published on June 21, 2024 in corga

How Thad Matta plans to lead a Butler resurgence

INDIANAPOLIS — Before Thad Matta begins to explain why he’s here, again, he asks Alexa to turn down Van Morrison Radio. But only just a bit. The plaintive sax riff from Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” merely opens the soundtrack to this conversation, followed by unintrusive hits from the Zombies and Steely Dan. Butler’s new-but-not-new men’s basketball coach always needs some tunes on. He’s a music guy. He says he can’t remember his wife’s birthday, but he has a steel-trap mind for lyrics.

Also, he can’t stand the silence.

Why return to a basketball life lived forever ago, five years after leaving basketball behind? Maybe that’s as good a place to start as any.

“It’s funny,” Matta says, and this could go in a bunch of directions. “It’s odd that the euphoria of being back here hasn’t hit me yet, because we’ve been going so fast. And I just haven’t had time to really take a deep breath and think, like, ‘OK. Here we are.’ I think the hardest part for me has been constantly being back on. When you retire for five years, the biggest decision was ‘Where am I going to go to dinner?’ That was it.”

How Thad Matta holds up to see this through is what we’re all about to find out, and two July days full of smiles suffice as a pleasant reintroduction but not a definitive answer. Matta was a teenager when he first got here. He was in his mid-30s the first time he did this particular job. He’s 55 now. Still, he’s fit. He has an excellent tan. The gray stubble and the brace on his right leg, a constant companion to compensate for nerve-damage issues from long-ago back surgery, are the only things that betray his age. Well, maybe the Pandora radio station selection, too. Not a whole lot else, though.

Matta does not look like the guy who abruptly parted ways with Ohio State on account of health problems that actually may have actually been recruiting and winning issues, or at least a bit of both. He looks closer to the guy who won 400-plus games and took a program to two Final Fours. And now he’s back, out of pretty much nowhere, at a place that’s become so much more than what it was in his time, assuming responsibility for repairs that will take many hours and a lot of work to complete.

The why behind this entire enterprise, though, is plain. The why is the easy part to figure out.

“I tell kids in recruiting,” Matta says, “there’s no school recruiting you where the school means more to the coach than this place means to me.”

Next season will be Butler’s 10th as a member of the Big East. Its men’s basketball program has reached one Sweet 16 since its arrival in the league, which was preceded by a gradual ascent from inconspicuous independent to back-to-back NCAA Tournament runners-up in 2010 and 2011. Perhaps you heard about it. Had a pandemic not wiped out the 2020 postseason, it’s possible that particular Butler crew (which had been ranked as high as No. 5) and that Butler coach (LaVall Jordan, an alum in his first run as a head coach) create the momentum necessary to meet the new program paradigm.

As it is? The Bulldogs haven’t played in an NCAA Tournament since 2018. They’ve endured consecutive sub-.500 seasons, prompting Jordan’s departure. Meanwhile, the Big East has become increasingly perilous — yes, Jay Wright abdicated the throne, but hello Sean Miller, a preseason top 10 version of Creighton, and Providence coming off its own Sweet 16 run, just to begin with — and Butler still operates with the smallest budget among its peers. (Or at least the $5,017,012 of men’s hoops expenses reported to the Department of Education in 2020-21 was the lowest figure in the league.)

Keeping up, let alone surging to the top of the league, feels like a hefty lift.

So Thad Matta, off a five-year hiatus, has the energy for … that?

“Dude, I’m telling you, he’s a monster,” says Greg Oden, Butler’s director of basketball operations, whom you may recall as a former No. 1 NBA Draft pick coached by Matta at Ohio State. “He always has that fire. Just that thing that makes you feel, ‘I like this guy, I want to play for this guy, this is the guy I want to go to battle with.’ Because he just has that energy. I don’t know how to explain it.

“That was what happened during my recruiting. Everyone asked, what was the difference? It was Thad. Like I really wanted to play for this guy. That’s the thing I still see here.”

We’d consider the source, if the same idea wasn’t echoed by others whose history with Matta is three months long. “Thad is a beast, I’ll tell you that,” says junior guard Chuck Harris, whose late-night shooting sessions often coincide with his new coach speed-walking laps around the concourse. “Thad is the man. He’s about his work.”

