CHICAGO — There was the 2019 NCAA men’s basketball championship trophy, in a hall running along the south side of Gentile Arena, atop a colorful platform emblazoned with the logo for the forthcoming Final Four in Minneapolis, with a one-man security entourage standing guard to its left. The occasion of its Wednesday visit: a reprise of a Sweet 16 matchup between darlings of last year’s tournament, Nevada and Loyola. It was unclear if either side saw the trophy. It was, however, perfectly clear that the Wolf Pack might not have cared to anyway, preferring to fix their gaze on the past as a means to move ahead.
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During the morning shootaround, they stared at the Final Four banner hanging above Loyola’s home floor. They stared at it again after arriving at the arena for the night’s festivities. The team’s standard pregame slideshow reemphasizing the keys to the game ended with a shot of that banner, and it froze there, so it would be the last thing Nevada saw as it left the locker room for warmups and the first thing it saw when it returned for the last few expectant moments before tipoff. “We thought that could’ve been us,” Wolf Pack guard Caleb Martin said.
While there was nothing definitive about the 79-65 victory that followed (or any late November victory of any kind for that matter), there was some truth in the blunt-force poetry of the result. Nevada thought it could be a Final Four team last season. Judging by what has transpired in its outings up to and especially including Wednesday, when it exorcized some of those demons of March Madness past, it can certainly think that again. If an old group of interchangeable long-limbed shotmakers is this determined on a given night, the other dynamics at play won’t matter. It will be difficult to deter from the future it imagines for itself.
Now, another experience with the unabashed brinksmanship of Eric Musselman’s rotation may have conjured another truth: Nevada plays very few guys for a lot of minutes and one wonders how long that can last. The counterargument, presented again on Wednesday, was what those very few guys do. The Wolf Pack basically ran out six bodies and amassed 25 dunks, layups or 3-pointers on 32 field goals, posting a 1.179 points-per-possession rate, while squeezing the life out of Loyola defensively in the first half and then coming up with the well-timed block or steal in the second half to preclude any legitimate threat. The Ramblers aren’t the same as last season, but they’re not bad, and they led for exactly zero seconds and never came within single digits after halftime, more or less because Nevada willed it so.
Not every game will offer such pret-a-porter motivation — “I figured they’d come out with a punch,” Loyola guard Marques Townes said — but then Nevada had won its previous six outings by an average of 22.3 points, and none of those teams had knocked it out of the NCAA Tournament last March. For the time being, any concern that the Wolf Pack’s core — Caleb and Cody Martin and bulwark forward Jordan Caroline — might be eyeing the next level instead of the next task in college seems moot. “They like playing with each other,” Musselman said. “They all understand we got a lot of talent on the team, and the only way it’s going to work is for guys to share the ball and for multiple people to get touches. We have to look at mismatches and see what makes sense. And then it’s up to these guys to put the team before anything else. That’s what they’ve done.”
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Maybe that’s the best way to apprise the value of Wednesday for Nevada going forward: What happened only underscored what can occur when the Wolf Pack completely channels their energies in one direction.
You had Caroline, the Champaign, Ill., native, bullying his way to a score through an early double-team, and after Loyola called timeout, issuing a primal scream of “This is my city!” as the teams headed to their benches. You had Cody Martin isolated on Loyola freshman Cooper Kaifes early in the second half, with Kaifes clapping his hands as Martin got into some rhythm dribbles, which preceded Martin draining a 3-pointer in Kaifes’ eye … which was followed by Martin himself clapping and staring down Kaifes. Nevada had six blocks, none more telling than the pair that flustered Loyola star Clayton Custer in the second half: Twice within a two-minute span, Custer beat a Martin for a layup, and twice Martin chased down the open shot and swatted it from behind. Collectively, it was an unmistakable edge displayed by a group that already can out-talent a lot of teams.
This is not to say Nevada hasn’t had that edge previously. The seven wins by double digits suggest it has approached all of its games with some measurable level of urgency. It’s just that Musselman, Martin and Caroline all concurred that this was likely the most complete effort of the season — for the record, Loyola shot just 43.3 percent on Wednesday after hitting 55.8 percent in that Sweet 16 matchup — and the underpinning for that effort was easily identifiable. “You could kind of feel the tension in our locker room, with how important this game was for us,” Musselman said.
So bottle it up. It’s a standard to which Musselman and the players can refer all season long. The value of Wednesday, quite possibly, was that Nevada eradicated all mystery about what it can accomplish when it is properly motivated, even if it doesn’t add another piece to the rotation and even if it doesn’t get appreciable improvement from any core performer through March. (Given that former McDonald’s All-American Jordan Brown logged all of four minutes against Loyola, that seems unlikely, as one would expect the five-star freshman to contribute at a much higher level at some point.) In any case, the Wolf Pack walked into an arena on Wednesday and saw, hanging from the ceiling, a reminder of what they didn’t do last year. They left confident in what they could do this year.
“We had a chip on our shoulder,” Caleb Martin said. “We had something to prove.”
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They did so to the extent that they effectively became the message the opposing coach sent to his own still-in-development squad.
Loyola features some of the same characters that forged that Final Four run last spring but also is working in some very green, new faces. And as Porter Moser’s players left the floor for late-game substitutions, the Ramblers coach stopped the more veteran members of his roster and issued a no-frills assessment, unafraid to reference the beat-down applied by the men on the other side of the scorer’s table: Look around, Moser told his crew. This is what we want to do.
“We just saw where we want to go,” Moser said after the game. “Nevada is at a different level.”
It also knows what it can do to stay there, if it didn’t already. Just before 10 p.m., the Martin twins exited Gentile Arena for a somewhat unfortunately long walk to the team bus idling in 20-degree weather. That NCAA championship trophy stood just down the hall to their right. Not shockingly, they demonstrated no inclination to veer off for any reason. Their flight home awaited. And they’d just spent a night reminding themselves how looking to the future doesn’t help, anyway. Using the past to attack the present had them exactly where they wanted to be.
(Top photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)