The 15 seconds that saved Virginia's basketball season
On the morning of January 26, the University of Virginia men's basketball team was at a crossroads at best and reeling at worst. The team, which had been ranked No. 4 in the country just three weeks earlier was out of the top 10 thanks to a mediocre 4-3 ACC record that included a dreadful and concerning 0-3 road mark. A promising season in Charlottesville was threatening to go off the rails.
Help was on the way though, in the form of a road game at woeful Wake Forest, ranked No. 127 in the kenpom ratings and a team the Hoos had defeated in Winston-Salem by a score of 70-34 (not a typo) just 11 months earlier. Things were looking up.
But things were not looking up. Wake used a 19-6 run early in the second half to take a 14-point lead over Virginia with 7:57 left. That lead fluctuated a bit over the next few minutes with Wake eventually holding a nine-point lead at the under-four timeout. The lead was at 10 with 1:23 remaining after Devin Thomas' three-point play that started with a thunderous dunk. But Virginia chipped away and quickly cut the lead to three with 57 seconds remaining and it was game on. That's when Wake, uncharacteristically made its free throws, quelled the UVA comeback and got the lead back out to seven with 15 seconds left. Game over. UVA was about to be 4-4 in the ACC and 0-4 on the road. That ranking was about to drop even further. And then, a miracle.
(AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Here's how those 15 seconds went down:
0:14 UVA three (70-66, Wake)
0:11 Two missed Wake free throws
0:06 UVA three (70-69, Wake)
0:03 UVA foul, Wake goes 1-2 from line (71-69)
Buzzer: UVA three (72-71, UVA)
UVA had been 2-14 from beyond the arc before going 3-3 in the final 14 seconds. In the first 39:32 of the game, Wake was 16-21 from the free-throw line. In the final 28 seconds, the Deacs were 3-8 from the line, missing the same amount of free throws (five) as they'd done in the first 98.8% of the game. In those final 100 seconds, UVA scored 20 points (as a Charlottesville newspaper noted at the time, that's a 480-point-per-game pace). And Virginia outscored Wake 6-1 in the final 15 seconds.
Though there had been crazy ACC comebacks before (the 2001 Duke comeback against Maryland, UNC being down eight to Duke with 17 seconds left and winning in OT without the benefit of three pointers), this might have been the best, as it was the only one to feature a buzzer beater.
(AP Photo/Ryan M. Kelly)
The oddest thing though is that it wasn't one of those frenetic comeback where a team hits a three, steals the ball on the inbound and hits another three, a series of events we've seen a handful of times in the past 30 years. (Think Reggie Miller.) This was a historic comeback that at no point felt the least bit surprising (at least to anybody who'd watched more than one Wake Forest basketball game in the Bzdelik/Manning era).
So what did this do for UVA's basketball season? First, it gave them a confidence-boosting victory that had to carry over into that Saturday road game at top-15 Louisville. It doesn't matter that the win came against the dregs of the ACC -- winning a game in that manner can turn around the mentality of a team with the flick of a wrist. Second, it kept the Cavs from going 4-4 in the ACC with that Louisville game and a 4-5 mark looming.
Since the comeback, Virginia has lost just twice, on the road to ranked Duke and Miami teams by a total of four points in games that both came down to the final seconds. They've outscored teams by 80 points en route to that 7-2 record. And now, UVA is, along with Kansas and Michigan State, one of the favorites in what appears to be a wide-open NCAA tournament.
(Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports)
Then again, you can argue that the Wake comeback only helped so much. The loss would have hurt, but perhaps that would have been the wake-up call UVA needed and they'd have still won at Louisville to regain the swagger the team had earlier in the season when it was beating Villanova, West Virginia, Ohio State and Cal.
After all, there's only so much you can keep a good team down. Still, it's better to stop a skid as early as possible, not have a horrible loss on your resume, grab a team-building win with a bulk of the schedule to play and, most importantly, possess the knowledge in March that no deficit is too great for a comeback in the Madness.
