Ed Cooley had just seen his Providence Friars dodge a major bullet when Creighton’s Mitch Ballock misfired on a wide-open three-point attempt with two seconds to play in overtime, a miss that vaulted the Friars into Friday night’s semifinals.
But before he talked about his team’s hold-your-breath victory and about his senior class that he loves so much, he first wanted to talk about the atmosphere at a rocking Madison Square Garden Thursday afternoon.
“You can’t say enough about the BIG EAST, you really can’t,” Cooley said. “And the competitive nature of our game. The spirit that’s always in this building, great, great atmosphere.”
It was only then that he turned his attention to the game itself, a 72-68 overtime thriller the Friars were able to come away with thanks to a collective effort of those seniors - Rodney Bullock, Kyron Cartwright and Jalen Lindsey - along with a little help from Alpha Diallo, a sophomore. The quartet combined to score 56 points and haul in 29 rebounds as Providence rolled into a semifinal matchup against top-seeded Xavier.
“Today was a win that I thought our players went out and earned,” Cooley said. “We made a lot of mistakes but I thought we were good when we needed to be.”
After Creighton held a 30-26 lead at the half, neither team was able to pull away from the other with the Bluejays largest lead being their 33-26 lead in the opening moments of the second half. But if you had to define the Friars in one word, it would be “grit.” And Providence showed plenty of that down the stretch.
The Friars stayed within striking range of the Bluejays, a team that tends to live and die from 3-point range. And after going just 3-of-14 from behind the arc in the first half, the Jays were limited to just seven attempts in the second half by a Providence defense determined to take away Creighton’s most lethal weapon.
“If you take away their threes and make it tough twos, you’re going to position yourself to have an opportunity to win because I think they have one of the most explosive scorers in college basketball in (Marcus) Foster.”
Providence finally caught Creighton at 44-44 on a bucket by Diallo with just under 11:00 to play. From there it was hand-to-hand combat between the two teams with neither team able to pull away from the other.
“I felt coming into this game that it was going to be kind of a rock fight,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott said. “It usually is when we play Providence and today certainly fit into that category.”
The Bluejays had a chance to win in regulation when they held a 59-57 lead with under 15 seconds to play. But Creighton couldn’t make the defensive stop it needed and Diallo’s putback with 12.9 seconds left tied the game at 59-59.
The Bluejays had one final chance to decide things in regulation with the ball in Foster’’s hands for a potential game-winning shot as the final seconds ticked down. But Foster lost control of the ball and could not get a shot off, sending the game to overtime.
It would prove to be a costly missed opportunity as Creighton would never lead in the overtime as Diallo and Cartwright combined to score 10 of the Friars’ 12 points in the extra sessions to help sew up the win. But it wasn’t until Ballock missed that last-gasp 3-point attempt from in front of the Creighton bench that the Friars could finally exhale and enjoy their victory.
Diallo finished with 19 points, Cartwright and Bullock each ad 13 points and Lindsey finished with 11 points and 10 rebounds. Foster’s 19 points led Creighton.
“All you can control is your preparation,” McDermott said. “I work in the same building where we practice so I know how much time (Foster) spends in there working on those situations. And I know how much Mitch spends in there. So they’re in there, working at it, preparing themselves for that moment. As long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘You know what, I prepared myself, I just missed it.’ And I’m confident, (and) I think Marcus would agree with me, that we’re very comfortable with Mitch taking that shot in that situation. It was a great read and we got the shot we wanted. We just missed it.”
One more thing Cooley wanted to talk about after the game - a little history that is being made by this Friars team.
“This is going to be the first time in the history of Providence College that a recruited class goes to four consecutive tournaments,” Cooley said. “And I can’t be more proud of this group for doing so, which is really, really hard to do. It’s a credit to what these young men have done.”