LAHAINA, Hawaii
Bill Self is a numbers guy. He may try to conceal this fact from time to time, shielding himself in a guise of toughness, offering never-ending rhetoric about defense and rebounding and finding ways to win basketball games in ugly fashion.
But beneath the surface, Self’s mind operates like a steel trap, processing box scores in a matter of seconds, calculating such numbers as rebounding percentages and turnover percentages and all sorts of basketball minutiae in the moments before postgame newsconferences.
On Monday night here in Lahaina, less than 24 hours before No.