With 35.4 seconds left, Auburn inbounded the ball with a 55-54 lead over Missouri. Cuonzo Martin opted not to extend the game by fouling. His team played the possession out and forced an Auburn miss. But Walker Kessler tipped the ball twice, Boogie Coleman couldn’t corral it and it rolled harmlessly out of bounds at the buzzer.
No. 1 Auburn 55, Mizzou 54. Upset bid denied.
Before we get into what I thought about the decision and why it was wrong, let’s establish why it was made.
“A little over five seconds on the clock, let’s get the rebound and push the ball up the floor,” Martin said. “Let’s get stops and depending on who got the ball whether we foul. We didn’t want to foul Wendell (Green). So just depending on who got the ball, then we’d foul.”
Okay, that sounds good. In a perfect world, you get the stop, you come down, you hit a shot, the place goes bananas and you slayed the dragon. But that’s just it. For the strategy to work, everything had to be perfect.
First, Wendell Green, an 86.4% free throw shooter on the year, did control the ball for the first 22 seconds of the possession. With 13 seconds left, he passed to Jabari Smith, an 80% free throw shooter, but also a freshman who was 2-for-15 from the floor and hadn’t gone to the line all night. He was guarded closely by Ronnie DeGray III and bobbled the ball, but got it back. If Missouri was going to foul, this was the ideal spot. But it didn’t and Smith passed it to KD Johnson with 10.7 seconds to play. Johnson, a 68.2% free throw shooter, caught the ball about 44 feet from the basket guarded closely by Coleman, but Missouri didn’t foul there either.
“Thoughts was just getting a stop, getting a rebound and then getting up the court,” Javon Pickett said. “Just getting up the court and getting a last second shot. There was enough time to get down the court once we got the ball.”
Again, in a perfect world, yes. Johnson drove to the left baseline and let a shot go with 5.4 seconds left. Let’s take just a moment here to wonder whether that was in time. Auburn got possession with 35.4 seconds to play. Johnson shot it with 5.4. That’s exactly 30 seconds. Did he get the shot off? Maybe. We don’t know. And the officials didn’t review that part of the play. Missouri asked if there should have been some time left on the clock when the ball rolled out of bounds (the officials said no) but there was no review of the shot clock. Had it been ruled the ball was in Johnson’s hand, Missouri gets the ball back with 5.4 seconds to play down a point. And then the strategy might look a lot better.
But anyway, back in the world of what actually happened, Johnson shot it with 5.4 seconds to play. If it all goes perfectly, the shot misses and goes straight to a Missouri player. If that happens, the Tigers likely have the ball with about 4.5 seconds to go and are approximately 90 feet from the other basket. We know how long it takes to go end to end with a running start (if you don’t know why it’s 4.8 seconds, Google Tyus Edney). So at best—because it’s worth mentioning Martin did not have a timeout left—Mizzou is finding an outlet pass to a man already on the move and he maybe gets close to the three-point line. Except Missouri had all five players under the basket to get a defensive rebound. Amari Davis was the closest man to the other end of the court and he was no more than ten feet from the rim.
So, anyway, if it all had gone perfectly, maybe there’s a chance at something other than a desperation heave. It did not all go perfectly.
By the time Johnson’s shot rolled off the rim and Kessler got a hand on it for the first time, four seconds remained. Kessler’s second tip came at 3.2 seconds. The first time a Missouri player touched the ball, it went off Coleman’s hands with 2.4 to play. He was 92 feet from the basket he would need to shoot at. Even if he grabs it cleanly, he’s not getting to half court before he has to launch the final shot.
But even that didn’t happen. The ball simply rolled out of bounds. Missouri had played incredibly hard and reasonably well for 39 minutes and 25 seconds. That needs to be mentioned here. The team is clearly improving and Martin deserves credit for that. But he also deserves blame for putting his team in a position to lose its shot at Missouri’s first win over the country’s No. 1 team in 25 years without ever even having the ball in its hands with a chance to win.
Regardless of the opponent, the strategy is questionable. Fouling gives you multiple ways to win. Not fouling requires everything to be done perfectly (which it mostly was) and then also depends on some good luck (which didn’t happen). But considering who Missouri’s opponent was on this night, it’s even more questionable. Auburn outrebounded Missouri 48-38 in the game. But in the second half, the margin was 33-16. The orange and blue Tigers had a mind-boggling 20 of their 25 offensive rebounds in the second half. They missed 30 shots and rebounded 20 of them. So I asked Martin, was the fact that Auburn had 20 offensive boards in the second half considered when he made the decision not to foul?
“I wasn’t worried about it,” Martin said. “You’ve got to block out. Just certain people you didn’t want to foul. I wasn’t worried about them getting an offensive rebound.”
Now I’m going to cut Martin a little bit of slack here. I’m sure he was probably at least a little bit worried about it. I mean, I hope he was. Especially considering Auburn’s Kessler is 7-foot-1, five inches taller than Kobe Brown, over whom he went for the tip that ultimately resulted in the clock running out and dooming Missouri’s chances. Martin trusted his players to execute perfectly. They didn’t.
“We did almost everything right,” Coleman said. “Except one thing.”
“They can’t really help us about going to rebound,” Pickett said, repeatedly praising the coaching staff for the game-planning and putting Missouri in a position to win.
Pickett’s right in one sense. They can’t go get the rebound. But Kessler is the biggest Tiger on the floor by four inches. He’s averaging 7.4 rebounds a game. As a team, Auburn outrebounds opponents by an average of 3.7 per game.
“Yeah, they’re bigger, but we’ve got to go hit them,” Coleman said. “Because they’re bigger, we’ve got to go hit them early when they’re out on the perimeter. We can’t let them come down to the paint and hit them there because a jump ball, they’re probably going to get it over us.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Missouri left things up to getting a bounce and it didn’t get the bounce. Because of it, the potential highlight of the season turned to disappointment.
A win over the nation’s top-ranked team, paired with the rather obvious improvement, almost certainly would have ensured that Martin would return as Missouri’s coach next year. And there’s still a very good chance that could happen. But it's not a sure thing. The misguided strategy in tonight’s final 35 seconds isn’t going to get him fired. But the margin between success and failure, between continued employment and a big buyout, is razor-thin in college sports. Every win matters.
Maybe Missouri wouldn’t have won this one anyway. It’s not exactly the sharpest shooting team in the country and it made just 38.5% of its shots on Tuesday night. But the shame is we never even got to find out. Fouling immediately when Auburn inbounded could have added three more possessions to the game. Even waiting for Green to pass it and fouling Smith or Johnson with 10 to 12 seconds left puts you down no more than three and gives you a chance at a game-tying shot.
Missouri didn’t get that chance. It should have.
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