Jalen Suggs saves Gonzaga’s season, etches his own name into NCAA tournament history
A shot like this, eventually, is known by just a name. That’s all it takes. The name is the one thread that tugs on a thousand memories. Kris Jenkins. Luke Maye. Christian Laettner.
Jalen Suggs.
The best game of this NCAA tournament — in the running for the best game of any tournament in recent memory, and perhaps ever — delivered one of the best endings of all time, and with not only a berth in the national championship game but an undefeated season hanging in the balance.
Gonzaga remains alive and unbeaten, but just barely, by the finest of margins. The two best teams in the country will play for a national title on Monday, despite UCLA’s best efforts, thanks to a banked-in, long-range 3-pointer by the country’s best freshman that gave Gonzaga a 93-90 overtime win and secured a place for his name in the great book of basketball history, pounding his chest while standing on the scorer’s table.
Jalen Suggs.
“I was fading away with it, and it went off the backboard and in,” Suggs said. “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to run up on the table and like Kobe and D-Wade and go like that, and that’s the first thing I did. Man, that is something that you practice on your mini hoop as a kid or in the gym just messing around. And to be able to do that, it’s crazy.”
It had been, despite all the upsets, a dreary tournament so far, outshined in drama by the women’s tournament in San Antonio, which so far had offered more competitive games and more compelling stories. Saturday’s first semifinal was another snoozer, a clinical dismantling of Houston by Baylor.
More of the same was expected in the second game, between undefeated — and unchallenged — Gonzaga and 11th-seeded UCLA, which had emerged from the First Four and just kept coming back, game after game, growing more fearless with each win.
By the time the Bruins got this far, given almost no chance against the Zags, they had long ago abandoned any pretenses. They were playing with house money, and they knew it. Rarely has a team playing for such high stakes showed so little regard for its circumstances. The Bruins were free and easy and they didn’t care if Gonzaga had only played one single-digit game all year, and that in December.
Lucas Oil Stadium replaced the Hoosier Dome, but is not built upon its remains, which are a few blocks to the north. Thirty years ago, that’s where Duke denied UNLV its perfect season, and Saturday night, it was as if the vapors had somehow crossed the railroad tracks and filtered into the new building. UCLA seemed possessed by something, at least.
They took enough 2-point jumpers to give Alabama coach/analysticist Nate Oats a seizure, but they made them, and for the first time this season, the Zags faced a 40-minute challenge that became a 45-minute challenge. Every time UCLA looked like it was falling behind, the Bruins conjured up some miraculous floater as an answer.
They had a chance to win it at the end of regulation, but free-wheeling star Johnny Juzang was called for a charge, Gonzaga’s Drew Timme stepping in his way with four fouls. And at the end of a season of questionable charges, the ACC’s Ron Groover got this call right.
When Juzang put back his own miss with three seconds to go in overtime, an arena already wrung of emotion steeled itself for a second overtime. Just as a much larger crowd in Houston once braced for overtime after Marcus Paige’s double-clutch 3-pointer to tie the score against Villanova, or in Memphis a year later when Kentucky’s Malik Monk tied the score against North Carolina, or even in the Spectrum 29 years earlier, when Rick Pitino decided not to challenge the inbounds pass in the final seconds of overtime.
Everyone knows what happened then. The clips are replayed every March, like home movies at Thanksgiving, but for the basketball family.
Jenkins. Maye. Laettner.
“My favorite buzzer-beater, I don’t think it gets much better than Kris Jenkins, national championship game, tie game, comes out and drills it,” Suggs said. “As it goes in, cannons go off, confetti is falling. That was the one for me.”
Suggs is in that conversation now.
Corey Kispert picked up the ball and quickly tossed it to Suggs, who was about halfway up the lane and already running the other direction. He was able to get almost two-thirds of the way up the court, to the far edge of the Final Four logo, before he gathered and shot. The backboard glowed red while the ball was still in the air, and then the ball chunked off that backboard and through the net.
“We haven’t had many games like this, but we worked on it a lot, we probably worked on more end-game situations this year than I ever have, just because I knew we needed that,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said. “And he makes shots — he’s got that magical aura. He makes them in practice all the time. It’s been crazy this year how many he’s made in practice, last-second shots. I felt pretty good. I was staring right at it. And I said it’s in. And it was.”
The circumstances were more or less reversed, in terms of hunter and hunted, but Suggs did what Butler’s Gordon Hayward could not, in this same building, against Duke 11 years ago in the title game. He put Gonzaga into the national title game, kept an unblemished record unblemished and pulled enough threads of history together to weave his name into the eternal record.
And now, when anyone hears that name, they’ll remember the tense back-and-forth battle — 19 lead changes! — that was headed for a second overtime as time ticked away until the ball banged off the backboard and through the net to end the best game of this tournament, one that will only grow in stature if Gonzaga finishes the job Monday night.
Jalen Suggs.
That’s all.
This story was originally published April 4, 2021 at 12:10 AM.
