Countdown To Tip-Off: Climb Continues in Year Two of Grant Era
November 07, 2022 | Men's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
Last season's finish should be a springboard into 2022-23 as BC begins its season tonight
CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- At a surface level, Earl Grant's first season at Boston College didn't offer much more than what some people expected out of the Eagles. A sub-.500 finish for the fourth consecutive year produced more losses than wins for the 10th time in the past 11 seasons, and the near-lock of the team into the bottom six of the league came to fruition when it played on the first day of the ACC's postseason tournament. Nobody had BC on its national tournament watch list, and a 12th straight NCAA Tournament completed without participation from Massachusetts' true basketball flagship.
Yet nobody could or would call last year a failure for a team that defined itself for its ability to embrace hurdles and challenges. The players themselves finished the year with a completely different edge to their game than from when the season began, and as the postseason progressed, a new-look Boston College team came within an overtime heartbeat of advancing the ACC semifinals. Combined with a full year of development and the recruitment of high-end basketball players, BC enters 2022-2023 with a rediscovered optimism and the hope that the ever-present climb is finally progressing out of base camp and up the mountain.
"Now that I've gotten into the second year, we're trying to break it down into different seasons within a year," Grant said, "so I'm not necessarily worried about anything more than the first season, which is the non-conference schedule. Certainly you want to get off to a good start and play the game the right way as you approach the second season [ACC play], so I just want to get off to a good start."
That outlook is decidedly different from Grant's calculated decision to eschew results during his first year. He very obviously still cared about winning, but he recognized the multi-step process involved in changing a team's in-game habits. He assumed a level-headed approach to that first season and valued educational elements over results if the team fell short in any capacity. Wins, especially early in the season, were great, but he refused to blow up his process when BC ran into inevitable hardships.
Even when the road got bumpy, the roster relied on an approach designed to construct knowledge over results. It didn't change when BC won three straight games in late November after losing three straight around Thanksgiving, and it didn't implode when losses to Saint Louis and Albany threatened the good vibrations created by wins over South Florida and Notre Dame.
Each game felt like an internal hardening, and a historic comeback win over Clemson in mid-January offered a true window in how the process operated behind the Conte Forum curtains. After losing to Louisville in a late game delayed by a leaky roof, a win over Virginia Tech after falling behind by double digits in the first half gave the Eagles a standout win over the eventual conference champions.
Through every matchup, BC used grit and determination to turn the maroon and gold into one of the toughest outs of the ACC season. The same team that lost to a .500 team in the America East eventually won consecutive games over Florida State and at NC State, and the COVID-riddled program that lost by 26 to North Carolina on January 2 would push the Tar Heels to the brink in Chapel Hill, holding the eventual national runners-up to their lowest shooting performance of the season.
All of this, of course, culminated in the wild ride of an ACC Tournament where BC exerted total influence over the overall NCAA Tournament picture with a three-day performance. An overtime win over Wake Forest in the Second Round essentially kept the bubble-bound Demon Deacons out of the NCAA Tournament, and the next day, the Eagles played their third game in three days by nearly beating Miami in overtime before a last-second layup ended the Cinderella story. There's no way of knowing how that span truly impacted the selection committee, but a small part of everyone's mind understood how close BC came to upending the entire tournament after tenth-seeded Miami advanced to the Elite Eight in the Midwest Regional. Wake Forest eventually landed in the NIT as a No. 2 seed.
"I don't know if it gave us a blueprint," Grant said, "but I think it gave us more belief in what we're trying to do. If somebody tells us to get into an airplane, we won't be okay if the plane hasn't flown across the Atlantic Ocean before. But once you've done it one time, you start saying that you believe you can get over the water in the air, in this place."
Every coach covets a trajectory that ends with their team playing its best basketball in March, but the key difference between rebuilding teams and tournament teams sits in the middle of the performances at the start of the season. Last year, Grant had to teach his team how to win those games, and there were clear moments when the team struggled with consistency within its 13-20 record.
Expectations are, in a word, different this year, and even with personnel changes, new players, and really anything included in year-over-year updates, there's now an attempt to bridge an upward trajectory with the continuity that exists in the perennial contenders. The goal is always the same, but by altering those expectations, especially early in the season, the team can now start to identify more of what it will take to finally end a postseason drought that is maybe, finally, starting to see storm clouds at the end.
"The goal is always being at your peak in March," Grant said this week. "We definitely started to peak late last year, and we started to peak late in March. I want to do the same thing this year, but I would like to get a good, early start. So we've been spending a lot of time scouting our non-conference opponents over the summer, just to make sure we have a better feel.
