The ball swung from Cordell Henry, Marquette’s second-leading scorer, to Dwyane Wade, its leading scorer, to Travis Diener, a dangerous outside shooter who comes off the bench.
This was the Golden Eagles’ final possession Thursday in a riveting first-round East Regional game eventually won 71-69 by Tulsa.
The Golden Hurricane had taken a two-point lead heartbeats earlier on a runner by Greg Harrington with 14.6 seconds remaining.
That had given Marquette a chance to call time out, but the Golden Eagles chose not to and rushed the ball up court.
“[Tulsa] had done a great job switching defenses,” Marquette coach Tom Crean said. “We had a play called [in a timeout with 32 seconds left] that would work against man-to-man or zone.”
In the same timeout Tulsa decided to play a 2-3 zone “and know where their shooters were,” coach John Phillips said. “We hoped when they saw the zone, they wouldn’t be able to get the quick shot they wanted.”
The Golden Eagles didn’t get it for Henry, who was stopped far out to the left, and they didn’t get it for Wade, who found all driving lanes to the basket blocked. That left it to Diener, who went up from 25 feet with just over two seconds remaining and offered up a prayer that fell far short.
Wade sliced along the left baseline and went to meet the ball in an effort to transform Diener’s hoist into an alley-oop dunk–to no avail. “I got my hands on it and just lost it,” Wade said. “Everything happened so fast. I just lost it out of bounds and that was it.”
Tulsa moved on to a Saturday meeting with Kentucky, conqueror of Valparaiso.
From the start it was bedeviled No. 12-seeded Tulsa’s speed. It got the Golden Hurricane open looks as Tulsa shot 45.6 percent, earned them rebounding position–Tulsa outrebounded Marquette 37-28 and scored 27 second-chance points–and allowed the Golden Hurricane to skirt the screens that are a major part of Marquette’s set offense.
Tulsa took a four-point halftime lead and built it to 14 with 12 minutes remaining. “But our kids never panicked when things didn’t go right,” Crean said. “They never flinched.”
Phillips noticed. “They played with the passion we had heard about even though we were playing about as well as we could in the second half,” he said.
That passion spurred the Golden Eagles, as did the work of Wade (18 points), Henry (17 points) and forward Jon Harris (10 points). A Henry jumper at 3:54 finally brought his team even at 65-65, and the game was tied again at 67-67 and 69-69.
A minute later Tulsa, which had the ball, called time and in both teams’ huddles the final 30 seconds were choreographed. Marquette shut down the play the Golden Hurricane sought, but Harrington improvised and put up a running 12-footer that bounced in. “That was an old-school shot famous in the ’50s,” Phillips said. “But it wasn’t luck. We’ve seen him do it before.”
And Marquette couldn’t answer.
“We made a lot of big plays,” Crean said after his team’s final play failed. “But they made the last big play.”
