The Nevada Men’s Basketball team looked to be comfortably on their way to a second-round matchup with Arizona in the NCAA Tournament after Jarod Lucas’ third three-pointer of the afternoon staked the Wolf Pack to a 17-point lead with 7:39 to play.
The silver-and-blue-clad fans had been cheering in full throat for 20 minutes of game action as the Pack surged from behind to take a nine-point halftime lead and then push the advantage to 56-39 while completely dominating their opponent.
It was all smiles and high-fives as the whistle blew for the scheduled under-eight-minute media timeout. The TV timeouts are even longer during the NCAA tournament—maybe too long.
The smiling faces toweling off in the coaches’ huddle had no idea that their titanic success in the first 32 minutes was about to hit a massive iceberg.
The Dayton Flyers ended the game outscoring Nevada 24-4, making their last seven shots, including four inexplicably wide-open three-point looks.
The epic reversal sends the Pack home much earlier than expected after an unfathomable 63-60 defeat by the Dayton Flyers, who will get their shot at a trip to the Sweet 16 vs. Arizona.
Nevada Head Coach Steve Alford was shell-shocked afterward.
“From that seven-minute mark on, it just steamrolled in the other direction,” he said. “We couldn’t get a stop and we couldn’t get a basket.”
A barely audible K.J. Hymes spoke about what happened in the final stretch.
“We just weren’t on the same page,” Hymes said. “I don’t know why. We get just one more kill, two or three stops, we win the game. We knew we needed to stay aggressive … we just … didn’t.”
The Pack started the game slowly, with the Flyers getting off to a quick 5-0 lead.
Dayton Head Coach Anthony Grant knew he had a match-up problem with Kenan Blackshear’s size. He made Blackshear and the Wolf Pack earn every inch toward their basket, employing a full-court press defense for the opening tip.
The Wolf Pack seemed unprepared for the strategy, and it took them a while to unravel the mystery of beating the press and making Dayton pay the price for employing it.
A Blackshear jumper knotted the game 11-11 just over five minutes in.
The contest stayed close until an 8-2 stretch from the Flyers saw them resume control by seven, 25-18 with 5:06 left in the half.
Tre’ Coleman knocked down a three from the corner, and Dayton’s Nate Santos turned the ball over after the inbound. Lucas canned a step-back jumper as a thank-you.
Blackshear made a free throw to cut the lead to just one.
Nick Davidson snatched a turnover away from Dayton’s Enoch Cheeks on the next possession, and Lucas potted a step-back bomb in transition to give the Pack their first lead of the day at 27-25 and 2:19 left in the half.
Nevada would add a triple and a paint bucket from Davidson.
Flyers’ superstar Holmes would then turn it over, and when Blackshear dropped in a floating 12-footer at the horn to complete a 16-0 burst, Nevada had a 34-25 lead and looked every bit ready to push their perfect 24-0 record when leading at the half and lock down number 25.
Even the TBS halftime crew had begun analyzing Saturday’s potential matchup.
Nevada did an excellent job defending DaRon Holmes in the first half, with Davidson, Hymes, and Tylan Pope drawing the assignments and holding him to eight points on 3-of-5 shooting. Davidson was arguably outplaying him on the offensive end.
The Pack was quick to double the All-American when he got the ball and still protected against Dayton’s snipers at the arc, as evidenced by squelching Koby Brea. Brea came in with a season average of 49% from deep to 1-of-3 from downtown, thanks to Tre’ Coleman, who dropped a pair of threes.
The second half saw the Pack remain effective on both ends of the floor, maintaining a double-digit lead and holding Dayton’s biggest threats, Brae and Holmes, to just 6 and 14 points, respectively, until that fateful under-eight media timeout.
Nevada had done everything right. They had neutralized both Dayton’s inside and outside threats while exploiting their below-average defense on the other end.
What happened next was unimaginable in the euphoric timeout huddle. The Wolf Pack surrounded their prey with no escape; their fate was inevitable.
And then, it all went so horribly, unexplainably, awry.
Suddenly, Nevada forgot that Brea made every other three he put up all season, yet they decided to leave him alone in the corner, departing from what they had done all afternoon. Brea made up for the first half by canning his last four triples.
Nevada also forgot to double Holmes in the paint as he added two layups and a dunk. Even Nate Santos made good on his first-half turnover by dropping in a three-pointer of his own.
Dayton didn’t miss once in the fatal stretch, converting on 7-of-7 attempts.
“We just fell short on the defensive end. Great shooting team, and they made great shots.”Nevada’s Nick Davidson
Meanwhile, the offense, which frankly had made Dayton look well over-matched, suddenly looked more like five guys who had never met one another. The flow was gone, the cuts were gone, the screens were gone, and so, too, were the easy buckets.
Nevada’s next five shots were all three-pointers when two patient close-range buckets would have been enough to put the game out of reach.
Their eyes slowly went blank as if each of them hoped someone would step up to rescue them.
Lucas would convert his last bucket as a member of the Wolf Pack with 2:16 left to give Nevada a 58-56 lead as they tried to hang on.
Blackshear would score his last points for the Silver and Blue with 1:03 left and a one-point advantage at 60-59. Nevada was still breathing, but the ship’s bow was in the water, and the stern was rising vertically.
An uncontested Cheeks layup with 3 seconds left on the shot clock was the perfect capper as Dayton waited for the Nevada defense to make a mistake, and they obliged, giving the Flyers the lead for the first time in the half at 61-60.
A Davidson turnover and foul on the next possession put Cheeks at the line, where he converted both free throws.
Kenan Blackshear couldn’t find anyone open, and Nick Davidson had no choice, finding himself with the ball and an onrushing Atlantic-10 Defensive Player of the Year in his face to throw up a deep ball with four seconds left. It clanged off the rim but found its way to Blackshear for one last desperate heave that came nowhere near its mark.
A red-eyed and understandably shaken Nick Davidson sat at his locker. He tried to piece together the nightmare and take some responsibility.
“Out of the timeout, we were talking about shaving time off the clock,” Davidson said. “Get the ball up court and use all 30 seconds of our offense and get good quality shots.”
Aside from the milking the clock part, the Pack had done just that to that point.
“We just fell short on the defensive end,” Davidson said. “Great shooting team, and they made great shots.”
Davidson paused and added, “I made a crucial mistake towards the end—a couple of defensive errors in crucial moments—and ultimately, we lost.”
Notes:
- Dayton shot 14-of-39 for 35% in the second half leading up to the final 7:14 when they went 7-for-7 and improved their second-half number to 50%.
- Nevada shot 37.9% in the second half, missing seven of their last nine shots.
- Rebounds were even at 30 for each team.
- Nevada had an 8-3 advantage on the offensive glass.
- Each team turned it over 12 times.
- Nevada shot just six free throws, converting three, after averaging more than 25 attempts per game during the season.
- Dayton shot 13-of-15 from the line.
- Lucas led Nevada with 17 points, Davidson and Blackshear each added 15.
- Davidson led the Pack in boards with seven and Blackshear in assists with eight.
- Dayton’s Holmes had game-highs in points with 18 and rebounds with nine.
- Brea added 15 points on 5-of-8 (62.5%) shooting from beyond the arc.
- Nevada Head Coach Steve Alford drops to 11-13 in NCAA tournament games.
- Nevada’s last NCAA tournament win came in 2018, erasing an 18-point deficit vs. Cincinnati.
