For all the hand-wringing over the final seven seconds, and over Anthony Thomas’ eloquent response to the Moscow boo-birds, the Vandals’ real undoing against Boise State on Monday night had come minutes earlier, when they responded to the Broncos’ fullcourt press with an overanxiousness that seemed very much in character.
For this particular team.
In other words, turnovers bit the Vandals again. It’s been a season-long pattern, one that’s difficult to explain in light of the team’s relative surehandedness last year with largely the same personnel.
The Vandals were up 54-45 with four and a half minutes left when the unraveling began. The most critical sequence started at about the 2:40 mark when they squandered a press-break opportunity — a post under the basket dribbled the ball off his foot, to be specific — and Boise State guard La’Shard Anderson recovered it near the sideline and whisked it downcourt for a bucket by Ike Okoye. While reporters were still jotting that sequence down, the Broncos’ Daequon Montreal stole the Idaho inbounds for an easy layin, and suddenly the game was tied at 55 with 2:27 left.
Later, the Vandals made another rash move against the press, trying a completely unnecessary crosscourt pass –having already safely crossed midcourt, mind you — and Montreal tapped the ball away before making a spectacular save at the baseline. That led to a transition bunny by Thomas that cut an Idaho lead to 60-59.
The money shot, of course, was Thomas’ 3-pointer at the buzzer, silencing the UI students who had been booing him in unison every time he touched the ball, and forcing an overtime that Boise State completely dominated in its 77-67 win.
The most compelling postmortem question was: With the Vandals leading by three points after UI’s Jeff Ledbetter missed a free throw with 7.7 seconds left, should Idaho have fouled Thomas in the backcourt before he had a chance to begin his shooting motion? Even if he had converted both free throws, Idaho would have still led by a point with a second or two remaining.
For the record, Vandals coach Don Verlin doesn’t believe in fouling in that situation.
“There are two schools of thought on that,” he said postgame. “What you worry about in a situation like that is, if you foul him and he shoots a 3 and makes it, that’s the only way you can lose the game (in regulation). So I didn’t think of fouling him. My philosophy has always been to make him shoot a contested shot. You have to give Anthony Thomas credit for making that shot. It was a heckuva shot.”
In the closing minutes, Verlin tried to interfere as little as possible, which seemed a wise enough course. But even one of his players , to judge from his rapid-fire summation of the Vandals’ mistakes, thought they could have used a bit more discussion.
“We didn’t close it out,” said senior post Marvin Jefferson, who had blocked six shots in an inspired, flawed performance. “We turned the ball over, made mistakes, both physical and mental. We didn’t take care of the ball and we were impatient. We didn’t slow the ball down. We had timeouts and we didn’t take them. We threw the ball away. It was mistakes down the stretch.”
As the stunned Vandals swirled away in overtime to their sixth straight loss, senior guard Mac Hopson took matters into his own hands with a series of needle-threading drives, including an unsuccessful one that got him benched.
“He didn’t execute the play that was called,” Verlin said.
And so it went. This team has three days now to process its most disheartening loss in years and ward off any intraquad demons before playing another home game, a seemingly anticlimactic one against Fresno State on Thursday night.
Vandal fans, meanwhile, were not the only ones left silenced by Thomas.
“Everybody is really down right now,” Jefferson said. “We don’t even know what to say to each other at this point.”
Verlin’s take: “Sometimes it’s best not to say anything.”
