Thursday, January 29, 2009

2 days, 3 ACC buzzer beaters

As a basketball fan, Sidney Lowe has been mesmerized by what he’s seen out of North Carolina’s ACC teams this week.

Over two days, the four ACC teams from North Carolina participated in three games won on shots in the final three seconds.

“I’m a basketball fan, so I’m watching that, and it’s what (basketball) is here,” said Lowe, the N.C. State coach. “I say this. I know people laugh sometimes. They talk about New York. This is a basketball Mecca. This is it. It doesn’t get any better than this down here.”

On Tuesday, freshman point guard Julius Mays thrilled Lowe with a 3-pointer with 2.6 seconds left in overtime, sending Miami to an 84-81 defeat at the RBC Center.

One night later, just eight-tenths of a second remained when Wake Forest’s James Johnson scored a layup off an inbounds pass from L.D. Williams to topple No. 1-ranked Duke, 70-68, in Winston-Salem.

Just a couple hours after that, North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson raced 50 feet in 3.4 seconds to launch a running 3-pointer at the buzzer at Florida State for an 80-77 win.

“We’ve had some good basketball,” ACC associate commissioner Karl Hicks said of the two Wednesday games, which included three teams ranked in the top six by The Associated Press, “but that might have been the best so far.”

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahem. UNC won 80-77.

Despite being jobbed out of 1.1 seconds.

JAT

Anonymous said...

Just so my above comment makes sense, the original version of this post listed the UNC-FSU score as 87-84. Sometime after my comment, the post was edited and the correct score added.

Right guys?

No harm in that, but in the wild, wild world of those crazy, lawless bloggers it is the practice to indicate your edits in some fashion.

JAT