This is good, because boy howdy, there is work to do. And college basketball in 2022 is not college basketball in 2001. Not even 2017.

Between a staff largely composed of people who previously played for him or worked with him or worked at places he’s worked, and what we can gather about the basketball philosophies guiding this Butler rebuild, Matta’s response to the conditions of his reemployment appears to be this: refer to the 74.0 career winning percentage, and don’t overthink it.

“One thing I do think I’ve learned is, I’m going to coach,” he says. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. We’re going to do what we do, I’m going to do what I do well, and that’s make our players better and make our team better. And how we do it, I don’t care what anybody thinks, I’m going to do it that way. I just want to be who I am. And I know it’s worked. I’ve seen it work for 17 years.”

How can it work in the here and now, two decades on from the one season it worked for Butler’s new/old coach previously? Well, the very tall director of basketball operations is a reminder that Matta has had some pretty good players helping him to 439 wins. A couple of recruiting cycles have to come and go before anyone can accurately assess this staff’s ability to woo championship-level talent, but the stitchwork of the 2022-23 roster suggests that Matta can connect with players as he always has: opening the door with fairly unconditional positivity and a knack for imbuing belief, then leaning on an established track record of development and winning to close the deal.

As Matta left his home for an 11 a.m. team meeting on April 3, primed to make his first impression, he turned to his wife and joked that he might not have a team to meet. “I may be home in five minutes,” he advised her, well aware of the tendency for coaching changes to vaporize rosters. Instead, potential holdover Bulldogs filled the room. Of the nine players who could have returned to Butler for 2022-23, eight did. Part of it goes to Matta’s unwillingness to hold a couple bad seasons against them — “Everybody had a clean slate with me, from the standpoint of I’m a firm believer that guys can get better,” he says now — and part of it goes to players absorbing Matta’s message of optimism and confidence, in both group and one-on-one meetings, and leaving convinced of the message’s authenticity. “Coach is just as hungry as us,” Harris says.

The approach worked beyond the Hinkle Fieldhouse walls, too, securing a potentially game-altering piece for the frontline. Manny Bates entered the transfer portal after a first-minute-of-the-season shoulder injury wiped out his 2021-22 season at NC State, but the 147 blocks he amassed in the previous two years made the 6-foot-10 big a coveted commodity. Matta called during Bates’ second week in the portal, and whatever was said during an ensuing Zoom meeting with the entire Bulldogs staff was all Bates needed to hear. “Not even five minutes after the Zoom call I was like, this is going to be my first visit,” Bates says. “There is no doubt about it. To have a coach with that stature and embrace me and say I want you to be part of this family is an unbelievable feeling.”

Naturally, the basketball calculus mattered. Matta sold a freer, faster system that appealed to holdovers like Harris. A newcomer like Purdue transfer Eric Hunter Jr. saw the development work Matta and his staff have done with point guards and wanted a taste of that. Bates got the pitch about developing into a midrange shooter and a big who can operate off a dribble handoff, instead of being pigeonholed as a screen-and-roller. Matta, convincingly, told them what he thought they could do … and then, importantly, continued to reemphasize how much he believed the words coming out of his own mouth.

It’s Matta watching Jayden Taylor, a 29.4 percent 3-point shooter as a freshman, sink a few in a workout and declaring the past to be nothing but a bad joke: Twenty-nine percent, my ass. “Having confidence goes a long way,” Taylor says. “If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will.” Or it’s Hunter making his way through the Butler basketball offices following a lift, when Matta calls him in, unprompted, to offer an apparently sudden revelation: You know what I was thinking? I feel like this will be the best year of your life. “And he’s not saying it to boost you up or whatever,” Hunter says. “I really think he believes that.”

Jayden Taylor, center, is one of several Bulldogs who has enjoyed Thad Matta’s style of positive reinforcement.

Positive self-talk, of course, won’t win on the road in the dead of a Big East winter. At least not by itself. And this is where Thad Matta’s revolutionary approach — be better at basketball and run a system that wins nearly three-quarters of the time — comes in. “I’ve always said, if I’m going to recruit the best players in the country, I gotta let you play basketball,” Matta says. “But that goes back to the skill level. How much better can we make you along the way, is what our job is, in my opinion. I want my players to leave the floor every day saying, ‘I got better.’”

