FRIDAY’S GAME
A-10 quarterfinals, Fordham/Richmond winner, Noon, NBC Sports Network, AM 1290, News 95.7 WHIO
Junior guard Kyle Davis stood on a table in the middle of the maelstrom, in the center of LOWD. That’s the funny word younger fans of the Dayton Flyers created to describe noise that’s louder than loud.
Behind Davis, hundreds of fans in the Red Scare student section, most wearing T-shirts with the numbers 21 or 22 in honor of seniors Dyshawn Pierre and Bobby Wehrli, screamed for the first time as fans of a championship team. The players celebrated with them as a sellout crowd of 13,455 shook the roof, marveling at the insanity of one of the great victories in 111 seasons of Dayton basketball.
A layup by Davis with 16 seconds left in overtime lifted the Flyers to a 68-67 win over Virginia Commonwealth. The teams share the Atlantic 10 championship with St. Bonaventure — all finished 14-4 — but Dayton will be the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament because it had a 2-1 record against those teams. The Flyers will play No. 8 seed Fordham or No. 9 Richmond in the quarterfinals at noon Friday.
No one knows what will happen in Brooklyn, N.Y., when all 14 A-10 teams head to the Barclays Center, but for one night, the conference belonged to the Flyers. They showed the type of fight that has served them so well in March the last two years.
“They don’t ask you how you did it,” Dayton coach Archie Miller said. “They just ask you, ‘Did you do it?’ The answer is yes. Give credit to VCU. Not only are they an NCAA tournament team, they are also regular-season conference champions.
“Our guys hung tough. A hard-fought game. We competed on defense all night. We didn’t rebound the ball well enough to win the game really in the second half, but we also didn’t turn it over and we hung around. If we hang around long enough where guys understand we have a chance, we can win.”
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It’s Dayton’s first A-10 championship since it won the West Division in 2004. It also won the West Division in 1998 and 2000. Until this season, it had never won a share of a regular-season conference title — in the A-10, Great Midwest or Midwestern Collegiate — when there haven’t been divisions.
Miller’s first title comes in his fifth season. His Flyers finished the regular season 24-6. That’s one victory more than last season, and it’s the best regular-season record of the Miller era.
“We wanted this,” Miller said. “We’ve been wanting this for a long time, not only for this year but when we first started out to build this thing. To do it on our home court in front of these fans is so exciting.”
If you had to boil down a game with 13 lead changes and nine ties to five plays, here they are:
1. Smith's shot: With 11 seconds left in the second half, Dayton point guard Scoochie Smith, who scored a career-high 29 points, beats Doug Brooks off the dribble and made a layup just past the outstretched arm of Mo-Alie Cox. The basket tied the game at 55-55.
The Flyers trailed 55-51 with 48 seconds but cut the deficit to two points on two free throws by Kendall Pollard with 34 seconds to play.
2. So close: VCU got two shots at the game-winning basket at the end of the second half. Melvin Johnson missed a jump shot. Brooks grabbed the rebound, and his shot rolled across the rim and fell out as time expired.
3. Tough finish: In overtime, Davis caught a pass from Smith in front of the UD bench behind the 3-point line, cut between two defenders, jumped in front of Cox, drew contact and threw up a shot as he fell back to earth. He made it to give Dayton a 68-67 lead.
VIDEO: Kyle Davis talks about winning shot
VIDEO: Postgame press conference with Archie Miller
4. Near disaster: On the next possession, VCU turned the ball over, giving the Flyers the ball with eight seconds to play. The next play was the craziest of the night. Davis threw the in-bounds pass right to Brooks, who threw it right back to Davis as he was going out of bounds. Davis was then fouled with six seconds left.
“It was a bad pass,” Davis said. “We had a time-out. I should have called it. My instincts told me to make a hard play on the ball. He passed it back in, and I got a steal.
5. Last shot: Davis missed both free throws with six seconds left. VCU advanced the ball to half court and called timeout with 1.1 seconds to play. Somehow the Flyers left VCU's best player, Johnson, wide open for a 3-pointer at the buzzer, but he missed.
“We usually have to go to the last possession with the last shot,” Miller said. “Melvin had a good look. I thought Kyle did a nice job on him the rest of the game.”
“It feels great,” Davis said. “We worked hard to get here. I know my teammates worked hard tonight. We were down Dyshawn and Kendall. Everybody else strapped it up and came out and played hard.”
Dayton played 76 seconds of the second half and all of overtime without Pierre and the last 3:22 of overtime without Pollard. Both players fouled out, an ironic twist because the Flyers played the first 11 games of the season without Pierre and were without Pollard for six games in A-10 play.
That Dayton won despite those losses is one of crazy facts from this game. Here are five more.
1. Poor start: The Flyers trailed Rhode Island 11-0 in their last home game and fell behind 9-0 in this one. They looked on their way to their first three-game home winning streak since January 2014. The Rams made three 3-pointers in the first two minutes. They made just two more the rest of the game and 5 of 20 in all.
2. Taking over: Smith scored 20 of his 29 points in the second half and overtime. He had eight points in the last four minutes of the second half.
3. Pierre struggles: Not only did Pierre foul out, he had one of the worst offensive games of his career on Senior Night, making 2 of 10 shots from the field and scoring four points in 33 minutes. Pierre had one big basket in the second half, following a miss by Pollard with a dunk to cut VCU's lead to 52-51 with 1:40 to play.
“I’m not happy I fouled out, but at the end of the day, we won the game,” Pierre said. “I had a terrible game, but we won. That’s all that matters.”
4. Scoring drought: It was either great defense, poor offense, nerves — or a combination of all three — but both teams forgot how to score midway through the second half. For an eight-minute stretch, from 16:00 to 8:00, the teams combined to score 11 points. The game was tied at 35-35 at the start of the stretch, and Dayton led 41-40 at the end of it.
5. Big Steve: No one experienced more ups and downs throughout the game than Dayton center Steve McElvene. After fouling twice in his only two minutes of action Tuesday at Richmond, he managed to stay on the floor for 23 minutes in this game and pick up only two fouls.
McElvene struggled for most of those minutes but did make a few big plays and finished with three points and eight rebounds. He made his only field goal with 2:24 left in overtime, cutting VCU’s lead to 62-61.
“He battled,” Miller said. “This was probably one of his better games in the last few weeks just in terms of being physical. He impacts the game with his size.”
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