CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WDRB) –For Louisville point guard Chucky Hepburn, the end-game sequence that beat Stanford in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals Thursday night went like this: Ball. Basket. Buzzer. Blur.
Basketball is a game that can take away, and it is a game that can give. No place knows that better than Louisville. We could tell you some stories in this city. And no one knows it better than Cardinals’ point guard Chucky Hepburn after what happened to him in the final 36 seconds of the 75-73 thriller.
Hepburn might’ve thrown the game away when he whipped the ball into the lane and Stanford’s Chisolm Opkara intercepted it and streaked to the other end for a layup and foul that tied the game at 73.
Louisville got the ball, and called timeout with 27 seconds left. When play resumed, Hepburn dribbled down the clock, and when he made his move, Stanford came at him with two defenders. He dished to Terrence Edwards, who probed for room, but couldn’t find it. He pump faked, jab stepped, rose, twisted, double-clutched and fired a three that bounced off the rim.
For a split second, Opkara had it in his hands, then another hand came in, that of Louisville sophomore James Scott. He knocked the ball loose, slightly. Opkara, trying to get rid of it, or maybe he had already started his pass, loses full control and winds up batting it straight into the hands of Hepburn, wide open at the elbow.
The game takes. The game gives.
“James made a great play on the ball,” Hepburn said. “Just a tip. And it popped right to me. Right place at the right time. Not an easy shot to make, right there, one or two seconds to play. But give credit to James. He made an incredible play.”
It was far from his first. He had eight in the game. But there were some assists that don’t show up on any stat sheet that were just as important. The biggest came at the media timeout with 11:44 remaining and Louisville trailing by 11. As the team left the court and headed for the bench, Hepburn gathered the other four players just past the midcourt stripe. His message?
“I just told them, we’re not losing this game,” Hepburn said.
Edwards had made a jumper to cut into Louisville’s deficit heading into that timeout. Coming out of it, the Cardinals scored 10 straight points and were right back in the game.
“I wasn’t thinking about it at all,” he said. “It had to leave my mind quick. We had the ball and a chance to win. If it’s in my mind, I probably don’t make that shot. Things happen in the game.”
When the pivotal play come, it was Edwards who found himself with the ball in his hands. “Credit Stanford,” he said. “They came out in some weird thing where they jumped Chucky and kind of took us out what we were going to run. But we were able to stay poised.”
Edwards could only remember what Scott had been telling him the whole game.
“Put it on the rim,” Edwards said Scott kept saying. “I got you.”
He figured out a way to get it onto the rim. And Scott figured out a way to keep it alive. And there it was, in Hepburn’s hands.
“It was just like pop-a-shot. I don’t even think he jumped,” Kelsey said. “It was just like a little push shot. It left his hands, and I knew it was going in. It was a little bit surreal. The guys start running all over the place. I just kept my composure. I knew they were going to check the clock, whether it went in or not, whether there was going to be more time on the clock. And they looked at it and said, bucket good, game over, and it was crazy.”
Crazy, indeed. It was the first postseason buzzer beater for Louisville since Scooter McCray tipped in a ball at the buzzer to beat Arkansas and send Louisville into the original Dream Game against Kentucky in March of 1983. This doesn’t exactly set up a dream game. But it does continue a dream season for a program that won just eight games last year and four the season before. Hepburn, sitting in the locker room, reporters filing out, took a phone. On the other end was Donovan Mitchell, congratulating him.
“We recruited winners, guys that are battle tested, guys that come from winning programs, guys that came into our program that were very, very well-coached,” Kelsey said. “. . . The first workout we had on June 6, it was pretty clear that we had a very, very high basketball IQ team. I started talking about concepts and putting stuff in and they were like, ‘got it, got it, got it.’ It is a smart, savvy team and a bunch of winners.”
It is a team that is 26-6. Kelsey now has won more games than any first-year coach in Louisville history, surpassing the 25 Denny Crum won in his first season. Its 18-game improvement over last season matches the second-largest single-season improvement in college basketball history – not counting those coming after the 2021 COVID season.
And the ACC quarterfinal win is the first in program history, setting up a 9:30 p.m. Friday matchup against No. 10-ranked Clemson. Before leaving reporters Thursday night, Kelsey was thinking about another buzzer beater, one that the Cardinals needed from Noah Waterman to escape an upset from Eastern Kentucky.
“You talk about this great season that we’re having, it could be totally different if that ball doesn’t go in at the end of the Eastern Kentucky game,” Kelsey said. “You talk about down and out, we could have very, very easily lost that game. Noah makes that shot, and then Chucky makes this one tonight. Hopefully, there’s more luck in the genie bottle moving forward.”
The game takes. And the game gives. In Louisville’s first game since the death of one of its best-known basketball alums, Junior Bridgeman, it may have had an angel on its shoulder. The Cardinals wore a patch with his initials on their uniforms. A game that began with a moment of silence in his honor ended with an effort worthy of his memory.
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