esposito never won a Cup, though he was a Hall-of-Fame goalie, to be sure.
Back to the present, would the Kansas Coach, as he put it, be any lesser a coach if his player’s last second shot had not made its way through the rim? Would all the strategy, hard work, planning--and months of game execution--been any less well done and have been a "failure" if that last shot didn’t go in?
Of course not.
But since we need to proclaim "winners" and "losers", "heroes" and "bums", we’ll say this Coach is a Champion, while the other is not.
The only difference, quite often, is a shot that didn’t fall, or a puck that bounced in the wrong (or right) direction, or a field goal that went two inches wide.
