Tinkle: ‘It’s the most rewarding season I’ve had, for sure’
I believe it was Cinderella who once famously observed, “A dream is a wish your heart makes.”
That and, I would add, hard work. And perseverance. And dedication in working toward a common goal.
Oregon State wound up wearing the glass slipper for all of those reasons Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena.
The team that West Coast scribes picked to finish last in the Pac-12 got the last laugh in Las Vegas.
Wayne Tinkle and his Beavers believed when nobody else did.
Now they’re wearing “Pac-12 champion” caps and have already arrived in Indianapolis, beginning preparations for a first-round date with Tennessee in the NCAA Tournament on Friday.
Oregon State made its first appearance in the Pac-12 Tournament finals since 1988. The Beavers had never won it. They hardly looked the part of contenders this time, either, coming in as the No. 5 seed, with a 14-12 overall record and a 10-10 mark in conference play.
Going into the Pac-12 Tournament, a spot in the NIT seemed a reasonable goal. It would have been an admirable achievement for a team that had lost home games to Portland and Wyoming and got drubbed by Arizona (98-64) and Colorado (78-49) through the first 18 games of this trying, COVID-19-impacted campaign.
The Beavers had some momentum, though, going as the regular season ended. In Vegas, they caught lightning in a bottle.
They toughed it out in an 83-79 overtime win over No. 4 seed UCLA in the quarterfinals. The next two opponents were riding six-game win streaks. The Beavers didn’t blink, knocking off top seed Oregon 75-64 in the semis, then holding off No. 3 seed Colorado 70-68 in the championship game.
Tinkle coached three NCAA Tournament teams at Montana and got Oregon State there in the second of his seven seasons in Corvallis in 2015, OSU’s first visit to the Big Dance in 25 years. Two months ago, though, a return trip this season was unfathomable.
So when I asked Tinkle late Sunday night if this was the most rewarding season of his 15 years as a head coach, he paused for a moment, then sighed.
“I’m going to think about that when I put my head on the pillow tonight,” he said from his Indianapolis hotel room. Then he paused again, changed his mind and delivered an immediate answer.
“I don’t listen to any of the negativity,” Tinkle began. “I’m not on social media. The support from Beaver Nation far outweighs the other stuff.”
Tinkle understands criticism of his job by fans and media comes with the territory. And there has been some of that through the last five years, beginning with the injury-ravaged season in which the Beavers went 5-27 in 2016-17. He has never let it consume him, nor has he stopped working relentlessly to build the program he envisioned when he arrived in 2014.
“This has been a year in which we’ve all been faced with some pretty incredible challenges,” Tinkle continued. “To do what we’ve done in the face of the adversity — picked 12th, some early losses that we should have never had … the guys never wavered. We never changed the way we did things. We never stopped believing. We were able to stay focused and grind away.
“It makes me so proud of the growth and development of this team. It stems from being a team of 15 individuals turning into a group of one. (The OSU coaches) stayed patient with them. We kept believing in them. We kept demanding the best from them. And they delivered. From the standpoint of growth from start to finish, it’s the most rewarding season I’ve had, for sure.”
The Beavers took the Pac-12 media’s 12th-place prediction personally — the players and their coach.
“Nike always sends us a supply of cool ‘shooting shirts’ for the postseason,” Tinkle says. “(OSU equipment coordinator) Ryan Lawrence told me when the shirts arrived. I asked him, ’Is there any way we can get 12th put on the shirts, somewhere where it’s not really out there on display?’ He got out the printer screener and put it really sharp in orange on the insides.
“(Sophomore guard) Jarod Lucas was the first one to notice it. He got fired up. He told everybody to look at what was in there.”
Tinkle had mentioned the slight only once previously.
