Take Five: Five viewpoints in five days, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Badgers' historic 2015 NCAA Tournament
BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — It was easy for Frank Kaminsky to identify the connection. Between players. Between players and coaches. And it was just as easy for him to address how that connectivity put Wisconsin on the road to back-to-back Final Fours and factored into the upset of No. 1 Kentucky.
"The biggest reason we did what we did was because we all truly loved and trusted each other," said Kaminsky, the 2015 national College Basketball Player of the Year. "You can't do something special if not everyone is on the same page and we were all on the same page."
In the success equation, Kaminsky spelled out the operative word: t-r-u-s-t.
"That's the biggest thing in all of sports," he said. "You can have amazing players, but if you don't trust the guy next to you, it's not going to go as well as you want it to. You're going to have breakdowns and you're going to have times when you collapse …
"There are going to be moments where you're tested in sports and if you don't trust the people who are around you and the people who are on your team and in your circle — from 1 to 15 (on the roster) and the whole coaching staff — then it is all going to fall apart."
Make no mistake about it. The Badgers had some amazing players. They had two NBA first-round draft choices in Kaminsky (No. 9 to Charlotte) and Sam Dekker (No. 18 to Houston). Three others were undrafted free agents and signed NBA contracts: Nigel Hayes, Duje Dukan and Bronson Koenig.
They also got tremendous leadership out of Traevon Jackson and Josh Gasser.
In the end, all the pieces fit together and meshed.
"All the people that I was with — and you can go down the line — we were all so close and that really started the year before," said Kaminsky, whose reference was to the 2013-14 team that won 30 games and carried Wisconsin into the Final Four for the first time since 2000.
The Badgers lost just one impactful player from that group, Ben Brust, the second-leading scorer behind Kaminsky and the UW's top 3-point shooter by a large margin (49 more triples than the runner-up). Brust was on the ground floor of that developing brotherhood that emerged on the national stage.
"We were all so close that it's hard to put into words," Kaminsky said. "You just had this connection with everybody. You didn't need to become a different person. You could be yourself and everybody accepted you for who you were. That's what was coming out in those press conferences."
Were they really having as much fun as it looked? Kaminsky checked that box. LOL.
"People talk all the time in the NBA, 'Do you still talk to this person?'" said an incredulous Kaminsky. "I tell them, 'Yeah, I talk to everybody from my team all the time.' You kind of realize that you had a different relationship with your college teammates than a lot of people do. That's special.
"I can't really tell you what the experience is like in college at the other end of the spectrum when you don't get along with people off the floor. I can only tell you what it's like when you do. And it's the most fun you can possibly have in your entire life.
"When you're going out there and you're winning game after game and building and creating a culture on and off the floor, it feels like every day is just like a dream, a dream come true. I got to play basketball at an extreme level and make friendships that are going to last for the rest of my life."
Leave it to a Hall of Fame coach, Bo Ryan, to tap into that connectivity in team huddles.
"He gave us the freedom to call plays and talk through things," Kaminsky said. "He'd say, 'Run this play out of the timeout' and we'd do that. Then, it was on us. He had this supreme trust in us to make the right plays because we had been together for so long and we knew each other's games.
"We knew what we were running. We could see the matchups and we knew who had an advantage. We knew where the ball needed to be and how to get it there and what play we had to run to get to the actions we needed. And Bo trusted us to go out there and execute it."
Ryan's trust in Kaminsky manifested itself in the win over Kentucky.
"Bo took me out and I think they scored on that play," Kaminsky recalled. "He used to give me a couple of minutes of rest before timeouts. But I just said, 'Don't do it. I don't need it.' So that's something always stuck in my mind — that moment — and he didn't take me out again."
Kaminsky played 37 minutes that memorable night in Indianapolis and led both teams with 20 points and 11 rebounds. It was a far cry from the way he had played the year before — 8 points (4-of-7 FG) — in a 74-73 loss to the Wildcats at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
"You can't think about the second one without thinking about the first one," he said of the two Final Four semifinal matchups with Kentucky in 2014 and 2015. "Walking off that court in Dallas, I still remember the first question to me was, 'Are you leaving (declaring for the NBA draft) or staying?'
