The Daily Cinderella: A perfect play
Houston's game-winner against Purdue felt like a heist movie.
The Friday where both the men’s and women’s Sweet 16s are playing might be one of the best basketball days of the year. The day started with North Carolina and Duke playing in a Sweet 16 game (it was absolutely awful, everybody should’ve watched it) and ended about 11 hours later with a perfect buzzer-beater.
I’m heading back to Newark in a few hours for the men’s Elite Eight game between Duke and Alabama—hit that subscribe button to find out what I see!
Your Daily Buzzer-Beater: Sampson’s 11
A perfect game-winning play feels like a damn heist movie.
Purdue was ready to stop Houston on the final possession of a tied game. The Boilermakers were smart. They were experienced. They were alert. They made last year’s title game. They were ready to stop the Cougars. They saw what Houston was trying to do, identified how to stop it, and executed, taking aggressive, proactive measures to shut down Houston’s first option. “All clear boss,” the security guard radios back to HQ.
But then it turns out the heist team had actually planned for exactly what transpired. They knew how this would go down. They knew what plans and counter-measures would be deployed to stop them, and designed a trick so clever, so dastardly, that all the efforts to stop them actually made it so much easier for them to pull off the robbery. They walk right out of the front door of the museum with the jewels.
Look at Purdue standing there, wondering: Did we really just lose everything on a totally uncontested layup?
Danny Ocean here was Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, a ball-coach’s ball-coach whose decades of coaching success were derailed by the fact that it used to be against NCAA rules to send texts to recruits. I really enjoyed this write-up by Kevin Sweeney at Sports Illustrated that breaks down the play in detail. It makes clear how thoughtful and detailed the coaching was—why Sampson had gone to that play in that moment, how he’d coached the team to execute it… even where he’d advised his team to bend the rules: The screen by Joseph Tugler is really what wins the game, and it’s definitely an illegal moving… but Sampson told Tugler the refs wouldn’t call it because they let moving screens go in the closing moments. Perfect.
The Turner Sports studio crew also spent about 5 minutes breaking down the play with Jay Wright—notably a drawer-upper of national championship-winning inbounds plays—coming to the conclusion that Purdue had made “two great defensive plays,” but that Houston had made “a third, great offensive play to react to two great defensive plays.”
The initial option on the play is to hit L.J. Cryer, a career 41 percent 3-point shooter, in the corner for a three after he comes off a screen from Joseph Tugler. But Purdue’s Braden Smith recognized the play developing and nearly shut it down by jutting out to the corner to pick up Cryer.
But it was such a good play that Purdue’s alert, aggressive, intelligent defense actually made the play easier. Instead of a three for Cryer, Houston got an uncontested layup at the rim by passing the ball back to Uzan, the inbounder Smith left. That’s good coaching.
As soon as Tugler’s screen picked off a defender, the game was basically over. Either Cryer was getting an open three, Tugler would have had an uncontested lane to the basket, or Uzan was getting the ball back after the inbounds. Purdue’s only choice was which way to die. They chose the one that made it clear how much thought and effort went into this play.
Bummer-beater of the day: Basically the opposite of that
And now, a reminder that sometimes it’s pretty difficult just to throw the ball inbounds. Maryland pushed defending national champions South Carolina to the brink, even leading the mighty Gamecocks with two minutes to go. But the Terps derped, flubbing two late inbounds plays in unique ways.
On the first, South Carolina’s Raven Johnson deflected an inbounds pass by Maryland’s Kaylene Smikle, sending it back out of bounds. That’s normally fine—reset, do it all over again—but Smikle’s instinctive reaction was to reach for the ball on its way out, forgetting that she was out-of-bounds and touching the ball would be a turnover. Gamecocks ball.
16 seconds later. Same spot on the floor, same score differential…. different inbounder. Maryland decided it didn’t want to mess with Raven Johnson again and put Smikle all the way on the other side of the floor. But two more Gamecock defenders ruined a give-and-go between Shyanne Sellers and Sarah Te-Biasu, with the ball slipping through Sellers’ hands and out of bounds.
South Carolina survived, in part because of their sheer tenacity defending sideline out of bounds plays 40 feet from the rim, refusing to cede an inch even when there was no immediate threat to the hoop. Is it a little mean for me to spotlight these blunders? Look, Maryland, you had two buzzer-beaters in two days last week. This is your payback.
Most Unstoppable: Lauren Betts
UCLA’s Lauren Betts may have recorded the least-bothered 30-point double-double in basketball history against Ole Miss. The 6-foot-7 center shot 15-for-16, scoring 31 points with 10 rebounds. She was barely fouled, only going to the line one time—just post move after post move, bucket after bucket. She easily could’ve shot 100 percent from the floor—her one miss was a rushed look to beat the halftime buzzer.
Betts had 30 points and 14 rebounds on 14-for-17 shooting in the second round against Richmond. Combine those two performances and she’s averaging 30.5 points and 12 rebounds on 87 percent shooting. The biggest stars in the sport right now are guards… but what if nobody can get Lauren Betts to miss a shot?