"The end of last season gave us some belief that, you know what, what we're doing, there's a method to the madness," he continued. "There is a formula that works because we were all, for the first time, together, last year, playing as a staff. So I think now that we've had some success, we assume that if we play a certain way, success will find us. I think that gives us a little bit of hope and a little bit of belief that if we play our game, we know how to do it."Â
Boston College opens its 2022-23 season tonight at 8 p.m. against Cornell. The game can be seen online via the ACC Network Extra.
Yet nobody could or would call last year a failure for a team that defined itself for its ability to embrace hurdles and challenges. The players themselves finished the year with a completely different edge to their game than from when the season began, and as the postseason progressed, a new-look Boston College team came within an overtime heartbeat of advancing the ACC semifinals. Combined with a full year of development and the recruitment of high-end basketball players, BC enters 2022-2023 with a rediscovered optimism and the hope that the ever-present climb is finally progressing out of base camp and up the mountain.
"Now that I've gotten into the second year, we're trying to break it down into different seasons within a year," Grant said, "so I'm not necessarily worried about anything more than the first season, which is the non-conference schedule. Certainly you want to get off to a good start and play the game the right way as you approach the second season [ACC play], so I just want to get off to a good start."
That outlook is decidedly different from Grant's calculated decision to eschew results during his first year. He very obviously still cared about winning, but he recognized the multi-step process involved in changing a team's in-game habits. He assumed a level-headed approach to that first season and valued educational elements over results if the team fell short in any capacity. Wins, especially early in the season, were great, but he refused to blow up his process when BC ran into inevitable hardships.
Even when the road got bumpy, the roster relied on an approach designed to construct knowledge over results. It didn't change when BC won three straight games in late November after losing three straight around Thanksgiving, and it didn't implode when losses to Saint Louis and Albany threatened the good vibrations created by wins over South Florida and Notre Dame.
Each game felt like an internal hardening, and a historic comeback win over Clemson in mid-January offered a true window in how the process operated behind the Conte Forum curtains. After losing to Louisville in a late game delayed by a leaky roof, a win over Virginia Tech after falling behind by double digits in the first half gave the Eagles a standout win over the eventual conference champions.
Through every matchup, BC used grit and determination to turn the maroon and gold into one of the toughest outs of the ACC season. The same team that lost to a .500 team in the America East eventually won consecutive games over Florida State and at NC State, and the COVID-riddled program that lost by 26 to North Carolina on January 2 would push the Tar Heels to the brink in Chapel Hill, holding the eventual national runners-up to their lowest shooting performance of the season.
All of this, of course, culminated in the wild ride of an ACC Tournament where BC exerted total influence over the overall NCAA Tournament picture with a three-day performance. An overtime win over Wake Forest in the Second Round essentially kept the bubble-bound Demon Deacons out of the NCAA Tournament, and the next day, the Eagles played their third game in three days by nearly beating Miami in overtime before a last-second layup ended the Cinderella story. There's no way of knowing how that span truly impacted the selection committee, but a small part of everyone's mind understood how close BC came to upending the entire tournament after tenth-seeded Miami advanced to the Elite Eight in the Midwest Regional. Wake Forest eventually landed in the NIT as a No. 2 seed.
"I don't know if it gave us a blueprint," Grant said, "but I think it gave us more belief in what we're trying to do. If somebody tells us to get into an airplane, we won't be okay if the plane hasn't flown across the Atlantic Ocean before. But once you've done it one time, you start saying that you believe you can get over the water in the air, in this place."
Every coach covets a trajectory that ends with their team playing its best basketball in March, but the key difference between rebuilding teams and tournament teams sits in the middle of the performances at the start of the season. Last year, Grant had to teach his team how to win those games, and there were clear moments when the team struggled with consistency within its 13-20 record.
Expectations are, in a word, different this year, and even with personnel changes, new players, and really anything included in year-over-year updates, there's now an attempt to bridge an upward trajectory with the continuity that exists in the perennial contenders. The goal is always the same, but by altering those expectations, especially early in the season, the team can now start to identify more of what it will take to finally end a postseason drought that is maybe, finally, starting to see storm clouds at the end.
"The goal is always being at your peak in March," Grant said this week. "We definitely started to peak late last year, and we started to peak late in March. I want to do the same thing this year, but I would like to get a good, early start. So we've been spending a lot of time scouting our non-conference opponents over the summer, just to make sure we have a better feel.
"The end of last season gave us some belief that, you know what, what we're doing, there's a method to the madness," he continued. "There is a formula that works because we were all, for the first time, together, last year, playing as a staff. So I think now that we've had some success, we assume that if we play a certain way, success will find us. I think that gives us a little bit of hope and a little bit of belief that if we play our game, we know how to do it."Â
Boston College opens its 2022-23 season tonight at 8 p.m. against Cornell. The game can be seen online via the ACC Network Extra.
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