INDIANAPOLIS—Two-point-eight seconds left. Tie game. Your ball underneath the basket. 

While we often talk about the moments players dream of one day getting to have in the NCAA tournament, this situation was a coach’s fantasy. Instead of practicing it in their driveway, they’ve drawn up plays for that moment on Post-it notes, whiteboards and spare pieces of printer paper. 

So when the Houston Cougars coaching staff huddled with ideas for that exact scenario as the Sweet 16 game went into the wee hours of Saturday morning, Kelvin Sampson, a man with over 700 wins to his name, had to remind his staff to keep it simple.

“I always tell my assistant coaches that when they become head coaches, don’t try to be the smartest guy in the room with a tricky play at the end of the game and it’s not something the kids had practiced,” Sampson says.

There were a few options pitched in the Houston coaches’ huddle, but Sampson settled on a play he had been running for years, one he said he wouldn’t have even needed to diagram on the whiteboard for his players to understand (he did anyway due to the long TV timeouts). Houston leading scorer L.J. Cryer would set a screen at one elbow, then sprint off a flare screen from big man JoJo Tugler toward the opposite corner. If the Purdue Boilermakers rotated enough for Cryer to be taken away, that should have allowed Tugler to make a catch facing the rim with a chance for a quick drive and finish. If Purdue shut that down, too, the inbounder, point guard Milos Uzan, would likely be open underneath the basket. 

In games, Sampson says it had never gotten to that third option. Either Cryer would have enough room to drill the shot, or Tugler could fly to the rim and score. But the team had practiced the third variable, and that preparation is what has the Cougars still playing and Purdue on its way back to West Lafayette, Ind. 

The key Purdue defensive wrinkle was its star point guard Braden Smith, one of the headiest players in the country. Smith was guarding the inbounder Uzan, but broke for the opposite corner when Cryer came flying off the screen. It’s something the Boilermakers regularly do defending inbounds plays, leveraging Smith’s lightning-quick basketball instincts to blow up plays before they develop. The one vulnerability with the scheme: It leaves the inbounder open momentarily while the defense recovers. And that split second of vulnerability turned into the 62–60 winning bucket and one of the sharpest late-game out-of-bounds plays in NCAA tournament history. 

“He’s gotta be open,” Tugler recalls thinking as Smith blitzed to the corner. “[Uzan] has gotta come inbounds and get open.” 

“We knew that they were going to come off the back screen and Cryer was going to get that shot in the corner,” Smith said. “We’ve seen it in film and stuff. I was just trying to take that away. As we did that, C.J. [Cox] … takes it and goes back to the ball … I could have stayed. There’s a lot of different things that could have gone into it. I just didn’t want Cryer coming off to hit that shot.”

Tugler made the catch. At that point, the only thing that could spoil the play was his own selfishness. The sophomore admitted that part of him wanted to be the hero and shoot it. He’d have had a good look, perhaps a floater or running layup through traffic. But the player, whom Sampson raved about for his instinctiveness, knew someone was more open, so he locked eyes with Uzan and immediately dumped it right back to him. Cox scrambled back from the opposite wing toward the ball, but by then, it was far too late. The Houston point guard made the catch, exploded off two feet and floated the ball over the iron and through the net for the winning bucket. 

“JoJo just made a great read, set a great screen,” Uzan said. “He was able to draw two, he slipped [to the rim], and he just made a great play to hit me back.”

The old ball coach in Sampson sees all the little things that made the play a success. First, the screen by Tugler to give Cryer the initial separation. Tugler had been coached that referees usually let players get away with a bit more on screens in the closing seconds, so “make sure you hit him” was among the Sampson teaching points. Then, Tugler stayed tight to the lane line as he slipped to the rim. Veer too far in either direction and the floor condenses, allowing Purdue to send help easier and potentially blow up the play. Sampson also praised Tugler for his jump-stop upon catching the ball, his willingness to play off two feet and stay under control rather than flying to the rim with reckless abandon, setting up the biggest assist of his life. 

And while it would have been easy for Uzan to be a spectator once he inbounded the ball like the other nearly 29,000 in attendance given he was the third option on the play, making sure he got inbounds quickly enough to establish himself with both feet in before Tugler bounced it back to him was essential. Those tiny details, drilled countless times in practices for years, all paid off to keep the Cougars’ pursuit of a national championship alive. 

“That’s why you work on that stuff day after day after day,” Sampson said. “You never know when you’re going to need it.” 

More March Madness on Sports Illustrated


This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside Houston’s Last-Second Sweet 16 Winning Play.

Test hyperlink for boilerplate