St. John's was blowing it. After building a 56-42 lead against Kansas with eight minutes left to play, they suddenly started getting outworked and outplayed by a Jayhawks team that had spent the previous 32 minutes looking totally uninterested in advancing to the Sweet 16. Kansas came all the way back to tie the game at 65 with 14 seconds left, and then the funny stuff started happening.
After Darryn Peterson hit his second free throw to tie things up, Kansas noticed an opportunity. The Jayhawks had only committed two fouls in the half, meaning that they had a handful of intentional fouls to dish out without sending St. John's to the line. Over the next 10 seconds, Kansas committed four fouls, forcing St. John's to inbound the ball over and over again as seconds ticked off the clock. Finally, with 3.9 seconds left, St. John's was able to take their final shot. Senior guard Dylan Darling received the inbounds pass just beyond half court, took a few hard dribbles to his right, and finished at the rim with his right hand, mostly unbothered by a Kansas defense that had seemingly cleared the paint for him.
As funny as it was to see Kansas' big-brained foul strategy get upended by their inability to stop a 6-foot-1 guard from driving straight from the center circle to the rim in under four seconds, it was even funnier that Darling was the one to hit the game-winning shot. He was 0-for-4 leading up to that shot, and it was an oversight by head coach Rick Pitino that put the ball in Darling's hands on the final possession.
"So we're going to run a play, but they've got fouls to give, and Bells comes up to me and says, 'run power,' which is a high back-screen pick-and-roll," said Pitino at the start of the postgame press conference. "So I said, 'OK, power.' I walk away and I said, 'Wait a second, he hasn't scored a bucket and he wants to run a play for himself.' And then I'm thinking as I'm walking, 'but he's Bells.' And not only did he do it, he went with his right hand."
It is important to note here that Darling has recently adopted the nickname "Church Bells," which came to him after Pitino told reporters that Darling had "balls as big as church bells" after Darling hit a game-winning three against Xavier in February.
"I probably don't deserve this," is what Darling had to say to reporters after Pitino was done speaking. "I was pretty bad all night long, but my teammate held it down tonight."
One wonders what would have happened had Kansas not played the foul game and just allowed St. John's to play out the final possession with 14 seconds left. Think of how many final possessions you've seen in college basketball that end in disaster because the players have too long to think, too many opportunities to hesitate and pass themselves out of clean looks. With all those fouls, Kansas took thinking out of the equation for Darling.
When asked why he wanted the ball on the last play, Darling said it was a matter of necessity: "Honestly, there really wasn't much time for nothing else."
There are a lot of ways to lose a college basketball game, but Kansas may have invented a new one by specifically engineering the circumstances in which an ice-cold shooter had no choice but to walk them off.