To wit: Butler shot 29.7 percent from 3-point range as a team last season. That is bad. Like 333rd in the country bad. In general, the offense was slow (334th in the country in adjusted tempo, per KenPom.com) and inefficient (187th nationally). Someone in charge of fixing these issues might be tempted to take radical measures. Butler’s new coach, on a Monday in July, instead draws up a practice plan that calls for form shooting in the first period following stretches: three players at one basket, three spots three feet away from the rim, flicking a basketball toward the net with only one hand. At the other end of the floor, another group fires off jumpers from the elbow, wing and baseline, with an emphasis on repeatable mechanics. “Same hands, same feet, same prep,” assistant coach Maurice Joseph barks when the group steps back beyond the 3-point line. “Nothing changes.”

It does not, not from an ideological standpoint anyway, when Butler moves to the next practice period: dribbling. The Bulldogs toe the baseline and go through a set of low taps that build into high pounds, followed by various iterations of ball-handling the length of the floor and back. In-and-out to between-the-legs. In-and-out to a crossover on the way down, in-and-out to a killer crossover on the way back. A speed dribble down, a speed dribble back, then change hands and do it again.

The next period? Passing. The “Spider passing” drill, specifically, which Matta has used for years, in which players exchange chest passes and spots on the floor while calling out the name of the pass recipient on the other end. The “Vegas closeout” drill, that comes later? Another Matta classic. “It’s nostalgic,” says director of recruiting Jon Diebler, who played four years for Matta at Ohio State. There are some innovations, like a 3-on-2 to 3-on-3 transition sequence that Matta invented this offseason — “Some day when you coach your own team, you’ll put this in and call it ‘The Thad Matta Drill,’” Butler’s coach assures his group — but for the most part the foundations of the second Thad Matta era are remarkable only for how unremarkable they are.

“Skill, skill, skill, every day,” Diebler says. “And he was like that 10 years ago.”

See, when Thad Matta talks about how something has worked for 17 years, it’s not hyperbole. It’s the North Star.

The optimism and confidence-giving is nothing new. After Diebler hit 28.9 percent from 3-point range as an Ohio State freshman — “I was awful,” he says, for emphasis — his head coach assured him that, while it would take some time and hard work, he’d become a great long-distance marksman. Diebler then shot 40-plus percent the next two seasons and 50.2 percent as a senior. When Oden took his official visit, Matta told the most prized recruit in the country that, if he worked at it, he could be Ohio State’s next Terrence Dials. Dials was, of course, a former Big Ten Player of the Year. Oden, of course, had no idea who Terrence Dials was. “But that was big-time for me to hear,” Oden says. “Somebody talking to a kid but being straightforward with him: You’re going to have to work to be the player you want to be. For him to actually say that to me, I really appreciated it. When you have a conversation with him, you always walk away like, damn. I feel good about myself.”

Likewise, the system is the system, adjusted to its parts. Matta’s Ohio State teams never drag-raced on the court — just once did those teams rank in the top 100 for adjusted tempo — but never were they as plodding and preordained as Butler was last season. On eight occasions, Matta’s Buckeyes ranked in the top 35 for adjusted offensive efficiency, including one three-year stretch in which they finished eighth, first and sixth, respectively. The emphasis was on freedom and creativity then, just as it is now. It just seems more drastic than it is, like emerging from a windowless cellar into the middle of the day, given the depths of Butler’s struggles. “If you can get something up or a wide-open layup in the first eight seconds, then we’re going to take that every time,” Harris says. “There’s more movement around the court rather than stagnant actions, where one player might be standing in the corner of the court. Everybody is engaged in the offense now.”

No, the new boss is the same as the old boss, in damn near every sense.

The only variable, really, is the boss himself.

And when the boss steps into Hinkle to do his job on a summertime Monday, there’s a single folding chair positioned along the sideline. It’s a fact of Matta’s life. It’s an acknowledgement that the head coach’s drop foot might make him want to sit down, at some point, over a two-hour workout. Which he does … after more than 30 minutes of spirited movement between groups and drills.

