Mount St. Mary’s is into the NCAA tournament’s field of 64.
New Orleans’ NCAA tournament ended with with this extremely unfortunate inbounds play
A good but risky idea didn’t get the execution it needed.
The Mountaineers beat New Orlenas in a thrilling First Four game to open the Big Dance on Tuesday night in Dayton, 67-66. They’ll face No. 1 overall seed Villanova on Thursday in Buffalo.
The game in Dayton was tight throughout, and the teams swapped leads a couple of times in the last two minutes. It ended on a really unfortunate inbounds play.
New Orleans got to inbound with 2.9 seconds left, after forcing a defensive stop and calling a timeout after hauling in the rebound. Coach Mark Slessinger drew up a full-court inbound play that never got off the ground. A heave toward halfcourt was intercepted, and the game ended anti-climactically.
The concept was pure. Had Erik Thomas’ inbound pass been caught at midcourt by No. 11, Michael Zeno, he would’ve had good athletes streaking toward the basket on either side of him. With that little time on the clock and a one-point deficit, it might’ve been the best way to get a high-percentage look at the basket — even a driving layup.
But the long pass is a risk, and it bit New Orleans here. The play can’t work if you don’t get a catch to kick it off, and New Orleans couldn’t get a catch.
Both teams got here via the automatic bid.
Mount St. Mary’s reached the Big Dance by winning the NEC, after they went 14-4 in the league during the regular season. New Orleans punched its NCAA ticket by winning the Southland’s conference tournament. The Privateers’ tourney-clinching win was a cool one, coming by three points in overtime against Texas A&M Corpus Christi.
March Madness is good. More March Madness games? Also good. Both Mount St. Mary’s and New Orleans knew what was waiting for them on the other side of this one. Neither was ever likely (and still isn’t) to win against a No. 1 seed, and the odds of that game even being close have never been high. Their First Four matchup gave them each a chance to play a peer opponent on a big stage, and they gave us a quality game.
It had some weird moments: two Privateers getting heated with one another on the court during the second half, plus a player’s butt crashing directly into a camera lens. One of the New Orleans players whose emotions were running high during the second half was Travin Thibodeaux, who had an outrageous dunk a few minutes earlier.
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