LOUISVILLE, KY. – Virginia had made an improbable, odds-defying shot in the final second at the Yum! Center before, but nothing like this.
Mamadi Diakite’s buzzer-beating, season-saving jumper forced overtime and UVA won a thrilling Elite Eight duel with Purdue, 80-75, on Saturday night. With the NCAA Tournament victory, the Cavaliers are headed back to the Final Four for the first time since 1984.
“I’ve said in previous interviews this week that most of the credit goes to the guys who aren’t here anymore,” Virginia guard Kyle Guy said. “And to Jack [Salt]’s class. They did all the work and built the foundation, and we were lucky enough to walk into a great program with the best coach in the country. So to finally get the critics off his back means a lot, and going to a Final Four.”
Afterward, the Hoos were elated and at a loss for an explanation of how it happened. They trailed by three with 5.9 seconds to go, Ty Jerome unintentionally missed a free throw, Kihei Clark tracked down a back-tapped offensive rebound, and then got a return pass up the floor just in time for Diakite to make his shot. It’s a sequence that can’t really be practiced and likely couldn’t be duplicated often.
In this moment, however, it all worked perfectly as Diakite just beat the clock and bought the Cavaliers five extra minutes.
“I don’t know. It happened,” Diakite said. “I was the person who was designed to take it. And I don’t know. I took it, and it went in. I was happy and ready for the next five minutes. I don’t know how to talk about it. It was unbelievable. I don’t know how to talk about it. I don’t know.”
“It was great,” UVA coach Tony Bennett said. “Ty was clapping. I was like throw it to Ty. We’ll get one up there. Mamadi to catch it and get it off that quick, so improbable. [Last year], what happened here, we’ve had amazing games here and comebacks. I was almost in shock a little bit.”
What happened here just 12 months ago defied logic too. The Hoos trailed by five with 0.9 seconds to go against Louisville, but managed to steal a win thanks to a missed free throw, a turnover, and a banked in 3-pointer on the same side of the floor. This one topped it though because it came in the NCAA Tournament during an instant classic game.
Purdue and Virginia played for 45 minutes with 12 lead changes and 6 ties. They combined for 23 3-pointers and 23 assists with just 14 turnovers. Three different players scored at least 24 points. Players made shots from all over the floor, highly contested or not. Regulation ended with a Boilermaker 3-pointer to take the lead with 1:10 to go and then the stunning sequence to force overtime. In OT, the lead swapped hands five times, including twice in the final minute.
For UVA, Guy tallied his first career double-double with a team-high 25 points and 10 rebounds. He finished off the double-double with a defensive rebound in the final 30 seconds in a one-point game and then made both free throws. Guy broke out of an NCAA Tournament slump with 5 3-pointers, all after intermission. That came despite rolling his ankle in the first half.
Jerome poured in 24 points, 7 assists, and 5 rebounds with just one turnover. His highlights included one of his patented long-range 3-pointers late in the second half and a high kiss off the glass to beat the shot clock after splitting defenders in overtime. He played a major role in getting Guy going with 6 of his 7 helpers going to his backcourt buddy.
Diakite scored 14 points to go with 7 rebounds and tied his career high with 4 blocked shots. Plus, he delivered a shot that will be remembered for ages. Hunter added 10 points, 5 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1 steal. That included 5 points in overtime. He made a tough driving layup to give UVA the lead for good in the final 30 seconds of overtime after making two free throws about a minute earlier to see-saw the lead as well. Jack Salt chipped in 5 points and 8 rebounds in 34 major minutes, while Clark scored 2 points with 5 assists. None were bigger than the one-handed pass off the dribble to Diakite at the end of regulation.
All of that came in what was a de facto road game with Purdue fans flooding the Yum! Center.
“Composure,” Bennett said. “When you look at what this group of guys has done on the road in the ACC, the last couple years or last number of years, that’s hard. This tournament is unbelievable. It’s the media and the excitement of it has made it so big. But maybe the test of a team as far as quality is over the course of the season, the conference play. This is a different kind of test and it’s what’s probably most honored and rewarded. What they did to go on the road and be consistent and play, those games prepare you for that. Us being down, no one has faced pressure like these guys have or this program after losing in that first round. No one’s done that in the history of the game so no one had to do that.
Then to be in that setting against Gardner-Webb, that was almost another road game, to be honest, the way the crowd was going. Just to kind of muster up enough resiliency and come through it, all those things prepared us for this moment to not lose sight and be composed and stay after it. They were encouraging each other in the huddles and they weren’t going to let it get away. If we got beat, we got beat. But we weren’t going to lose this one. That was what I knew.”
If the Hoos got beat, it would have been because of a virtuoso performance from Purdue’s Carsen Edwards. On a tear throughout the NCAA Tournament, Edwards unleashed a shot-making night for the ages against the Hoos and scored a game-high 42 points as a result. He became the first opponent to reach 40 points against UVA in Bennett’s tenure. Edwards made 10 of 19 3-pointers, including one that banked in late in regulation to give his team a 69-67 lead with 1:10 to go. He gave his team the lead in overtime as well with a twisting runner with 42 seconds remaining.
Ryan Cline and Nojel Eastern added 7 points each, while Matt Haarms had 6. That wasn’t enough to end the Boilermakers’ own Final Four drought that extends back to 1980. As UVA fans well understand, that loss stings especially considering the way the late game drama unfolded.
“First of all, want to congratulate Virginia,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “Obviously, it was a hard-fought game and I thought our guys did a great job of hanging in there. Obviously, a special performance by Carsen shooting the basketball. It’s exciting when you beat somebody like Tennessee to get into the Elite Eight. But it’s also pretty humbling, you look back and our game against Tennessee could have went either way. You feel very grateful and fortunate to be in this situation. And then you play a game that see-saws like it did against Virginia and you don’t get a couple breaks and things don’t go your way, and they make a special play there at the end, and that’s just part of competition. That’s part of basketball. The other night was pretty cool and today stinks.”
While the Wahoos can empathize with that torture, they expressed excitement and gratitude for breaking through this season. Everyone was especially happy for Bennett as he reached his first Final Four, becoming just the second father-son duo to coach a team there in the process. The coach that reminded UVA fans that joy will come in the morning after an Elite Eight loss to Syracuse and guided the response to the historic UMBC loss a year ago, thrust both hands in the air after cutting down the nets in Louisville.
The Hoos are headed to Minneapolis.
“He’s a great coach, a great person,” Salt said. “He deserves to be in the Final Four.”
“What Kyle said about the guys that came before us is 100 percent correct,” Jerome said. “They built the foundation. They built an amazing foundation. You think of all the guys that came before us and just the teams that were so close and showed you just how difficult it is to get to the Final Four. And how many times Coach Bennett has been a 1 seed or a 2 seed and has had so much regular season success. To be the team that gets him to the Final Four, I think that’s what means the most. But he’s believed in every single one of us. He has our best interest at heart, on and off the court. And he’s a great person. To finally quiet the critics feels great.”
Wahoowa!