Then, within a minute, Matta is on his feet again. During this particular practice, his Starbucks coffee cup spends more time on that chair than he does. “I feel like he has the most energy in the program,” Taylor says.

Thad Matta wears a brace on his right leg and has learned how to deal with his health issues.

He knows he has to take care of himself, and do his stretching and get his workouts in. But at 55, he also knows better. He knows, he says, there’s no need to create work where work doesn’t necessarily have to exist, for appearances’ sake. “The job keeps you busy enough,” Matta says. “Don’t add to it for nonsense.” He knows, after spending a year immersed in Mike Woodson’s NBA-like approach at Indiana, that some things can just be fixed tomorrow. He knows he can spend July 4 weekend at his home in Florida and stop looking at his calendar, even if it’s for one day, and the world will not topple off its axis. He knows to identify and move on to the next important thing.

And that’s how Butler’s new coach will eliminate this one last variable, or at least try to. The college basketball universe might be more complicated than the one he left five years ago. Thad Matta will dare to uncomplicate it.

“I’ve always just been a simple dude,” he says. “If I could coach my game and just go home and disappear, and come back and do the same thing the next day, I’d be the happiest person in the world.”

The Molten ball carts are pushed to the side and the volleyball nets are gone, period, vanished to a storage area somewhere. In an hour or so, dozens of youth campers will reclaim the practice space after their lunch break. So Butler’s new coach and his team are in a bit of a hurry. This is the last group workout before the coaches scatter coast-to-coast for the final live recruiting period in July, and if they’re going to conquer the Big East once again, at least today they need to make way for pre-adolescent girls learning to bump-set first. There’s a lot of work to do and not a whole lot of time to do it, and what else is new?

But the plan doesn’t change and the work doesn’t change, even in a compressed window. Butler’s first order of basketball business after calisthenic warmups is a ball-handling series, featuring pivots and ball fakes and retreat dribbles that you see in junior high gyms. The guards and wings then move on to shots taken off screen actions. The bigs again convene to shoot floaters and hooks over Oden, who occasionally whacks them with a pad. The plan is the plan. The work is the work.

On the far side of the floor, the lone courtside folding chair is occupied, but only because Matta slept funny the previous night. He has a knot in his shoulder that requires the attention of a medical staffer to massage out. In short order, he’s bouncing between both ends of the floor again. With each passing minute and each compliment of a player’s drop step or follow-through, it’s increasingly difficult to be shocked that Thad Matta is the head men’s basketball coach at Butler, two decades after he was the head men’s basketball coach at Butler. “You can tell he’s got that juice again,” Diebler says, and when he’s asked if he’s surprised about that, the question is rendered moot in five syllables.

“No,” Diebler says. “Because it’s here.”

Playing actual basketball is baked into the work and the plan, because that’s the only way to assess how the plan is working, so the second half-hour of this abbreviated practice is devoted to five-on-five scrimmaging. Butler does move fast, or faster than it has. Butler does look to push the ball and look to run. Players occasionally do the sorts of things that make people excited to watch them play, such as Harris deflecting a pass for a steal and then finishing the play with a monster dunk at the other end — “Holy shit, Chuck,” Matta says after a few moments of silence — or former Indiana state long jump champ Pierce Thomas elevating through traffic to throw down a tomahawk jam that, if reprised this winter, might lead to a roof replacement at Hinkle.

“You just made one of the top five dunks in all my practices,” Matta tells Thomas, after the Bulldogs circle up for a post-workout debrief. “Chuck? You’re sixth.”

Everyone laughs. Everyone smiles. Everyone feels good, and of course they do in mid-July, but feeling good and feeling confident once more are elemental to Butler once more meeting its own standard. That much, already, looks like a job well done.

“We’re getting better,” Matta tells his players, before a staff member sounds a 10-minute warning to get off the floor. The volleyball campers are coming. The Bulldogs nevertheless take sides and begin an informal pickup run, aiming to wring anything they can out of the next 600 seconds, give or take. As his players get up and down some more, Thad Matta heads to the door and walks out of the gym, coffee in hand, like a guy with a pretty good idea about how this is going to go.

(Photos: Zach Bolinger / Butler Athletics)

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