St. Louis ? No coach ever would say his team choked, and that goes double for UAB boss Mike Anderson.
At the same time, a case could be made after Kansas University bombarded the Blazers, 100-74, Friday night in the NCAA Round of 16 that the boys from Birmingham did some hard swallowing.
“This is something new for our guys,” Anderson said in trying to assess his team’s failure, “and I think you saw possibly some of them getting caught up in it.”
In other words, Kansas had been to this dance before, while the Blazers were cutting their first rugs at this level of the NCAA stratosphere.
“I saw some things,” Anderson continued, “that weren’t typical of our basketball team. They may not say it, but from a coach’s standpoint you can sense it.”
Throwing bricks certainly wasn’t typical. UAB never recovered from missing 13 of its first 15 shots. All those misfires prevented the Blazers from doing what they do best — clamp on full-court pressure after a made basket.
“It’s hard to get in your pressure defense when you’re not making shots,” Anderson said. “So you’re scrambling, and you’re trying to make something happen.”
Senior Mo Finley, the Blazers’ leading scorer, wishes his last college game hadn’t been so awful, at least from a shooting standpoint. Finley missed 15 of 19 shots. He was 3-of-13 from three-point range.
“That was the way it went for us tonight,” Finley said. “The ball doesn’t always bounce your way. Who do you blame?”
UAB made just 32.4 percent of its shots (23 of 71). Finley shrugged off the suggestion the wide-open dome background had something to do with it, pointing out the Jayhawks hit 53.6 percent (30 of 56).
“It was a combination of great defense for Kansas,” he said, “and shots that usually go down didn’t go down for us.”
Meanwhile, Kansas had little difficulty shredding the Blazers’ buzz-saw defense. Time and time again, KU was able to push the ball inside to Wayne Simien, Jeff Graves and David Padgett.
“They had a size advantage, and Simien is a very, very good basketball player,” Anderson said. “He shot, my gosh, what, 20 free throws. If you shoot 20 free throws, you’re going to score a lot of points.”
Nearly half of KU’s points (48) were in the paint. Another 36 points came at the foul line. That’s all but 16 of the Jayhawks’ 100, and 12 of those 16 came on three-point shots.
“They’re a good team,” Finley said. “They knew what we were weak at, and did a good job of exploiting, and they also did a good job of finishing.”
Anderson failed to finish. The UAB coach witnessed only 34 minutes and 36 seconds of the Blazers’ self-styled “fastest 40 minutes of basketball” after being called for his second technical foul with 5:24 remaining. He had picked up his first T just six minutes earlier.
Anderson alibied afterward that he was merely trying to call a timeout when referee Bob Donato whistled him for being out of the coaching box — “five feet out,” as Donato reported in a postgame statement issued by NCAA officials.
“I was trying to call a timeout,” said Anderson who had to be restrained by Tony Greene, the lead official, before he eventually walked out peaceably through the southwest tunnel escorted by a law-enforcement officer. “It seemed like the game was getting ugly, and I was trying to call time.”
The game had actually turned ugly for the Blazers long before that.
“You have to credit something to Kansas,” Anderson said. “They’ve been in this thing before. It was Kansas’ night.”