Sometimes pressure produces best plays
NEW YORK — If Florida men’s basketball coach Mike White had a timeout left at the end of the Gators’ thrilling Sweet 16 victory against Wisconsin, the most memorable shot of this NCAA tournament — at least through Friday night — might not have happened.
Down two points with no way to stop the clock and plot out a strategy to go the length of the floor with four seconds left, the Gators simply put the ball in the hands of one their speedy guards and let him go to work.
Chris Chiozza produced the first game-winning buzzer-beater of the tournament after sprinting to the 3-point line and letting fly a onehander that hit nothing but net. The fourth-seeded Gators ended the run by coach Greg Card’s eighth-seeded Badgers and advanced to play No. 7 seed South Carolina today at Madison Square Garden in an all-Southeastern Conference East Regional final.
So how did White feel about the timeout situation?
“I was glad we didn’t have one, of course,” White said Saturday. “Especially a half hour after Chris makes the shot he made. It was easier to say that last night than right now, but I don’t want to back off of that sentiment. If we had called a timeout, who knows what Greg does and how they line up and match up and what type of defense that we see.”
It is a scenario coaches face often at the end of close games: Call a timeout and draw up a play, or trust preparation will lead the players to make the right decisions without further instruction against a scrambling defense.
With only four seconds left, just getting into position to take a decent shot is difficult, but Florida has the type of players needed to pull it off.
“They’ve got the three fastest guards in the country,” South Carolina associate head coach Matt Figger said, referring to KeVaughn Allen, Chiozza and Kasey Hill.
White said he likes to think he would not have called a timeout even if he had one — probably.
“And that’s probably been the case five or six times this year,” White said, “where we had one late half or late clock, late game where — especially with both these guys in the game — if they can get a head of steam in four seconds, they can cover a lot of ground, and Chris obviously showed that.”
Most end-of-game offense during this tournament has been — at best — unproductive. Lots of hero-ball, with long jumpers coming up empty.
Princeton had a chance to knock off Notre Dame in the first round, but down one in the waning moments, a long 3-pointer missed. Wichita State needed a 3 to tie Kentucky on its last possession and ended up getting it blocked. West Virginia was down three and had the ball for the last 38 seconds against Gonzaga — the Mountaineers never called a timeout — and barely hit the rim once in three long attempts.
Kentucky coach John Calipari said often his first instinct is to refrain from calling a timeout and see what develops.
“I’d let it go and watch and then be ready to scream timeout if it looks ugly, but I want them to just play on and that’s what we practice,” he said. “I like to go home with timeouts. I like the players to work through their issues.”
It’s not just the team with the ball that has a decision to make. Wisconsin had a timeout and might have been better off using it to set up a defense after Nigel Hayes’ go-ahead free throws.
In the end, though, all the strategy and planning often goes out the window.
“Sometimes you get a broken play and a guy jumps sideways off one foot and throws it over his shoulder and it goes in the net,” South Carolina head coach Frank Martin said. “You can rehearse a lot, but at the end of the day things have to go your way and breaks have to go your way. All of a sudden we look a lot smarter when that happens than we really are.”