“We’d won a tough one at Cal (59-57 on February 25) and were playing Stanford,” he says. “It was the only thing I wrote on the board in the locker room before the game — ’12th.’ I said, ‘this is where we were picked to finish. Let’s show them we’re better than that. Our postseason starts tonight.’ ”
Tinkle has done the best coaching job of his seven years in Corvallis this season. His adjustments through the season have mostly paid off, most notably inserting the 6-2 Lucas — one of the Pac-12’s premier shooters — into the starting lineup in place of 6-9 Maurice Calloo after the lopsided loss to Arizona. Lucas has made more 3-point shots than anybody in the conference, ranks second in free-throw percentage (.897) and has made more clutch shots than anybody on the team.
The switch moved 6-7 junior Warith Alatishe from small forward to power forward, where he has blossomed into one of the best at the position in the Pac-12. He was named MVP of the Pac-12 Tournament and Lucas and senior Ethan Thompson made the all-tournament team.
In recent weeks, Tinkle has used more of 7-1, 265-pound Roman Silva and 6-8, 250-pound Rodrigue Andela. Silva has been effective scoring off the post-up. Andela, who bears physical resemblance to Zion Williamson, has provided muscle, inside scoring and rebound strength. Tinkle has stuck with 6-5 senior Zach Reichle, who played perhaps the most aggressive basketball of his career — with good results — during the Pac-12 Tournament.
After the so-so first half of the regular season, Tinkle placed an emphasis on improving defensive performance. He went often to a mixture of zone and matchup defenses to keep opposing offenses off-balance.
“We knew that’s what cost us early,” he says. “We had to make it a priority.”
In the process, Tinkle and his staff — assistants Kerry Rupp, Stephen Thompson and Marlon Stewart — crafted an “inside/outside” offense featuring 3-point shooters Lucas and Thompson and a post presence allowing Alatishe, Silva and Andela to work the interior. Beginning with an 80-79 win over Arizona State on January 16, Oregon State has gone 12-7 and allowed only one opponent as many as 80 points.
“(The defensive success) took some pressure off us offensively,” Tinkle says. “The buy-in to playing inside/outside has put a lot of pressure on (opposing) defenses.”
After Oregon’s 80-67 win in Corvallis to conclude the regular season — in which the Ducks went 15 for 23 from 3-point range against OSU’s mostly man-to-man defense — Tinkle could have gone back to the zone for the Pac-12 Tournament.
“I was really upset with our man defense (in the regular-season finale),” he says. “We used a little zone against UCLA, but we challenged them going into (the semifinals against the Ducks). We said, ‘We’re playing man; now get up into the those guys at the 3-point line.’ They responded. I thought we’d play more zone against Colorado, but we stayed mostly with man and did a nice job.”
Through Tinkle’s first five seasons at OSU, critics complained that he couldn’t recruit, that his only good ones were coaches’ kids — Tres Tinkle, Stevie Thompson Jr. and Ethan Thompson. The last two seasons, though, the efforts of young recruiting coordinator Stewart have paid off. The 2019 class featured guards Lucas and Gianni Hunt, centers Silva and Dearon Tucker and swing man Julien Franklin. Last year’s group included four transfers — Alatishe, Andela, Calloo and guard Tariq Silver — along with promising freshman small forward Isaiah Johnson.
The result is the most athletic team Tinkle has had at OSU, “and that will be the emphasis moving forward,” he says. “Next year’s team will be a lot more athletic than this one.”
This year’s team is one of the deepest in the Pac-12. Nine players have averaged double-figure minutes, and that doesn’t include Silver, Johnson and Franklin, who all could be in line for more duty next season.
Calloo, who had contributed 10 total points in the previous eight games, exploded for a team-high 15 in the championship game, sinking 3 of 6 from 3-point range.
“Maurice could have sulked about (his reduced role),” Tinkle says. “Instead, he stayed connected, kept working and came up big when we needed him most.”
Oregon State lead the league in opponents’ 3-point percentage (.307) and ranks third in free-throw percentage (.758). Those traits proved effective against Colorado, a veteran team with seven seniors, including star guard McKinley Wright. Lucas made three of four free throws over the final 16 seconds to fortify the win. The Beavers were 9 for 22 from beyond the arc, the Buffaloes 6 for 19.
