It was the 1954 Milan basketball team in Indiana that inspired the movie "Hoosiers" 30 years later. In the state championship game, it was a highly defensive battle where Milan held the ball at one point for over four minutes.
While it eventually made for one of the best upset championship victories in American sports history, the practice of teams holding the ball with no shot clock is a controversy that many folks continue to disagree with. That includes new Texas A&M head coach Bucky McMillan.
The term "Bucky Ball" is predicated of a team who runs up the court with some fast-paced tempo. This is exactly how McMillan has wanted to combat the controversy haunting high school basketball today.
"Bucky Ball" is complete opposite of HS teams purposefully running the clock out
It was just a couple of years ago in Oklahoma where Weatherford and Anadarko ran down the clock where the result ended up in a 4-2 final score. Questions regarding a shot clock that have already been raised to The National Federation of State High School Associations have been shut down by some states simply due to budget issues.
This fired up McMillan when he was coaching Mountain Brook High School in Alabama, and resulted in him loathing the idea of just holding onto the basketball (skip to 29:09). As he told CBS Sports' Jon Rothstein, he went against the traditional style of other coaches once he saw how ridiculous it was.
"In Alabama, back in the day, all the coaches kind of in the suburban schools played in the 30s and 40s, like really slow, ran the flex, no shot clock, shoot it after a minute. And, I committed to, if I coach, we're never going to do that. "Bucky McMillan
This prompted McMillan's teams to trap teams on defense to make them uncomfortable, and on offense, they would get up the court and shoot as quickly as possible. This prompted the traditional-minded coaches to criticize this as "Bucky Ball," but when McMillan started winning more, the term started to become more positive.
Granted, part of his tenure coaching high school at Alabama was before the basketball world starting copycatting Stephen Curry. When McMillan took the Sanford job in 2020, it seemed like "Bucky Ball" was already the new norm.
With Ruben Dominguez, the Spanish deadeye shooter coming to play for Texas A&M, it seems like the identity of McMillan's philosophy is slowly coming together. If McMillan's first-year Aggie group starts to hit shots, it's going to be a rough year for the rest of the SEC.