Before his weekly press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Bobby Hurley had a challenge to meet.
His brother Dan, head coach of Rhode Island’s basketball team, had nominated the Arizona State coach to take the Hot Pepper ALS Challenge, a viral social media movement aimed at raising awareness for the debilitating disease.
Hurley obliged, chomping into a jalapeno pepper and waiting for the spicy tang to kick in.
It never did.
“I have no reaction,” said the shoulder-shrugging Hurley. “I’m good.”
He could have only hoped his team’s foray into conference play would have been as easy.
A month ago Arizona State was on the verge of a No.1 national ranking. But a 3-4 Pac-12 record since has the Sun Devils outside of the top 20, its once-promising conference title hopes all but dashed.
To be sure, college basketball is a fickle game.
It’s the second time in Hurley’s career that a euphoric start to a season has been washed away by a mid-season slump – hardly an original obstacle for ASU’s fervent coach.
Though only in his fifth season pacing a sideline, Hurley has been down this road before, a path that helped land him in Tempe in the first place.
Plenty know of Hurley’s headline achievement during his first coaching stop at the University at Buffalo, where he transformed the Bulls from a middling mid-major program into a MAC conference champion, delivering the school its first-ever trip to the Big Dance.
Forgotten in Hurley’s tenure in upstate New York is that his historic 2014-15 Bulls squad, the team that went to the NCAA Tournament and helped him earn the ASU gig, also battled through an imperfect season that was almost derailed by serious stumbles early in conference play.
The current stakes at a power conference school might be greater, and the pressure of coaching a ranked team certainly more intense. But suffering a league-play trance isn’t unique to Hurley's team, or to almost any coach in the game.
Rarer instead is Hurley’s past history of guiding talented groups through the stormy stretches -- a valuable asset ASU can benefit from while righting the ship this winter.
RAISING THE BAR...AND THEN STRUGGLING TO MEET IT
Like ASU this fall, public predictions for Hurley’s second season at Buffalo were meager. The Bulls had lost two starters from the previous year, including conference player of the year Javon McCrea, and were picked to finish in the bottom half of the MAC in a preseason coaches’ poll.
“A lot of people wrote us off as a middle of the road team (in the preseason),” Will Regan, a senior forward on that 2014-15 UB squad, told DevilsDigest.com. “But our team had internal expectations.”
Topping Buffalo’s list of aspirations was to deliver the program with a first-ever NCAA tournament bid. By the beginning of league play, the Bulls were well-positioned to do so.
UB surged during a 9-3 non-conference schedule. It held halftime leads at No. 1 Kentucky (a Final Four participant that season) and at No. 6 Wisconsin (another Final Four team that year) while limiting opponents to just 65 points per game, helping secure the program’s most successful out-of-league campaign since 2004-05.
“We had a great non-conference,” Hurley remembered on Tuesday, speaking to media members just minutes after ASU’s practice in Wells Fargo Arena, and minutes before his pepper-eating endeavor. “We had taken Kentucky deep in the second half the year they were 39-1 and Wisconsin deep in the game at their place (and) they were a Final Four team.”
At the time, those were accomplishments that Buffalo -- a program with little tangible success at the NCAA Division I level -- had never before achieved.
Hurley continued: “We felt great (early in the season) about what we did...”
A slight pause.
“Then we hit a bad stretch.”
The Bulls skidded early in their MAC slate: a last-second loss to conference bottom-dwellers Ohio. A 3-point loss at Akron. Consecutive home defeats to Toledo and Central Michigan.
Twelve games into its conference season, Hurley’s team held a mediocre 6-6 league record. Once unbridled optimism for a first tournament bid was fading fast.
“Most of that was just due to midseason lulls. We rested on our laurels a little bit,” Regan said. “We were going through that phase where we brought it, then we lost it, then we found our rhythm again then lost it, due to it just being a long season and the immaturity as us as players to not bring it every night.”
Regan’s explanation echoed the same sentiments ASU’s befuddled roster has offered in recent weeks, with the Sun Devils wading their way through their own conference woes following a school record 12-0 start to the year.
“That is just part of the season, going through some tough stretches and figuring out how to get it going again,” Hurley said, a message applicable to both this winter’s team in Tempe and his 2015 group in New York.
Current ASU assistant Levi Watkins was on Hurley’s coaching staff during his two seasons in Buffalo. He too recognized the parallels between the two roller-coaster campaigns.
“It’s hard to win on the road in conference with coaches and teams that are very familiar,” he said on Tuesday, noting how both seasons included a heavy dose of away games to begin conference play (ASU has played five of its first seven Pac-12 games away from home; Buffalo played six of its first 10 on the road).
“During that time at Buffalo, it was one possession games here and there and maybe executing a little better here or there,” Watkins added. “It wasn’t like it was double-digit losses for the most part.”
This year, all of ASU’s four conference losses have also been close games, a trend Hurley cited as a reason for continued optimism despite his team’s newborn setbacks.
“I just like that every game we’ve been in, we’ve had a chance to win the game,” he said about this year’s ASU team. “Even when we aren’t playing as well as we are capable of playing we still give ourselves a chance.”
At least, that is how he paints the increasingly bleak picture publicly.
When addressing his team, on the other hand, there is only one tolerable result.
SNAPPING OUT OF A SLUMP
Few people know “Bobby Hurley, the Coach” as well as Shannon Evans. The Sun Devils’ senior guard was part of Hurley’s first recruiting class at Buffalo before transferring to ASU when Hurley was hired by the school. Throughout his career, Evans has filled crucial roles scoring, playmaking and leadership roles within Hurley’s teams.
