Four Questions with Bucky McMillan

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‘Every coach has to coach to their personality’

When Samford hired Bucky McMillan in April 2020, it didn’t take long for him to make his mark. After 12 seasons coaching his school basketball in Birmingham, Alabama, “Bucky Ball” immediately took root thanks to its aggressive, up-tempo approach that piled up points.

This season, Samford is thriving with that approach.

The Bulldogs are 13-2 overall and boast the nation’s second-longest win streak (13). They’ve topped triple digits three times, and have scored less than 80 points just three times. They play fast (75 possessions a game, 8th most in D-I), force turnovers (17th-best TOrate) and hit 3s (40.8%; 5th best) and have their eyes on their second-straight Southern Conference title after sharing it with Furman last season.

They prep for UNC Greensboro tonight (a team’s that’s beaten Arkansas this season), but McMillan had enough time for Four Questions.

Q: Your team hasn’t lost since Nov. 10. Does it feel like you’ve won 13 in a row? You’ve talked about winning in the four phases of the game. How would you grade your team on those this season?

Bucky McMillan: We've gotten a lot better, and that’s the key. If you win 13 straight games, you’re doing something right. And we’re significantly better from games from where we were early on.

This is the best team I've had since I've been at Samford. It's our first recruiting class where it's been all guys that I've recruited and it’s the best we’ve been at all four phases, to be honest. This is the best pressing group we've had. This is the best half-court defensive group we've had. It's the best transition team by the numbers. It's the best half-court team by a lot of the numbers. Last year's group was pretty good, but in a different way.

I think our defensive efficiency, which is never going to be extraordinarily high just because style of play. But our defensive efficiency is number one in the league right now. It starts with the guys playing really hard. They're really connected out there on offense and defense, and they're unselfish. Sometimes you can have guys that are unselfish players, but their style of game doesn't look like it. For example, you can have the best iso player in the world. He's just not a very good passer. That's just not his deal. Our team this year is the opposite.

Q: With that style and up-tempo approach — anyone who watches your team has to enjoy the pace and style — are you surprised more teams don’t play that way?

McMillan: To each their own. I think every coach has to coach to their personality. I’m more of a risk taker. When I played basketball, it was these suburban teams walking it up and scoring in the 30s and 40s. And I said, ‘Man, if I ever coach, we’re gonna play fast. We’re gonna shoot a lot.’ And that’s what I’ve always done. But when you play that way, you have to go deep into your bench, and that bench is always pretty active because those guys know they’re not going to just sit there. You’ve gotta have good players, and this style doesn’t work if you only have 5-6 guys.

Q: When you’re recruiting to Samford with the transfer portal today, finding that kind of depth has to be harder than ever, right?

McMillan: That's what every school is dealing with. And it's unfortunate because that's what made college basketball so great. When you watched North Carolina and Duke play in the late 90s or early 2000s, those guys were at the school three years, sometimes four. Now, the team that can get players to buy into that, you have a chance to do something special.

These teams say ‘I'm gonna put my personal objectives on hold because we're gonna do something magical.’ It's what makes teams so incredible to be a part of. And I think the idea of team has kind of been taken away in this era of NCAA rules and ‘me’ era.

I coached high school for 13 years. Whenever we have a reunion of one of our state championship teams, not a player misses. It doesn't matter where they are, what they got going on, everybody's there. It's unique and being around each other takes them back to some of the best times in their lives because they were part of something so incredible and so special. And it's hard in college basketball because of the lack of continuity. But those teams that do that have to be extraordinary right? Those are the ones that are gonna have the most success.

Q: You mentioned your background coaching high school ball. We’ve seen coaching the last few years have success who didn’t take the traditional coaching path, whether it was Tobin Anderson at Fairleigh Dickinson or what Josh Schertz is doing at Indiana State. Given that, do you think more program might look to coaches who didn’t take the traditional path?

McMillan: I take it as a personal responsibility to have success for all the high school coaches. Nate Oats was a high school coach. He's here in Alabama, and we kind of had similar backgrounds, just in different states and everything.

But I know that I've coached against so many great coaches in high school. There, you really have to learn how to coach. In college, you might be a GA, then an OPS. And then you move into an assistant role, and more of a recruiting role. And then bang, you're hired as a head coach, and you’ve never called a time out before. I'm not saying there aren’t fine coaches who’ve gone that route. But I think that when you sit in that chair, you know how to manage things.

How do we regroup after a tough loss? How do we handle the ups and downs? How do we handle fatigue? You already know what your philosophy is. You're not figuring it out on the job. And so when things get tough, you don't just abandon ship. I think one of the biggest mistakes coaches make is all of a sudden things aren't going your way. How do you handle that?

Why don't we just do what we do, and get really damn good at it. the coaches who are willing to what they believe — if it's sound — their program is gonna develop an identity, and that's a successful program.