“Guarding the 3-point line was the difference in the game,” Colorado coach Tad Boyle said afterward. “Credit to Oregon State. (The Beavers) deserved to win this game. They played well. They played better than we did. They were the tougher team tonight, a little more aggressive than we were, especially when the ball went up on the backboard.”
The entire Tinkle family was on hand in Vegas, including son Tres, whose G-League season ended Tuesday night as the Raptors 905 fell 127-100 to the Delaware Blue Coats in the playoff semifinals in Orlando. (Tres played 14 games, averaging 8.2 points and 3.7 rebounds in just 16.5 minutes, shooting .500 from the field, .324 from 3-point range and .750 from the line.) Tres — who was injured and missed playing in the NCAA Tournament when the Beavers last got there in 2016 — boarded a plane Wednesday and was at T-Mobile Center for Thursday’s quarterfinals against UCLA.
“You know how much my family means to me,” Wayne says. “I had to turn away from looking at them (in the stands) after the Colorado game. I was starting to get pretty emotional.
“From a personal standpoint, this one was for Tres. He was up there (in the stands), chanting and beating his chest and cheering his (former teammates) on. It wasn’t just about his dad’s teams; it was also about the guys he went to battle with for so many years.”
Tres, sisters Joslyn and Elle and mother Lisa Tinkle understand best how much Wayne bleeds orange, how much he wants to make Beaver Nation proud.
“When he took this job seven years ago, he had big eyes and was ready to get to work and put Oregon State’s program back on the map,” Joslyn Tinkle says. “But it doesn’t happen overnight. People who don’t understand how hard it is have different expectations.
“This is rewarding because of the hard work my dad represents, because of his integrity and how much he cares for his players. He does things the right way. It’s fun to see the culture he is creating continue to propel forward. I couldn’t be more proud of him and the team. It’s been a really difficult year for a lot of people, but it was good to have that night (Saturday). It was really special.”
In the media, we strive to remain impartial. Sometimes when you cover a team or a group of individuals, that gets hard. It’s especially that way with a person such as Tinkle, who is down to earth and warm and funny and as fine a man as you’d want to meet. You find yourself pulling for him. As a graduate of Oregon State, he’s the kind of person I want representing my university. I’m pleased for him to have this kind of success, if only to quiet the calls for his head.
When I spoke to Joslyn on Sunday, she was still in Vegas with Elle, waiting to fly home to the house the sisters share in Portland.
“We haven’t even bought our return tickets yet,” Joslyn said with a laugh. “We fully plan to be in Indy. But we have to get home to do some laundry first.”
Mike Parker has worked remotely all season, but the popular, erudite play-by-play voice is headed for Indiana and will be in the house for the Beavers’ NCAA Tournament opener Friday against Tennessee (Source: Parker Scanlon/Beaver Sports Properties)
In 2016, Oregon State fell 75-67 to Virginia Commonwealth in its first-round game in the NCAA Tournament. Pundits expect a similar result in Friday’s 1:30 p.m. PDT game on TNT. Tennessee (18-8 overall, 10-7 in the SEC) is the No. 5 seed, the Beavers — who have won six of their last seven games — No. 12 in the Midwest Region.
“We were a little shorthanded going into the tournament the last time,” Tinkle says. “We’re at full strength this time. We’re riding quite a wave. We won the Pac 12 Tournament to get the automatic bid. There was some stoicism (from the players) after beating UCLA. There was more excitement after beating the Ducks, but that was because of what they’d done to us in the previous game. Heading into that Colorado game, there was no doubt. I sensed a calmness in the guys. It was our time. We were going to make it happen.
“That’s going to be the same approach we’ll have when we tip it off Friday. I can’t guarantee anything, but I do know one thing. Our players aren’t going to be intimidated.”
