There has never been a national championship game quite like the one that took place in Houston on Monday night. There have been other remarkable endings — Lorenzo Charles’s buzzer-beating dunk in 1983 instantly comes to mind — but nothing that compares to the climax of Villanova’s 77-74 victory over North Carolina.
Why?
Because both teams made shots that will be remembered forever in the final five seconds. If Carolina had gone on to win the game in overtime, Marcus Paige’s off-balance, double-pump 3-pointer with 4.7 seconds left would have been remembered much the same way as Mario Chalmers’s game-tying 3-pointer in 2008 to send the Kansas-Memphis title game into overtime. It would have fallen into a play-it-again-and-again category along with game-winners from Michael Jordan for Carolina in 1982 and Keith Smart for Indiana in 1987.
It would have been historic. Except that Kris Jenkins topped it, swishing his winning 3-pointer with less than a second left setting off the wildest postgame scene since North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano’s famous run to nowhere after Charles’s game-winner in Albuquerque 33 years ago.
The difference between the Jenkins shot and the Charles dunk is that there was absolutely no luck involved. Charles’s putback of Dereck Whittenburg’s desperate heave — which Whittenburg still insists was a pass — was set up by a deflected pass that got Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon one step out of position because he thought his team had the ball.
There was no such luck involved in Jenkins’ shot. Coach Jay Wright wanted the ball in Ryan Arcidiacono’s hands because the senior with the unpronounceable name — “If I had a dollar for every way my name’s been pronounced in my career I wouldn’t need a job,” he said last weekend — has always been a superb decision-maker.
As it turned out, the final decision of his college career was his best. He got the ball into the front court so quickly that he had options when he reached the top of the key. He could have pulled up to shoot; he could have gone to the basket; or he could have dished the ball to his right, where Jenkins was wide open.
Carolina’s big men were in the lane to cut off any kind of drive. Tar Heels guard Joel Berry II had shadowed Arcidiacono all the way down the court and 6-foot-9 Isaiah Hicks came toward him as he began to pull up.
“I was going to be aggressive, I was looking for a good shot,” Arcidiacono said. “I was pulling up and then, in the back of my head I heard Kris screaming. He was saying, ‘Arch, Arch, Arch!’ I saw that he was open, so I just got him the ball.”
Jenkins had inbounded the ball and then raced just behind Arcidiacono and to his right.
“When I inbound, the defenders always follow the ball,” he said. “So, I just followed and when I saw them running at Arch I just called for the ball. It says a lot about him that he never hesitated to pass the ball.”
Hearing his teammate and knowing he had time, Arcidiacono found Jenkins, who was in the air as Hicks tried to change direction to get a hand in his face.
The ball was never going anywhere but the bottom of the net. If the shot hadn’t beaten the buzzer — it did, by six-tenths of a second — the NCAA would have had a problem since someone decided to unleash the confetti that has become an unwelcome part of championship night.
Even before the shot was officially declared good, North Carolina coach Roy Williams was congratulating Wright and trying to console his understandably inconsolable players. Every coach who loses in this tournament goes on about how proud he is of his players and what a great season they had. In Williams’s case, the words rang true.
These were, without any doubt, the two best teams in the country when March rolled around and each reached the final in dominating fashion. Saturday’s semifinals were both blowouts: Carolina easing past Syracuse by 17 and Villanova humiliating Oklahoma in a 44-point beatdown.
What made Villanova a championship team this season was its defense. The Wildcats have always had shooters and have been capable of going on shooting sprees that can embarrass an opponent. But Wright preached defense to this group from day one and it paid off.
Of all the gaudy statistics that the Wildcats put up — including shooting 71.4 percent and 58.3 percent, respectively, in their two Final Four games — this one jumps off the page: In their last three games, they played teams led by senior standouts: Kansas’s Perry Ellis, a second-team All-American; Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield, the Naismith Award winner as national player of the year; and Carolina’s Brice Johnson, a first-team All-American. They held them to four points, nine points and 14 points — an average of nine points per game among three of the best players in the country.
The only time the Wildcats blinked at all on Monday night was when they built a 67-57 lead and held the ball with less than five minutes to go. Twice, the normally flawless Arcidiacono turned over the ball. Josh Hart missed a layup and the front end of a one-and-one. Carolina got a second wind and crept closer and closer until Paige’s double-clutch 3-pointer tied the game. The only reason Paige had any space at all was that Daniel Ochefu went for a steal 35 feet from the basket, a rare mental lapse by Wright’s team.
But even as Carolina celebrated Paige’s shot, Wright was calmly drawing up the play that is simply called “Nova”: Get the ball in Arcidiacono’s hands and spread the floor. Almost as if it were a late-afternoon practice on a Tuesday inside the Pavilion on the Main Line with no one watching, the Wildcats ran the play flawlessly with millions watching and Jenkins put himself and his team into basketball’s pantheon.
Every March, the NCAA’s TV network partners show the tournament’s most iconic moments over and over again: Valvano’s sprint around the Pit; Christian Laettner’s shot to beat Kentucky in Philadelphia; Chalmers’s 3-pointer in San Antonio and Gordon Hayward’s near-miss from 45 feet in Indianapolis in 2010. Now, Jenkins’s shot will go to the head of that class.
It was extraordinary. It was stunning. It was history.
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