Hoosiers Get Smart When It Counts : Shot at :04 Lifts Indiana Past Syracuse

NEW ORLEANS —  Indiana University, the flower of Bloomington, Ind., couldn’t have picked a better time to win the NCAA basketball championship. Everything sounds simple now.

So Coach Bob Knight’s wearing his third NCAA title. Hey, it looks pretty Smart on him. But for one Hoosier, for one game and for one night, it was even better to be Smart.

That would be Keith Smart, one of the few junior college players ever recruited by Knight and the guy who plucked a national championship out of the air for Indiana the instant his 16-foot jumper cleared the bottom of the basket with four seconds left.

Yes, it was one Smart play for Indiana and one giant leap for the Hoosiers, who defeated Syracuse, 74-73, Monday night before a crowd of 64,959 at the Superdome.

For the Orangemen, the whole thing tasted pretty sour. Syracuse discovered that free throws are pretty expensive if they are missed. Two that clanked off the rim 10 seconds apart in the last minute of play, plus some questionable strategy by Coach Jim Boeheim and a too-late timeout, helped push Indiana to the title.

“I don’t worry about things I can’t control,” Boeheim said afterward.

Too late, Syracuse found out it didn’t play Smart enough. So Smart scored 17 of his 21 points in the second half and was named the tournament’s outstanding player.

The Hoosiers’ 6-foot 1-inch guard from Baton Rouge, La., also scored 12 of Indiana’s last 16 points, including a winning streak of six that began with his driving reverse layup that tied the game, 70-70, with 1:21 remaining.

A lean-in jumper by Syracuse forward Howard Triche broke the deadlock with 56 seconds left. Then Triche rebounded a blown jumper by Smart and got fouled by Steve Alford. With only 38 seconds left, Triche had a chance to give Syracuse a four-point lead. Triche made his first free throw but missed the second.

Syracuse is not a good free-throw shooting team. The Orangemen came in shooting 64.2%, with back-to-back games in which they had missed 32 free throws. They missed 9 of 20 free throws in the championship game.

Smart came right back on a breakaway and scored on a driving shot inside the key to trim the Orangemen’s lead to 73-72 with 32 seconds to go.

Derrick Coleman took the inbounds pass after the basket and was immediately fouled by Smart. Knight called a timeout to let Coleman, a freshman, think about his one-and-one foul shots. Boeheim, who left Coleman alone at the line and pulled the rest of his players back to the other end of the court, had no one to rebound the ball when Coleman’s first free throw hit the front end of the rim.

So, down by a point with 28 seconds left, the Hoosiers spread their offense. Smart penetrated briefly and passed to forward Daryl Thomas, who looked at the hoop and quickly passed the ball back out to Smart.

“There was a little bit of scrambling and he came up with a pretty good shot,” Triche said.

Triche was playing his zone and followed Smart to a left-side angle of the basket. Smart did not waste any time. He went up over the outstretched arms of Triche and guard Greg Monroe and shot the ball. When he came down, at the moment his sneakers touched the floor, the ball was through the basket.

“I didn’t look at the clock, but I knew time was running out,” Smart said. “I couldn’t really go berserk because there was still time left on the clock and I knew we had to stop some wild and crazy shot.”

However, there wasn’t much time left for another shot by Syracuse--wild, crazy or anything else. By the time the Orangemen called a timeout, only one second remained. Coleman’s three-quarter length of the court heave was picked off by Smart at the buzzer.

Why didn’t Syracuse call a timeout sooner? Some said Alford knocked the ball away, but both Triche and Monroe said they had already called a timeout and the referees apparently did not see them.

Boeheim was curt when he was asked about the timeout. “Hey, you saw it, you write it,” he said. “I thought we called it, but they didn’t see it. That’s the way it is.”

On the wisdom of pulling players from the free-throw lane, Knight strongly defended Boeheim.

“Anyone second-guessing not putting players on the free-throw lane is b.s.,” Knight said. “There are a lot of things going through a coach’s mind, and I think he made absolutely the right decision. He had the defense set and the lead. Don’t give us a chance to win.”

But that’s how it turned out. If Boeheim’s strategy backfired, it was still probably due more to Smart’s own strategy, which was to shoot more since Alford was so closely guarded, often by Triche, who is four inches taller.

Alford finished with 23 points, but he scored just one field goal and attempted only three shots after a three-pointer with 11:59 left in the game.

“Late in the game, they started to jump out on me,” Alford said. “Then Keith took over. That’s been the defense used on me all year, to contain me, but we’re too good elsewhere and it showed up tonight.”

Syracuse stuck with a 2-3 zone and a box-and-one defense in the first half, which ended with the Hoosiers leading, 34-33, Hoosier lead on Alford’s three-pointer with two seconds left. But Boeheim went to a man-to-man defense in the second half when he judged the zone combinations to be ineffective.

At the same time, Knight wasn’t too happy with his offense. “They had us standing around a little more than we should,” he said. “I honestly thought we were just kind of hanging in there at halftime.”

The second half became a game of runs, just about equally divided. Center Rony Seikaly, who finished with 18 points and 10 rebounds, helped move Syracuse to a 52-44 lead seven minutes into the second half that was built on a 15-3 run.

Indiana came right back with a 10-0 run when Knight went to a three-guard offense of Alford, Smart and Joe Hillman.

Coleman, who had 19 rebounds, and Sherman Douglas, who had 20 points, helped the Orangemen turn on the juice. When Douglas scored on a breakaway, Syracuse led, 68-67, with 2:54 to go.

Thomas, who had 20 points, made a free throw to even the score at 68-68. And after Seikaly scored inside, Smart countered with his reverse layup that tied it at 70-70.

The good times were rolling for Smart, who said there had been other times when he scored game-winning baskets.

“In pickup games,” he said.

The ultimate pickup game, with nothing more than the NCAA championship on the line, was a pretty good time for another game-winning jumper. So the winners and losers went off to collect their memories, half of them good and half disappointing.

For Indiana (30-4), it was the title that placed Knight in an elite group of three coaches with at least three NCAA championships. John Wooden (10) and Adolph Rupp (4) are the other two.

For Syracuse (31-7), it was a second trip to the Final Four and a second trip home without a championship.

Boeheim said that as good as Indiana was, his team deserved some credit, too.

“There is only one team better,” he said. “And that isn’t by very much.”