Notre Dame ’emptied the tank tonight," Mike Brey says – USA TODAY
CLEVELAND — Given what Notre Dame was up against, it was hard for Mike Brey to complain too much in the end.
Yeah, the Fighting Irish wanted better looks down the stretch instead of the tough isolation plays that Jerian Grant couldn’t finish. Of course it would have been ideal to get a stop and a rebound when they had two-possession leads down the stretch and really put the squeeze on No. 1 Kentucky. Certainly, missing three free throws over the final 5:21 turned out to be pretty important given the final score. All of that will sting for a while, considering the gravity of what Notre Dame nearly pulled off Saturday night at Quicken Loans Arena.
But deep down, Brey knew what happened in the final minutes was more about the greatness of Kentucky than some haunting series of events that will be difficult to live with for the rest of his career. Notre Dame didn’t lose this Elite Eight game 68-66, it was simply taken from the Fighting Irish by a team that has known nothing but victory.
“We emptied the tank tonight, and that’s all I asked them to do before the game,” Brey said.
Notre Dame’s locker room was the usual mix of shock, sadness and a few tears. The Fighting Irish led for nearly 22 minutes and several times seemed on the verge of putting Kentucky into a truly difficult predicament.
But after Jerian Grant’s three-pointer with 2:35 remaining put Notre Dame in front 66-64, the Fighting Irish didn’t get another good look the rest of the game. After executing their offense almost perfectly to get in position to win, Notre Dame had the ball with 1:59 left up by two and with 1:12 left in a tie game.
It didn’t get a good look at the rim either time, with the second — Grant’s step-back three-pointer — getting blocked by Willie Cauley-Stein at the end of the shot clock.
“I was extremely surprised; that was one of my best stepbacks of the night,” Grant said. “I felt like I created a lot of space and his long arms got a piece of it. I got the looks I’ve been getting all year and knocking down. They didn’t go in tonight. We put everything we had into it and we were a couple seconds away from a Final Four. It’s tough.”
Brey had no regrets about the shot selection down the stretch, noting the cumulative effect of trying to score all night against Kentucky’s size.
“Even some of the shots he took in those possessions that were a little empty, you can say get to the basket but it’s a little harder against these guys,” Brey said. “There’s not a lot of room in there. The size does get to you over 40 minutes, and as good as Jerian was getting us there, it kind of swallowed him a little bit a couple of times. But we’ll go down with him making plays because he’s made all the plays for us all year to get us here.”
The most admirable thing about Notre Dame’s performance is it never played as though it was the massive underdog it looked like on paper. There was no moment, Pat Connaughton said, where the team looked up and had some lightning-strike moment of realization that an upset could happen. They were in the game from beginning to end, playing toe-to-toe with a team that hadn’t lost in 37 tries.
The Fighting Irish didn’t have to make a crazy number of three-pointers to stay in the game (they finished just 4-for-14) and didn’t catch Kentucky on a fluky horrible shooting night (the Wildcats made 53.2% of their field goals and were 4-for-8 from the three-point line).
Instead, Notre Dame had a plan and executed it almost to perfection. All year long, teams have tried to go inside against Kentucky with disastrous results, so the conventional thinking was that Notre Dame would need to hit perimeter shots to have a chance.
What the Fighting Irish did instead was spread the floor to create space, drawing Kentucky’s big men out to the perimeter to open up driving lines and backdoor cuts. Notre Dame, a team with just one true big man in 6-10 junior Zach Auguste, finished with 40 points in the paint.
“We came into the game thinking we were going to win,” Auguste said. “We didn’t come in thinking they were the best team in the country. We felt like we were. We just didn’t execute to win. You’ve got to give them a lot of credit. They’re a great team. They played well. They did what they had to do to win.”
And what Kentucky had to do was make its final nine field goals, get 25 points from Karl-Anthony Towns and two massive three-pointers from Tyler Ulis and Aaron Harrison in moments that felt like the game could have slipped away irretrievably from Kentucky.
In the end, the Wildcats didn’t miss a field goal for the final 12:05. If your season is going to end, make the other team go beat you. Notre Dame surely accomplished that much.
“There’s always things you wanted to do better, but our guys gave a really great effort. That’s all we can ask for,” guard Demetrius Jackson said. “We didn’t execute as well as we’d like to down the stretch, but they’re really good defensively.”
GALLERY: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ELITE EIGHT
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