"I looked at the guy and said, 'I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to come back here and I'm going to get back to the Final Four. That's what I'm going to do.' It just made it so sweet that we got to play them again and beat them and play as well as we did. Amazing game. Amazing atmosphere."
Before the opening tip-off in the rematch, Kaminsky had some choice words for his teammates.
It was kind of a blood, sweat and tears appeal.
"I was the one that gave the little speech before the game started when we were all huddled up," explained Kaminsky, who reminded everyone how hard they had worked to get back to the big stage while questioning whether the Wildcats worked as hard or even respected them.
"I just said something along the lines of 'Make 'em Believe.' I remembered there was kind of some doubt. People were saying we got there because of luck. I didn't believe that. I said, 'I believe our destiny is to be here and to play in this game. Now it's time to go and make everyone believe.'"
Kaminsky was confident that the Badgers had the psychological and physical edge.
"They knew we were better," he said of the 'Cats. "We were a year more experienced. We had more pieces on the team that were contributing. And we liked the way they were going to match-up with us. That was to play us all one-on-one. I just tried to create mismatches and attack people."
Kaminsky followed the same plan against Duke and had 21 points and 12 rebounds. But it wasn't enough. With his jersey pulled up over his face to cover red eyes, Kaminsky rode in the back end of a golf cart from the locker room to the post-game media conference at Lucas Oil Stadium.
"You'll just never be able to put into words what a loss like that means especially when you felt like you had it in your hands and it slowly slipped away from you," he said. "Obviously, the ultimate goal wasn't to get back to the Final Four and beat Kentucky. It was to win the national championship game.
"So, you go from riding on extremely high emotions to feeling about as low as you could feel when you know the storybook ending doesn't have the outcome you want. I remember sitting in the locker room during Bo's talk after the game.
"He told us, 'There's nothing I can really say right now that is going to make it feel any better. But what you guys accomplished is hard to put into context.' At the press conference, I said, 'It was extremely hard to have to say good-bye. There's not another chance, not a next season for me.'
"It's something I replay in my head all the time. It's something I wish that I could go back and change. But that's life. You don't get re-do's on stuff like that. But you can be proud of everything we accomplished. Nobody believed a bunch of three-star recruits would make it as far as we did."
Today, Kaminsky is living in Phoenix, Arizona and waiting out what might happen next with the NBA season which has been suspended indefinitely because of the coronavirus. After four years with the Charlotte Hornets, Kaminsky signed a free-agent contract with the Suns last July.
Upon getting off to a promising start, averaging 12 points and 5 rebounds, he found himself playing on the equivalent of one leg in December because of a balky knee, an injury that was diagnosed as a left patella stress fracture and eventually put him on the shelf for the rest of the season.
Kaminsky bought some weights and has been working out on his own. He would like to return to the Suns next season. But he knows the business end of sports and about such things as salary caps. Over the last month, he has learned a lot about pandemics and the impact on connectivity.
"I hope people become more independent," he said of any potential silver lining. "You kind of have to rely on yourself right now. And you can look at it in two ways. One, you can do something to better yourself in a way that you haven't had the time to do recently.
"Or, you can just kind of sit around and fill your time with a bunch of meaningless nonsense that doesn't help better yourself. I hope everyone takes a step back and does some self-reflection and realize what they have. Their health. Their family. Whatever it is that makes them happy. I'd focus on that."
On April 4, the fifth anniversary of the win over Kentucky, Kaminsky will turn 27.
"The game (of basketball) changed my life," he said. "You think back to when you're making your decision on where you're going to college. Right when Wisconsin offered me, I thought, 'That's where I'm going to school.' It's just like this light bulb flickered in my head.
"It's kind of insane, but you then make all these bold claims about yourself, 'I'm going to the Final Four, I'm going to play for a national championship, I'm going to make it in the NBA.'
"For two years (freshman and sophomore), it looked like it was not going to come true. But when you do all the things that you told everybody you were going to do and you achieve all the things you wanted to achieve, it's the most rewarding feeling you could probably ever have in your life.
"I always think back, 'What if the light bulb didn't flicker in my head that this is the spot for me?'
"I wonder where I would be right now. I owe that all to Wisconsin."
