Tourney Talk: HoopsHD interviews UNC Asheville coach Nick McDevitt

CLICK HERE for Jon Teitel’s most recent Bracketology

CLICK HERE for our most recent Championship Week Video Notebook

Coach Nick McDevitt has been a Bulldog for almost 2 decades, having arrive on campus to begin life as a freshman back in the late 1990s.  On Sunday he became the 1st UNC Asheville alum to coach the school to the NCAA tourney by overcoming a 9-PT halftime deficit and getting a 9-PT win over Winthrop in the Big South tourney title game to earn an automatic bid to next week’s NCAA tournament for the 1st time since 2012. Earlier today HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to speak with Coach McDevitt about winning without many seniors and guarding the arc.

You played basketball at UNC-Asheville and your father/uncle/sister are also alumni: what does it mean to you and to you family to be the 1st alum to take the Bulldogs to the NCAA tourney? Anytime you get to experience the NCAA tourney it is a special time, both for myself as well as 2 of the guys on my staff who are also alums.

During your career you were twice named to the Big South All-Academic team and were also named to the Dean’s List 4 different times: how much importance do you place on academics? A lot of what we do is certainly about academics, and we stress the importance of being a student and an athlete…in that order. It is important to get a degree but also to get an education as well.

Your team finished 15-16 last year: how were you able to turn things around this year? We just continued to grow: we did a nice job of playing hard and playing together. They are a fun bunch who enjoys the work that it takes to get better both as individuals and as a team.

You played several power-conference teams this season including Tennessee/Texas A&M/Georgetown: which of these teams impressed you the most? Texas A&M has a combination of size and skill that is very good. We were still trying to figure out who we were when we played them early on (and lost by 28 PTS).

On Sunday SG Dwayne Sutton scored 25 PTS in a 9-PT win over Winthrop to clinch the 2016 Big South tourney title: how were you able to overcome a 9-PT halftime deficit, and how on earth did a freshman end up as the conference tourney MVP? We needed to get more aggressive in the 2nd half. Winthrop has some good rim-protectors which made us a little passive in the 1st half and we settled for jump shots. At halftime we stressed to our players that they had to play in the paint and get on the glass, and it helped us get the win.

SF Will Weeks missed most of the past 2 years due to a knee injury: how happy are you for him to finally make it to the postseason? He has put in an awful lot of hard work. He had a bad injury a couple of years ago which was a big setback both to him and our team, so to see him able to play well and be rewarded by getting to play in the tourney makes me really happy for him.

You only have 2 seniors on the roster: do you think this team is ready to win now or do you think that they are not going to peak for another year or 2? That will depend on the work we are able to put in going forward and not being complacent about the success we have had so far. We cannot stay stagnant in the years ahead as our current players continue to mature: we need to prove our skill level and our strength.

Your 28.4 3P% allowed is #1 in the entire nation: what is the secret to guarding the 3-PT line? At times we have similar-sized players on the floor which allows us to switch on ball-screens. Some teams get easy shots from their stretch 4s via a pick-and-pop, but when you have 6’5” guards like we do it gives you a lot of length on the perimeter. Our players are very versatile so we can also play multiple kinds of zone defenses.

What kind of seed do you think you deserve, and what kind of seed do you think you will get? I really do not know for sure: we will go wherever they tell us to go and play whoever they tell us to play. I imagine that we will be a 15 or 16 seed and we will just try to advance to the next round.