In that time, Evans has learned exactly what to expect from his head coach when results sour.
“Losing is losing, it’s not acceptable and it’s never acceptable to coach Hurley,” he said on Tuesday, Hurley himself standing just steps behind him, barely out of ear-shot near the West tunnel inside Wells Fargo Arena.
“He deals with losing all the same,” Evans continued, quickly peeking over his shoulder before hushing his tone to half-jokingly concede, “He’s going to kill us.”
While only a figurative punishment, both past and present players have made note of Hurley’s heightened zest during his teams’ downturns.
Part of Hurley’s style is to coach with an edge, his way of protecting against complacency and lethargy during the marathon of a college basketball season.
Earlier this year, his energized side didn’t need the extra push in practice.
“We were playing very freely, like a free spirit with an edge to us and a chip on our shoulder in those games,” Hurley said. Just in a great rhythm on offense, teams had a hard time dealing with all the ways we can attack offensively.”
Recent weeks have delivered a demanding new set of circumstances for his Sun Devils though.
“You get to that point and then it switches on you,” Hurley said. “I felt like just about all of our (conference) opponents have played as hard as I’ve seen them on the film that I’ve watched. I’m sure that has something to do with our success and our ranking.”
Regan recalled a similar script during the early weeks of 2015.
“During that up-and-down (part of the year), he was definitely on us,” Regan said. “He knew we were a better team than we were playing as.”
While ASU’s offense has slumped this season, it was Buffalo’s defensive prowess that disappeared during its 6-6 start in the MAC in 2015, a stretch during which the Bulls allowed 73 points per game. Regan said his team’s offense “wasn’t fully in rhythm” either as a result of the defensive inconsistencies, a claim supported by Buffalo’s woeful 26 percent 3-point shooting during the weeks-long funk.
In response, Hurley changed his tactics at UB, first with a change to the starting lineup. Regan was moved to the bench in place of Xavier Ford, a fellow senior who nearly doubled his offensive production after becoming a starter.
A necessary move, as Regan remembers.
“At that point, we were really frustrated and looking at ourselves in the mirror and trying to figure it out,” Regan said. “...Tweaking the lineup and trying to get players to gel better, that helped.”
Not long after, UB began its rise back to the top of its conference, a rebound Regan credited to Hurley’s coaching decisions as well as “the team internally coming together and playing together on the court.”
This year, Hurley has already enacted similar changes. He tweaked ASU’s starting lineup at Cal last Saturday, dropping forward Mickey Mitchell to the bench in favor of Vitaliy Shibel – another move that has mirrored his season-saving tactics at Buffalo.
“We just tried to learn from each game,” Watkins said of the decisions Hurley and the staff made in 2015. “Same approach we have here (at ASU).”
SPARKING A SEASON-ENDING SURGE
Like Buffalo’s puzzling regression, the Bulls’ season-ending surge was equally surprising.
Over its final six regular-season contests and two MAC conference tournament games in 2015, the Bulls returned to form. Their lockdown defense returned (66 points per game allowed during the span), its 3-point shooting caught fire (42 percent) and a favorable schedule helped pave the way to a perfect 8-0 finish that culminated with an 89-84 conference championship game victory over Central Michigan, a team the Bulls had lost twice against earlier in the year.
“It was something I’ll never forget,” Evans said. “Just where I was at as a player and our team, as far as never being (in the tournament) in school history, the years before that our basketball team had never really been good before. Hurley getting there and changing everything around was just a great feeling.”
Playing a role in a program-defining triumph – like Buffalo’s 2015 title – is usually a once-in-a-career occurrence. But Hurley and Evans are getting a chance at an encore in Tempe this season, an opportunity that carries even more emotional weight for the senior sharpshooter.
“It does feel similar. But it’s like different here, a little more special,” he said. “What we are doing, changing a culture here and the fans being behind us...Everything here is going good. It’s a great place to be.”
His days in college numbered, there is an added pressure on Evans: an ultimatum to get himself and ASU deep into March. Buffalo’s first-round exit to West Virginia in 2015 hasn’t satiated his postseason desires.
“We all know it’s our last year, our last shot at this,” Evans said. “I’ve been to the tournament before, but (my ASU teammates) haven’t. To get them there and for me to go back, I was only there for one game, I only got a sneak-peak. I want to get there and stay a little bit.”
Hurley meanwhile admitted that it is still “too early” to classify his Buffalo and ASU teams as perfect comparisons. He also bypassed a chance to indulge in remembering his victorious days at UB, instead of sharing his businesslike, short-term mindset: how to kickstart ASU’s own late-season revival.
“We still have a lot of work to do. Right now we are 3-4, we’ve got seven of the last 11 at home, so we’ve got to make it happen here to give ourselves a chance,” he said.
“I think that all these hard games and all these different ways we have to play (opponents) – whether a team slows it down, if they want to go up-and-down, if they want to try and pound it inside on us – we’ve had to deal with a variety of teams so when you get to the NCAA tournament you have that experience under your belt,” he added.
His most veteran player, however, can sense a turnaround is imminent – Evans, like his coach, has experience when it comes to gauging these sorts of resurgences.
“You go through slumps, ups, and downs, things like that. We had a little spurt, our little down,” Evans said, his sweat from practice still dripping down his brow.
“Now we are working our way up.”
