Related pages Game summary Box score Season stats Possession analysis advertisement [an error occurred while processing this directive]

"We played hard. We came to win the game, and for all practical purposes, we should have. We did a lot of good things. A lot. They beat us when Gardner was unbelievable. But it still never should have come down to the last free throws or Gardner’s shot. We’re up seven with about a minute and a half left and had every opportunity, and just bailed them out. A lot of unfortunate things went against us today. We go box-and-one three straight possessions and have three of the best defensive possessions we’ve had all year, and they throw in shots, bank shots, and everything else when they didn’t have offense. We just didn’t make those same types of shots tonight. We’re on the road and we shoot 35 free throws, so we can’t complain about the whistle. We just didn’t make our free throws. They shoot 25 and we shoot 35, and we outscore them by just two points from there. Guys competed really hard and did a lot of nice things, but these last two games will go down as two of the toughest losses this staff has ever been through, and probably the toughest as far as two games we should have won. But somehow or another we didn’t. "The big killer play was us fouling McKinney on the lay-up. Why would you foul him on the lay-up and give him a three-point play without shooting a three? We talked about that. But the guys played hard, they tried hard. Mario showed great poise when they made the last shot, got the ball to Christian in perfect position, but it just wasn’t meant to be. "Gardner was phenomenal. We actually guarded him decent after about the first ten minutes. He got 11 points pretty quick. After that we did a pretty good job. He was just better than anybody on the floor tonight by a long ways. Mario was probably the second best player on the floor. He had an exceptional game. "Our guys played well. You look at the stat line, we shoot 53% on the road, we shoot 35 free throws on the road, you out-rebound them by ten on the road, you have fewer turnovers than them on the road, and you have nine steals to their two on the road. There’s no way you can lose that basketball game. But we did."