‘I ain’t leaving’: For Dave Smart and Carleton Ravens, dominating CIS is not getting old

Dave Smart plans to put it up to 11.

The 'Carleton should play NCAA Division I' crowd has mostly been shouted down by people who prefer their thinking to be less blue-sky but the question of how long Smart will stay in the CIS ranks pops up after every Ravens' national championship. The big pre-tournament story before the CIS Final 8, after the possibility of a Carleton-Ottawa Gee-Gees final, derived from the Grantland feature on the Ravens where Smart named his terms to entertain an offer to coach south of the border. Following Carleton's 79-67 win over Ottawa for its 10th title in 12 seasons and fourth in a row, Smart stated the quote was all about pricing himself out of the NCAA market.

"No one's giving me that, no one's giving me a half-million dollars [per season]," Smart said as he held one of his young children during a media scrum. "That was my way of saying that I'm not going anywhere. Even if someone offered me ridiculous money, it would be a family decision. I know I'd go into a situation, coaching- and program-wise, that would be worse. I've got a great situation here professionally. You have to look at your family. But that ain't happening. The point of me saying that was I ain't leaving."

Smart, 47, has said that he once accepted a NCAA job but changed his mind after facing players who still had eligibility remaining. To know, or think one knows, a little bit about the hierarchy of needs here is that the Ravens will never feel like there are no more worlds to conquer while playing in Canada. The liberal rules in CIS of about off-season workouts and practice hours per week vis-a-vis the NCAA, which does not accept Canadian schools into Division I, are also nice.

Even while workers at the Canadian Tire Centre were getting out the ladder to the current Carletons to cut down the nets while ex-players milled around to extend congrats, Smart spoke about how "we've got to do some things to loosen it up" for Phil Scrubb, who didn't have good shooting days against Ottawa on both Sunday and in the OUA Wilson Cup final on March 1.

"Every year's a different year," said Smart, who I'm so happy for [co-captains and graduating bigs] Kevin [Churchill] and Ty [Tyson Hinz]," Smart said. "It's been a long year, a lot of ups and downs for me personally and them as a group."

He was as animated as ever in a hotly contested final on Sunday that saw 37 fouls called.

"I thought last week at the Wilson Cup I didn't do a very good job saying my piece, and that's not necessarily usually a problem for me," Smart said. "In the last five minutes of that game I hurt our team because there were about 4-5 calls that could have gone our way that went the other [Ottawa's] way, and if two had gone our way — I'm not saying they weren't 50-50 calls; they were — but they all went against us. Today I felt I'm not going to let my team down by not fighting for them. I think Phil was getting beat up but I also think some of their guys were getting beat up. You just have to bring attention to the contact."

'We wanted this matchup all weekend'

Carleton, with Sunday's win, is 132-3 in CIS play since Phil and Thomas Scrubb debuted in the fall of 2010. Two losses were in Wilson Cup games after the Ravens had already qualified for the national tournament. The other was a conference season opener at Windsor, a perennial top 10 team. That helps paint a picture of having almost no rivals outside of Ottawa and the emerging Ryerson Rams. It also got the team it wanted on championship Sunday and kept the Gee-Gees to fewer than 70 points.

"We knew if we were going to earn a championship, it was going to have to be against Ottawa," Thomas Scrubb said. "We wanted this matchup all weekend and we did well."

With Churchill and Hinz moving on, Ottawa has a potential quintet of fifth-year seniors in the Scrubbs, Victor Raso, Clinton Springer-Williams and Gavin Resch, but none are taller than Thomas Scrubb at 6-foot-6. Its only semi-seasoned big, 6-8 Jean-Emmanuel Pierre-Charles, will be a third-year player. How is that going to work?

It's as fresh a restart as Carleton has faced since 2009-10, when it had to replace the Kingston trio of future national team forward Aaron Doornekamp, shooting guard Stu Turnbull and defensive stopper Robert Saunders. It suffered three losses that season, falling to eventual champ Saskatchewan in the semifinal.

"There's no Stu here, there's no Aaron," Smart said. "I could name 30 guys, they're not there. And there'll be no Ty and Kevin next year. We got to figure out a way to change the way we play. We've got some really talented kids, so we got to find a way."

The Scrubbs also buy into that thinking. Thomas Scrubb, in his words, "really doesn't think about it, like the whole 10 national titles.... I feel great being part of a tradition and wanting to carry it on, but it's not really main focus." Similarly, Phil Scrubb downplayed questions about being on the NBA radar by pointing out his game is far from a finished product.

"It's nice to hear but I have a long way to go," the Richmond, B.C., native said. "If I'm not the one to do it then I think someone will eventually [get a NBA shot out of CIS]. The level of talent in CIS has really come up.

"But I need to work on all my skills, Also my attitude, just becoming more aggressive and assertive in games."

Next season, the Scrubbs can potentially match former Ravens lead guard Osvaldo Jeanty's feat of playing on five consecutive CIS-winning teams. Only next year will it truly be their team. The dynamic of Phil being the scorer and Tommy being the stopper who might actually be more valuable when the calendar turns to March is a treat to watch.

"He just becomes extra aggressive," Phil said of Tommy. "He gives our team confidence that he can just make plays at the end. He really focuses on defence and rebounding and the offence just comes naturally to him."

Phil Scrubb's comment about the improving talent level in Canada is also pertinent. The Ravens are on their perch, far above everyone else, but why break up a good thing when the depth of competition in Ontario and across Canada keeps rising? Why call off this endless exercise in trying to play perfect basketball?

Sunday's contest in front of 7,050 on a Sunday afternoon at Canadian Tire Center, whose location doesn't lend itself to drawing much of a spur-of-the-moment, walk-up crowd, was as high-skilled a final as has ever been played in CIS. Sorry but not sorry to those who didn't watch it. It will be the last to come to Kanata Ottawa for a while with the Ryerson Rams hosting in Toronto in 2015 and the UBC Thunderbirds hosting in Vancouver in '16. It's too soon to say whether Sunday was as good as it will get for basketball in Ottawa, but it hasn't been better.

"I think it's a great, great atmosphere and it was electric and it was two teams that have a lot of respect for each other, although I don't want to downplay how good both programs have been for a long time," Dave Smart said. "Basketball in this city has been thriving and the universities have done a tremendous job on the men's, and the women's side. This is the kind of the climax, but there have been a lot of good teams here."

Sounds like there will be a lot more yet.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.