Chris Boucher grateful his inbound pass blunder didn’t cost Oregon
LAS VEGAS — As the rest of the Oregon bench pumped their fists and roared after every overtime basket, forward Chris Boucher was a picture of anxiety and despair.
The 6-foot-11 junior college transfer remained planted in his seat between two assistant coaches, his hands clasped together and the stress unmistakable on his face.
Boucher believed he was the reason Oregon wasn’t already celebrating a Pac-12 semifinal victory over Arizona. His boneheaded inbound pass turnover during the final second of regulation enabled the Wildcats to complete an improbable comeback from a 17-point second-half deficit and forced the Ducks to endure overtime before emerging with a 95-89 victory.
“I was sitting there like, ‘Please just help me out. I know I made a mistake,’ Boucher said. “I knew I messed up, but I had faith in my teammates. Even though I messed it up, I knew they had my back.”
The circumstances that led to Boucher’s blunder were set in motion when he missed a pair of free throws with 12 seconds to go in regulation and Oregon clinging to a four-point lead. Boucher was still berating himself for those missed foul shots by the time Arizona’s Gabe York buried a 3-pointer to cut the Ducks’ edge to one with seven tenths of a second remaining.
When the ball fell next to Boucher under the basket, he instinctively picked it up. Oregon coach Dana Altman had instructed the Ducks that Elgin Cook was to be the designated inbound passer, but Boucher absentmindedly chose to deviate from that plan.
“That was my mistake,” Boucher said. “In the moment, I thought I’m already there. I’m going to try to make a play.”
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There were certainly better inbound passing options than a skilled but unpolished big man with only three years experience in organized basketball, but Boucher’s mistake did not have to be fatal. Any Oregon player could have called the team’s last timeout once Arizona pressured the inbound pass and Boucher began to look flustered.
Said Boucher, “I didn’t even know we had a timeout.”
Said Oregon forward Dillon Brooks, “Timeout was in my mind to call, but people’s minds were going thousands of miles per hour.”
An experienced inbound passer might have thrown the ball deep with so little time left or spotted Tyler Dorsey open to the left of the basket, but Boucher didn’t look in either of those directions. He instead tried to get the ball to Brooks, who had flashed open to the right of the basket.
The pass was late, so late that Arizona’s Mark Tollefsen was able to step in front of it and cleanly intercept it. As Tollefsen went up for a potential game-winning baseline jumper, Brooks compounded the problem by fouling the senior forward and sending him to the free throw line with four tenths of a second remaining.
Two foul shots would have resulted in an Arizona victory, and Tollefsen was clearly nervous. He took a deep breath, exhaled and went into his free throw routine. Clang. Undaunted, he went back to the foul line and tried again. Swish. Against all odds, a game that Oregon had controlled since late in the first half was headed to overtime.
“I just told them, ‘Fellas we put ourselves in this position,'” Oregon coach Dana Altman said. “We were fortunate they missed one of the free throws and we had another opportunity.”
Altman described Boucher as “obviously pretty shaken up,” so it wasn’t a hard decision for the Oregon coach to leave the Pac-12’s premier shot blocker on the bench during overtime. Boucher remained in the same seat almost the entire overtime, guilt churning inside him.
When Dwayne Benjamin hit a tie-breaking 3-pointer to put Oregon up three, Boucher hardly moved. When Brooks followed that with another 3-pointer to extend the lead to six, Boucher unclenched his hands just long enough for a quick, nervous golf clap. Only when a free throw from Benjamin increased Oregon’s advantage to eight with 11 seconds to go did Boucher allow himself to finally relax.
Give Oregon a ton of credit for the remarkable display of togetherness and resolve in overtime because many teams would have crumbled under those circumstances.
It surely helped the Ducks that Arizona’s standout freshman Allonzo Trier had fouled out late in regulation and that the Wildcats’ top interior scorer Ryan Anderson had consistently been swallowed up by the Ducks’ length in the paint. It also helped that Oregon was consistently able to exploit Arizona by spreading the floor, identifying the favorable matchup and attacking it off the dribble.
Cook led Oregon with 22 points on 8-for-15 shooting. Tyler Dorsey had 19 points and Brooks had 19 points, six assists and eight rebounds.
While Oregon’s victory clinched a third trip to the Pac-12 title game in the past four years and kept the team in contention for a No. 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA tournament, the top-seeded Ducks were as excited to bail out Boucher as they were to advance. Brooks, Benjamin and point guard Casey Benson each took the time to embrace Boucher and offer some encouragement before the postgame handshake line.
“I told him he’s my brother and I love him,” Benjamin said.
“It says a lot about us that we were able to win tonight, especially against a great team like Arizona. We stayed together and we fought. That’s what we relied on all season, and it showed tonight.”
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
