Saturday finally saw some good action in the NCAA tournamnet. Three of the eight games went to overtime, and four of the remaining five were decided by seven points or less. VCU and Xavier came up short against Pitt and Ohio State, but made fantastic runs to get the games into OT, and #6 seed Vanderbilt knocked off #3 Washington State in double overtime. We finally got a slate of close, exciting games.
Unfortunately, one of those games saw Maryland losing to Butler. Thanks to the Ohio State overtime, I actually got to see a fair bit of this one, but really, two lines in the box score tells you everything you need to know: Butler was 12-26 from three-point range, and Maryland was 7-15 from the free-throw line. The final margin was three points, so a small improvement in either of those changes the outcome– if Maryland shot their season average of 70% from the line, for example, the game would’ve gone to OT.
As usual, Jeremy Gold goes hyperbolic about Gary Williams, but really, I don’t have a problem with the decision to just play defense on the last Butler possession. It was a gamble, but a reasonable one– they couldn’t really expect that guy to miss the shot as badly as he did, and had he done more than graze the rim, the Terps would’ve had the ball. And God knows, I’d rather see that than the usual slog of foul, timeout, free throws, three-point attempt, time out, foul,…
Given that I expected basically nothing from this season, I’m fairly happy with the outcome. The Terps lose D.J. Strawberry, which is big, but I’m less broken up about the fact that Mike Jones and Ekene Ibekwe will be moving on. The freshman guards were really good this year, and James Gist played well down the stretch, so there’s some promise for the future.
For the moment, the chalk-iest tournament in memory moves on to the fourth day. A couple of the games ought to be fairly entertaining (Virginia and Tennessee ought to put up some points, at least), while one or two should be cover-your-eyes awful (Virginia Tech vs. Southern Illinois? Yeesh.). And then there’ll be three whole days of no basketball, which ought to make my readers happy…