When he was at MU, Buzz sometimes confounded me by calling a timeout after we'd have a run that put us ahead. "Why is he interrupting our momentum?" OK ... I think I have discovered the answer to that question.
I coach a middle-school girls team. We were playing a home game against our rivals, the only team to beat us this season, and we were down by 5. We put together a 7-0 run to take the lead with about 2 1/2 minutes to go, the crowd was going wild and I didn't even think about calling timeout after we scored the go-ahead hoop.
Well, the girls were giddy that we had rallied for the lead, a few of them forgot to get to their places in our press, our opponents beat us down court and scored to tie it up. We then got rattled that we gave up such an easy basket after having shut them down for so long and turned the ball over. A minute or so later, we gave up a rebound basket to fall back behind and we never could pull back even. We lost by 4.
Later on, as I re-wound the game in my brain, I thought, "What if I had taken a timeout immediately after we had gone ahead, just to re-focus the girls and remind them we still had a lot of time on the clock?" We'd have been able to set up our press and maybe instead of giving up a layup we'd have gotten another steal and easy basket. BTW, we had four timeouts remaining, and I ended up not even using one of them - D'oh!
So now I see why a coach would call time in that situation -- Buzz isn't the only one who does so -- and I probably will do just that the next time I face such a situation.